This lecture by Alberto Toscano was given at the Populism, People and the Media symposium in May 2018, funded by The Sociological Review Foundation. It is published here as part of a special feature on populism https://www.thesociologicalreview.com/blog/call-for-blog-posts-populism-people-and-the-media.html

1. POPULISM,
OR, THE IMPOSSIBLE CRITIQUE OF
POLITICAL ECONOMY
NOTES ON THE 2018 ITALIAN CRISIS
Alberto Toscano

4. A populist catharsis?
“When breaking the silence on the negative social effect of neoliberal
politics, the recent populist eruption enlarges the sphere of the
“politically thinkable.” Thus, the populist gesture is above all an
invocation of the Right to Politics—the right to matter politically, to have
one’s experience of social injustice count as a public concern and
therefore to merit policy action. In this gesture, the populist upheaval,
be it inadvertently, is pulling democracy out of its state of crisis by
striking at the hubris of policymaking as political techneˆ . This is a
moment of catharsis, of a release of suppressed grievances; eventually,
this enlarging of the scope of the political and its re-energizing through
novel ideological conflicts could trigger a democratic revival.”
Albena Azmanova, ‘The populist catharsis: On the revival of the
political’, Philosophy and Social Criticism (2018)

5. Class struggle and the populist roots of neo-liberalism
“this populism is operating on genuine contradictions, and it has a
rational and material core. Its success and effectivity does not lie in its
capacity to dupe unsuspecting folk but in the way it addresses real
problems, real and lived experiences, real contradictions— and yet is
able to represent them within a logic of discourse which pulls them
systematically into line with policies and class strategies of the Right.
Finally—and this is not limited to this analysis, though it seems
especially relevant—there is the evidence of just how ideological
transformations and political restructuring of this order is actually
accomplished. It works on the ground of already constituted social
practices and lived ideologies. It wins space there by constantly drawing
on these elements which have secured over time a traditional
resonance and left their traces in popular inventories.” (Stuart Hall, ‘The
Great Moving Right Show’, Marxism Today, 1979)

6. Class struggle and the populist roots of neo-liberalism (cont.)
“At the same time, it changes the field of struggle by changing the
place, the position, the relative weight of the condensations within any
one discourse and constructing them according to an alternative logic.
What shifts them is not "thoughts" but a particular practice of class
struggle: ideological and political class struggle. What makes these
representations popular is that they have a purchase on practice, they
shape it, they are written into its materiality. What constitutes them as a
danger is that they change the nature of the terrain itself on which
struggles of different kinds are taking place; and they have pertinent
effects on these struggles. ” (Stuart Hall, ‘The Great Moving Right Show’,
Marxism Today, 1979)