To “Feel” and to “Understand” Political Struggle

National-Popular Rhetoric

The historic specificity that has generated Podemos’s contingent opportunity consists of a conjunction between “objective” historical circumstances and “subjective” interventions. After having discussed the context of the Spanish organic crisis as the “objective” context, in this section, I consider national-popular rhetoric as the “subjective” account of how rhetoric can be utilized as a hegemonic asset to reorganize dominant social relations by creating a collective will.

For Gramsci et al., the “national” and the “popular” elements are not synonyms but actually distinct aspects united in a dialectical relationship. The “national” was used polemically to incite traditional apolitical and book learning intellectuals to function organically to their community of reference, such as a nation or a class. The “popular” element, on the other hand, refers to the theoretical and practical need to involve the “masses” in this political project. Thus, the idea of national-popular front combines together the necessary social and historical conditions that can mobilize people and the intervention of “organic” intellectuals. Those are intellectuals linked to a particular class or group who develop and promote an ideology that can help compact different social groups as well as systematize their common sensical views into a collective will, that is, as a collectively “operative awareness of historical necessity” (1971, p. 130) that leads toward a radical “moral and intellectual reform” (p. 132) of a given society.

In Gramsci’s thought, national popular stands in specular ways with the idea of passive revolution and its more specific manifestation, trasformismo (Morton, 2007). The conceptual distance between national-popular and passive revolutions consists of the way in which people is involved in the political process. The idea of passive revolution needs to be understood in the historically specific dialectics between revolution and restoration, which, due to its unstable equilibrium, can manifest in different forms such as trasformismo. Thus, while trasformismo describes the tendency of subjects of a politically defeated party to be incorporated inside the winning party, creating a progressively larger social and political base for the ruling group, national popular aims at forming a united front, that is, an alliance among vast subordinate segments of society.

Such a national-popular front represents a superior dialectical synthesis of its distinct components. In fact, both elements, that is, “intellectual” and “popular,” go beyond their own limits in the national-popular synthesis. On the one hand, popular common sense sublates from being “spontaneous philosophy” (1971, p. 422) and “chaotic aggregate of disparate conceptions” (1971, p. 422), to a revolutionary “good sense” (1971, p. 323), a new conception of the world that tends to gradually approach the argumentative form of Aristotelian logos. On the other, the intellectual by operating as a “constructor, organizer, permanent persuader” (1971, p. 5) becomes organic, which means to feel and understand the struggle: “The intellectual’s error consists in believing that one can know without understanding and even more without feeling and being impassioned [. . . .]. One cannot make politics-history without this passion, without this sentimental connection between intellectuals and people-nation” (1971, p. 418).

As we can see in this passage, the concept of national popular for Gramsci expresses the rhetorical synthesis between people’s capability to both “feel” via pathos and “understand” via logos.

In the transition from “traditional” to “organic” intellectuals and from “common” to “good sense,” Gramsci envisions a plan for subaltern classes to develop its social struggle as well as their need to develop a particular kind of consciousness. Such a plan involves the objective of not simply countering existing hegemony but replacing it entirely. He notices how almost systemically any movement emerging from the lower strata tends to be characterized by the absence of what he defines “state spirit” or the preoccupation to produce long-lasting changes that can establish an alternative hegemonic order: “The subaltern classes, by definition are not united and cannot unite until they are able to ‘become a “state”’” (1971, p. 52). Gramsci believed that a struggle of a determinate social group should always aspire to extend its victory beyond its social and make itself a “state” thus reaching political hegemony, the condition for the formation of a “collective will” (Golding, 1992).

The idea of national popular as a project that goes beyond a group’s social boundaries resonates with the notion of vernacular rhetoric and allows me by juxtaposition to define national-popular rhetoric. National-popular rhetoric shares with vernacular rhetoric an interest in linking language, sense of community and identity construction, and aims at producing through communication a collectively shared field of meanings and practices, as the primordial condition for its emancipation (Ono & Sloop, 1992). However, while vernacular discourse focuses on a community self-understanding (Hauser, 1999), national-popular rhetoric, informed by state’s spirit, refers to the phase when such a community goes beyond its social boundaries and embraces a hegemonic project.

