10.09.2026

Tribune of the populists

In its latest relaunch, Tribune takes a further step from its historic Labourism to engagement with populism in all its ghastly forms and manifestations. Paul Demarty assesses the living dead

A little over 20 years ago, I moved to London for the first time, to go to university.

I was not there long, dropping out by Christmas; but I got into the habit of reading the leftwing press as it was then (which in turn led to my taking up the bully-pulpit at the Weekly Worker, with which I was rather taken). On one occasion, I picked up the then current Tribune. I was aware of it by reputation, but it was a terrible thing to behold in those dog-days of Blairism - an incompetently-printed nullity, its contents equal parts wishful thinking and total banality. The 19-year-old Demarty was not, it is fair to say, half as clever as he thought he was; but even he could see this was a journal on its death bed.

Yet the death has never quite come. It has been passed around among different owners in the years since, like a Mayfair flat among Gulf princelings. In 2018, most notably, it was rescued from bankruptcy by the US magazine Jacobin, which took it in a more analytical, magazine-like direction, much more informed by Marxism; now it has been sold to Mohamed Ali Harrath, best known as the proprietor of the Islam Channel, and the Harrath Tribune has now published its first issue, dedicated to the theme of populism.

The latest relaunch is largely in continuity with the Jacobin era; it is a quarterly, and the published artefact has a satisfyingly quarterly heft to it. It is rather better turned out than the cheapo weekly I bought all those years ago - indeed somewhat overdesigned. The bylines include some more classically Tribune-flavoured entries, like left-Labour MP Jon Trickett and Unison general secretary Andrea Egan, but are otherwise largely drawn from the contemporary left intelligentsia, if I may use that phrase. Readers of New Left Review, in particular, will recognise many recent contributors, from editor Oliver Eagleton (son of Terry) to Balkan expert Lily Lynch and culture critic Owen Hatherley.

Endings

Is that what this is, then? Is this warhorse of the old left now an even newer New Left Review? It seems so. The focus on populism tends, inevitably, to draw on particular themes - the steady disintegration of the institutions of the workers’ movement, the post-Gramscian obsession with contestation over the meaning of “the people” - familiar from that journal’s recent decades. Whether we need both of them is an open question, but not one that need detain us: for now we have a useful snapshot of this very small class of writers’ attempts to grapple with politics in the large, which illustrates both its particular insights and its symptomatic silences (as another NLR influence, Louis Althusser, liked to put it).

Very much looming over the whole ensemble is the problem of deinstitutionalisation: leftwing politics has tended to become unmoored from the traditional institutions, like parties and trade unions, that anchored it in the common political and economic life of its purported constituents. The phrase, “downwardly mobile professions”, appears independently in more than one of these articles, describing the class character of the spinal core of the contemporary left. The story of how we got here is laid out in greatest detail, improbably, by Trickett, whose contribution has the greatest historical sweep, albeit limited largely to the official British labour movement.

His story is of an endless tension between ‘socialists’ and ‘social democrats’ in the Labour Party, with the social democrats relying on endless economic growth to pay for redistributive measures to ensure broad social equality; but this growth has stalled since at least the 1970s, trapping the Labour right into ever more comfort with the dominance of finance capital, exemplified in what he calls the Blairite “coup” of the 1990s. With the financial crash of 2008, this strategy has in turn become a kind of prison. For Trickett, “without stable jobs and economic growth to sustain their vision of the good life, the people who used to weigh votes in the Yorkshire coalfields had less and less to offer their constituents”.

Trickett’s article is called ‘The end of social democracy’, and a contribution by Ed McNally (also recently of the NLR) gets the headline, ‘The undead workers’ movement’. His story is of the decline of the trade unions, and their retreat into economism and sectionalism as a desperate rearguard posture. He is pleasingly acidic on the unions’ increasing comfort with the military-industrial complex. He notes that, in 2022,

the TUC’s annual congress voted narrowly - reliant on support from the historically rightwing teachers’ union - to campaign for immediate increases in defence spending. This came at the crest of ‘Slava Ukraini!’ fervour, in which state-mandated moralism became the spear-tip for a militarist revival in the unions … ‘Jobs for freedom!’ might have been the rallying cry. [But] today, given the irreparable evil inflicted upon the Palestinian people and the strength of the mass movement against it, the industrial argument for bombs has been robbed of its putative moral force. Jobs at what price?

Egan’s contribution, though notably lightweight, is correspondingly a cri de coeur for welfare, not warfare. It comes easier to her, leading a union of workers largely engaged in the provision of public services, than it might to Sharon Graham of Unite or Gary Smith of the GMB; but she does, like Trickett and others, root her case in the general decay of the social fabric.

It is this, after all, that bears the bitter fruit of ‘right populism’, however one chooses to delimit that markedly fungible category: the molecular dysfunction of modern society, from potholes to petty crime, to the strikingly obvious corruption of politics, feeds into a molar shift in popular morality - from ‘An injury to one is an injury to all’ to ‘Fuck you, got mine’.

