The People and its Pitfalls: Why "People" Must Reckon with its Imperial Qualities

Throughout the Global North, the left rediscovered the politics of the “people.” For example, the “Fighting against Oligarchy” tour of Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio Cortez position the “people” as an affectively powerful rhetorical device and a revolutionary agent. In addition, a coterie of left scholars has lent their insight into people-centric mobilization to combat the rise of right populism globally. These authors include Jason Frank (2020), Adom Getachew (2020), and arguably the most prominent theorist of left “people” (and left populist) politics, Chantal Mouffe (2018; 2023). However, the manner in which the “people” are invoked in the realm of practical politics and left political theory often fails to take note of transnational connections between peoples, or they do so inadequately. Drawing on Inés Valdez’s 2023 book Democracy and Empire, this paper argues that left “people” politics in its current Western form is imbricated with what Valdez (2023) terms “self-and-other-determination” wherein domestic rule in former empires is sustained by affective attachments to the wealth of other peoples. These other peoples are the “post” colony and the indigenous populations that are dominated by settler colonialism. Left practitioners of people politics in the West often cannot grapple with self-and-other-determination because self-and-other-determination creates a double-bind between addressing domestic domination between citizens and transnational domination one’s own country is complicit in. I explore how self-and-other-determination is both elided and addressed inadequately (respectively) through the oeuvre of Chantal Mouffe’s work, and through the speeches and writings of Jean-Luc Mélenchon. These figures are both prominent and influential in the realm of left “people” politics. Moreover, they both seem committed to ending transnational domination, but are inhibited from fulfilling their goals because of their conception of peoplehood. Finally, I explore Valdez’s conception of peoplehood which gestures towards non-imperial possibilities that allow us to keep the “people” as emancipatory agent while also addressing transnational domination.