Thus, while aligning with vernacular rhetoric’s project of capturing transitional, extemporaneous, subaltern, unstructured, and noninstitutional rhetorical practices, this article tries to interpret the rhetoric of another transitional moment. Rhetorically wise, that moment consists of a social movement’s development from vernacular and contradictory common sense to progressively higher moments of elaboration and actualization of a hegemonic project, which turns chaotic fragmentary common sense into a relatively more systematic logos. As already mentioned, such a passage involves dealing with a question of power “constructively” rather than defensively, thus moving from “resisting oppression,” toward ways to actively “assist liberation.”

Thus, in juxtaposition to vernacular rhetoric, I define a national-popular rhetoric as the rhetoric of a historic specific movement, which, operating in the context of an organic crisis, is in the process of building a collective will. This process aims at representing larger sections of a given social formation rather than its original own community and therefore has exceeded the necessary stage of self-understanding and self-centering provided by vernacularism. Whereas in vernacular rhetoric language is primarily understood as a way to express the particular right to existence of a given community/group/movement, national-popular rhetoric expresses the discourse aspiring to transform the lived experience of that specific group into generalizable (good) common sense, as the pivotal principle of a new alternative social organization.

Strategically, the transition from vernacular forms to national popular ones can also be identified in the achieved combination of war of position and war of maneuver. While vernacularism mostly implies a rhetorical (war of-) positioning within civil society, national popular, in a determinate opportunistic moment of hegemony crisis, adds to that a move from a particular location in the civil society, toward the expansive area that links civil society and the state—the previously mentioned Gramscian “integral state” (1971, p. 267)—and aspires to seize political power.

In conclusion, the national popular translates into a discourse that, instead of asserting a community’s idiosyncrasies as a legitimate and particular way of living, assumes that in its “particular” there is a “general” that can be extended to the rest of society, in order to “establish the conditions for its own existence as universal principles and as a worldview” (Gramsci et al., 1995, p. 353).

A National-Popular Ethos: La Casta

The moral and political authority of Podemos mainly derives from its capability to semiotically dispute any possible sign of association with La Casta, which is defined as:

a fundamental component of the political class that runs the country. This is people not representing the citizens but butlers of financial capital. La Casta is a minority that rules against the majority’s interests, living in of a shameful condition of privilege. (Iglesias, 2014e)

Based on such an understanding, Podemos intends to eradicate La Casta because it morally and politically failed its own people. In this regard, the ethical superiority of Podemos as alter of La Casta is rhetorically constructed by producing binary oppositions, as the party clearly exposes in its Manifesto: “fraternity and solidarity” against “egoism and greediness”; “public spending to ease social inequalities” against “austerity policy”; “transparency” against “corruption”; popular “jeans and shirt” against institutional “suit”; “rational and common sensical arguments” against “politicians’ fuzziness” (Plaza Podemos, 2014).

In this confrontation, the apparent demise of the Spanish political class under Podemos’s pressure is used to establish a teleological narrative that depicts the former as an inherently regressive force doomed to be overcome by history:

The fact that the forces of the regime are so worried about us means that we are getting it right. La Casta is realizing that the bargain is ending and because of that they react agonizingly. Such behaviour must be considered as the past for this country because it’s necessary to build something new based on common sense, respect and political responsibility. (Iglesias, 2014d)

In the process of antagonizing such an oligarchic regime, both elements of “national” and “popular” gain definition. On the one hand, intellectual and academic professors such as Podemos’s leaders Iglesias, Monedero, and Errejon present themselves as intellectually and competence wise superior opponents by the scholastic rhetoric of the better argument. On the other, as it will be explained later on, two key aspects of the popular element, that is, common sense and the construction of a people, derive from the opposition to La Casta framed as a ruling minority. As Gramsci et al. would put it, Podemos’s ethos intends to construct “an intellectual-moral bloc which can make politically possible the intellectual progress of the mass” (1971, p. 332).

