Can Common People Govern?: Political Parties, Movements, And Uprisings

In Can Common People Govern?, the renowned French social theorist, philosopher, and historian Jacques Bidet offers a theoretical and political exploration of political parties, movements, and uprisings as forms of popular political organization. He highlights the contradictions of the party-form and the movement-form through a critical analysis of Lenin, Xi Jinping, Gramsci, Althusser, and the theorists of left-wing populism, Laclau and Mouffe. Popular political organization, he argues, must be related to the structure of modern society, in which the popular class is opposed in a “triangular duel” against a dominant class that includes two poles in conflictual connivance, “capitalpower” and “competence-power” (or “elite”). This duality offers the common people an angle of attack for a risky alliance with this elite against capital. This class confrontation is put in the context of the ongoing ecological disaster and popular uprisings. In the age of disaster, environmentalism and social emancipation must be conceived as one and the same thing.

Can Common People Govern? is relevant to students of Marxism as well as wider readership interested in political thought and action.

Jacques Bidet is Emeritus Professor at the University of Paris-Nanterre, France, and the founder of the journal Actuel Marx. Since the 1980s, he has been developing a theory of modern society and history known as “metastructural theory of modernity.” His work is mainly inspired by Marx and influenced by thinkers such as Althusser, Habermas, Bourdieu, Foucault, Wallerstein, and others.