Another way of posing the problem is to think about the idea - represented by Sahra Wagenknecht in Germany and George Galloway’s Workers Party of Britain - that a political realignment around social conservatism and social democratic economic policy is a plausible way out of the general political bind. If one looks at single-issue polling, this seems to be the case. Yet these parties have not broken through: the WPB is effectively stillborn, and the Sahra Wagenknecht Alliance has not fared too much better.

In both cases, moreover, more conventionally progressive leftwing parties have made breakthroughs, in the form of the new-model eco-populists of the English and Welsh Greens and the somewhat revived Die Linke, just as these parties of realignment have been stillborn. Their failure to prevent large voter defections to traditional far-right parties is so obvious as almost to be beneath comment. The BSW picked up some seats in Saxony-Anhalt, but clearly at the expense of the Social Democrats and Die Linke, not Alternative für Deutschland, and possibly driven by tactical voting around the five-seat minimum, to deny the AfD an outright majority.

Why? In particular, when both the AfD and our own Reform UK have economic policy platforms drastically to the right of even the thoroughly neoliberalised mainstream parties? Do people secretly not care about decaying public services, deindustrialisation and potholes as much as they claim? The most plausible hypothesis is surely a pervasive sense that politics is incapable of doing anything about it, and so the natural political response for many is a nihilistic resort to sectionalism and clientelism, to grab a couple more crumbs from the shrinking pie - again, ‘Fuck you, got mine’.

Much of this volume consists of case studies, some overlapping considerably. Both Barnaby Raine and Alyssa Battistoni cover Zack Polanski’s ‘eco-populism’; Jack Gross summarises Zohran Mamdani’s first months in office in New York, and Battistoni characterises Mamdani oddly as an ‘eco-populist’, despite acknowledging that he says nothing about the environment. The case studies are largely exercises in friendly criticism. Gross is good on the limits of the mayor’s power in New York, and critical of Mamdani’s compromises (though he rightly says that not much else could be expected of him). Battistoni confronts the fact that ‘eco-populism’ seems to involve almost total silence on ecological questions.

Leaders

What is not really confronted anywhere - though it is mentioned in passing in many places - is the extraordinary importance devoted to individual leaders, which is perhaps the only linking thread of all these ‘populisms’. In the theory of Ernesto Laclau, so routinely (and regrettably) influential on leftwing discussions of the phenomenon, it is necessary to socially construct the people and the enemies of the people alike through political struggle; very little of his famous book On populist reason, however, is actually dedicated to the question of the leader.

Yet it seems undeniable that modern populist politics delegates that division of society into two camps - overwhelmingly to individuals. From Farage to Polanski (or, with more consequence, Corbyn), from Wagenknecht to the AfD’s Alice Weidel, Marine le Pen to Jean-Luc Melenchon, ours is an age of would-be heroes everywhere. So far as Laclau’s process of construction of the people takes place, it does so overwhelmingly in a Bonapartist form. This tends to produce brittle, lightweight organisations, as noted particularly in Eoghan Gilmartin’s historical account of Spain’s Podemos, in which the would-be Bonaparte, Pablo Iglesias, eventually, almost poignantly, walks away, realising he has ceased to be of much use. Having concentrated so much on a top-down, media-centric strategy, Iglesias realised he had nobody serious left to mobilise.

Indeed, we have seen the rise of a distinct form of populist ‘party’, which is either de jure or de facto a private company owned by the leader, exemplified by Farage’s Reform and Mélenchon’s La France Insoumise. Eagleton here interviews Manuel Bompard, a senior LFI-ist, who speaks of reaching out to non-voters with “a vision for transforming society - one in which they would have a place”. But they have no place in LFI - or no place of any substance, since its political line and strategy is decided essentially by Mélenchon and his kitchen cabinet. (It does not occur to Eagleton to mention this problem - if indeed he thinks it is a problem.)

Which brings us back to the problem of deinstitutionalisation - the decline of concrete forms of organisations like trade unions and above all parties as deeply embedded structures of social life. This has long been a theme in our pages, but it has been usefully popularised recently by Anton Jäger’s short book, Hyperpolitics, which explains the contemporary paradox of apparently extreme levels of political feeling issuing in little in the way of political results through the decline of these kinds of institutions.

Jäger is more pessimistic than us about the project of reconstructing a substantial workers’ movement, but nonetheless illuminates the problem - the Bonapartist-populist political form, at least, does not reinstitutionalise. In failing to do so, the resulting structure is the popular leader addressing a passive electorate, via the capitalist media (the reason why right populism tends to be more effective in the end).

The importance of this social weight was invisible to Laclau, whose theorisation of the problem is in highly abstract, post-structuralist terms; and so it was equally invisible to his disciple, Iglesias. The Tribune writers, then, are asking the wrong questions, about which slogans can properly constitute the people. They do not interrogate the essential problem of political form: of what organisations can impose a political agenda, and how they can resist the counterstrokes of the prevailing order. Even if Jäger is right that we cannot clone the dinosaurs, we are then left merely with the problem of recreating the dinosaurs from first principles.