A National-Popular Logos: El Sentido Comun

In a letter preceding the foundation of Podemos, a group of intellectuals urged people to “Make a move. Convert indignation in political change” (Iglesias, 2014a). It was an exhortation to sublate the rage and frustrations for the existing conditions into a new common sense, or sentido comun, that can only be produced by the citizenry because:

When normal people, with normal needs and normal lives assume that politics is not about privileged individuals with suits but a question of everyday life, then politics becomes a question of popular common sense and things can change [. . .], the common sense is what turns a social majority of people into a political majority and the key is to orient popular common sense toward change. (Iglesias, 2014c)

In this passage, Iglesias uses common sense to reposition the political process from the “powerful” to the demos, from elite interests to the one of normal people.

Sentido comun rhetoric represents another manifestation of the synthesis of national and popular elements because it implies the intellectual translation in political terms of immediate material needs of everyday life of “normal people.” Echoing Marx’s (1974) concept of general intellect, Podemos advances the discourse of a collective effort that generates a communal knowledge. This rhetoric does not equate “common sense” with logos but rather describes the process how contradictory and chaotic common sense becomes gradually systematized into a relatively more coherent logos by intellectual intervention. That is exemplified by Plaza Podemos (Podemos’s square), a highly interactive web 2.0 platform created to host debates. Plaza Podemos welds together Ono and Sloop’s (2002) binarism between “civic” (p. 12)—as “the larger community” (p. 13)—and “vernacular discourse” (p. 13), the smaller localized community.

Plaza Podemos constitutes a space that emerges from the particularity of a specific community but aims at a national commonality. It is a kind of proletarian public sphere in which people of different demographics, levels of instruction, and geographical areas are working together in order to create open documents, regulations, and policies for the newly founded political party. In this arena, there are currently close to 100 discussions engaged with questions such as how to incorporate ecological or gender issues into the program, secularizing politics, or whether Podemos should abide to any specific ideology.

Plaza Podemos inherits from Indignados movement a participatory method for developing the electoral program, which is then elaborated by a team of intellectuals defined as “synthesizers,” the ones who try to sublate common sense into argumentative logos. The logic that links the “synthesizers” and regular members follows the principle that Gramsci et al. defined as “democratic centralism”:

A continual adaptation of the organization to the real movement, a matching of thrusts from below with orders from above, a continuous insertion of elements thrown up from the depths of the rank and file into the solid framework of the leadership apparatus which ensures continuity and the regular accumulation of experience . . . ” (1971, p. 189)

Such a democratic centralist confirms Podemos’s will to sublate rather than rejecting the “real movement” originating from Indignados.

Plaza Podemos also constitutes a kind of public that converges around particular issues and aims at establishing an unconstrained arena for rational critical discourse, which, in a contest of ideological liquidity, unites people with “peace and bread rather than ideological factionism” (Iglesias, 2014b). As one of its supporters claims:

We replaced the ideologically based positioning such as left and right of the old 1978 regime with “common sense” of the people dialectically opposed against La Casta. Now the diffused feeling consists of saying “I am not left or right but I am citizen and I have rights to education, health, home a job.” We replaced ideology with common sense. (Garzon, 2014)

In this passage, the author makes explicit the transition envisioned by Podemos from a politics that relies on ideological abstraction to common sense, as a practical conception of the work organically emerging from concrete popular needs as a collective will.

Another way in which Podemos rhetorically mediates sentido comun is through tertulia politica, which in Spanish refers to the idea of a community of people meeting for political discussions. In this sense, the two main front men of Podemos, Pablo Iglesias and Juan Carlos Monedero, gained public attention with the web or TV tertulias called La Tuerka and Fort Apache, which denounced the Troika policy, the deeply rooted corruption, the housing bubble, and the incredible disparity between bank and regular people bailouts.

Podemos’s preference for audio-visual media as a campaign tool, as opposed to the daily press, reveals a commitment to vernacularism and common sense but also an important message about their national-popular program. Thus, whereas traditionally in Spain daily press is characterized by low readership, and is fairly elitist on both content and linguistic forms, Podemos engages its audience via traditionally more popular media such as TV and Internet. In this sense, Fort Apache and La Tuerka represent two forms of tertulia política that use mediation to promise a kind of passionate political immediacy. In fact, in a political environment in which La Casta seems to be removed from the people because too drawn by its greed, Podemos promises an “immediate” mediation of politics: vernacular, fraternal, and antielitist.

