Decline of the manufacturing capital-labor binary makes populist politics objectively more attractive.

Evidence

A majoritarian social bloc does not arise ex nihilo. Without being overdetermined by the relations of production, it is not completely independent of them either. Hence the political economy of populism: the harder it is to reduce political conflict to a binary opposition between capital and labor in the manufacturing sector, the less the industrial working class can regard itself as the key political subject for social transformation—and the more tempting a populist approach will be for the left. In the 2010s as in the late nineteenth or mid-twentieth centuries, populism picked up social democracy’s slack in situations of extreme social fragmentation and disorganization. In terms of policies, too, it worked as a functional equivalent of social democracy’s reformist agenda, expanding the scope of civil and political rights while laying the foundations for future welfare states. — Arthur Borriello and Anton Jäger, The Populist Moment, 78

Categorization

• DEEPTHINKING: The claim that populism functions as both replacement AND welfare-state founder — not just ideology but structural functional equivalent of reformism — is dense and worth sitting with.
• XREF: connects to: Populism expresses ambivalence toward industrial modernity from its periphery — Ernesto Laclau, On Populist Reason, 41; Capitalist growth structurally reduces rather than increases employment. — Clara E. Mattei, Escape from Capitalism: An Intervention, 245

Broader Connections

• Capitalist growth structurally reduces rather than increases employment. #corroborates (0.75) — Clara E. Mattei, Escape from Capitalism, 245
• Populism expresses ambivalence toward industrial modernity from its periphery #qualifies (0.72) — Ernesto Laclau, On Populist Reason, 41