Left Populism

"The Left has, with amazing simplicity, pointed to the daily 'experience' as the home of the concrete. It has therefore substituted for any sustained and scientific analysis of the objective conditions of life a rather banal spontaneity as the very condition of the political: at the appropriate moment the people will--through the very experience of oppression--rise up and rebel against tyranny. It is in this context that the U.S. vote has been about more than just the re-election of a criminal clique to global power. It is also a referendum on left populism. Fifty million Americans, including some of the most impoverished sections of the working class, have not only not 'rebelled' but have actively sided with the ruling class. In doing so, according to the populist mantra, they have acted on their 'experience'. Where does this 'experience' come from? What left populism obscures is that this is an experience painstakingly fabricated in religious and cultural terms by Karl Rove and funded by huge corporate donations. The 'spontaneous' far from being spontaneous is an ideological effect of capitalism and its institutions. What is 'out there' is put 'out there'. It needs to be critiqued, not propitiated. The Left sentimentalizing of politics as the automatic agency of the oppressed has not only failed at intervening into the ideological consciousness of workers: it has, by its own logic (experience!), actively cultivated it."

(thanks wood's lot)