The introduction of a such a new language in La Tuerka is also linked to the intellectual project of what Gramsci defines as “integral journalism,” which “is not only intended to satisfy the immediate needs of its public but intended to create and develop those needs in order to extend gradually the area of interests of its public” (Gramsci, Hoare, & Smith, 2000, p. 179). Integral journalism is a pedagogic project of capitalizing on both the common sensical standpoint of the “masses” but also raising theoretical awareness so that the “the public find the difference in the apparent identity and identity behind apparent difference” (p. 181).

Thus, to summarize, a context in which Madrid’s politics, Europe’s politics, and global politics seem exceedingly far, ethereal like the financial economy that has led Spanish people to this crisis, Podemos appears as common sensically proximate, locally and grassy rooted via its local assemblies and Plaza Podemos. Podemos speaks a language that capitalizes on the social proximity of citizenry and stands as a promise of substantiation of the polity. As already mentioned, sentido comun, in its approaching logos, is popular and intellectual at the same time as it exemplifies “good sense,” a kind of enlightenment force that aims at replacing “Darkness and ignorance of the ancien régime with social justice and progress.”

A National-Popular Pathos: La Gente

While the anti-La Casta rhetoric previously mentioned already provides a powerful emotional appeal for Podemos’s followers, in this section, I would like to focus on one significant productive outcome of that pathetic aspect: the definition of la gente. In this sense, according to commentators (Fernández-Albertos, 2014), one distinctive trait of Podemos is its constituency. Along with frustrated voters of the institutional left, Podemos has reappropriated a section of the electorate abandoned by traditional parties: the “absentees.” This specific portion of society is the one most painfully experiencing the precariousness of working conditions, unemployment, and general frustration of not being able to reach “generational expectations” on well-being: under 40 years old, a-politicized, precarious workers, or unemployed. In fact, Podemos’s slogans such as “when was the last time you voted with excitement?” (Iglesias, 2014b) reveal its objective to target the disenchanted portion of voters that prefer abstention.

However, the pathetic intervention of Podemos goes well beyond the emotional persuasion to vote, as it embodies the productive power of populism. If for Laclau (2005) the populist construction of a “people” represents “the political operation par excellence” (p. 153), that process inevitably tends to simplify the social and political field, which is reduced into the confrontation of two factions: the “people”—mobilized and organized by Podemos—and the “institutionalized other” (p. 117), La Casta.

Thus, in this particular case, the merit of Podemos consists of having discursively constructed a “people,” its political “interlocutor”—Podemos—and its political alter—La Casta:

There are two groups, the ones above us who live in prosperity and the one below. The one below needs to be aware of its condition, otherwise we are all screwed. Democracy cannot be exercised only every 4 years, with a voting slip [. . .] That is not democracy. Democracy depends on the people, you, going on the streets defending your political power against them. The power is on the people’s hands. If we the people do not exercise it, they will exercise for us and there is no democracy. (Iglesias, 2014e)

This passage reveals how Podemos aims at mobilizing “people” through its politicization.

Moreover, the discursive leverage on “fraternity,” the catalyzed and polarized antagonism against La Casta, and the “solidarity” among “decent ordinary citizens” (Iglesias, 2014a) created a powerful sense of identity among the people gathered around Podemos (Charland, 1987). In this sense, the almost obsessive reference to La Casta rhetorically serves as a “negative bonding” (Sennett, 1980, p. 28), which refers to the mechanism of interpellating a rejected presence, such as La Casta, in order to capitalize on that antagonism as a cohesive factor: “By knowing them, we know what we want” (p. 28).

Thus, Podemos’s national-popular rhetoric focuses on a Burkean (1969) sense of identification but without neglecting persuasion, as the addressing of La Casta is intended to mobilize Podemos onlookers rather than La Casta itself because “We need to become a people and as a people we need to become aware of our power” (Iglesias, 2014d). In my view, both negative bonding and identification rhetorically express the Gramscian transition of Podemos from rejection of existing hegemony to a level of assertion of its own project. In fact, instead of complying with the language and modus operandi of the Spanish political class, the group rhetorically instrumentalizes it in order to expand its social basis in order to eventually replace La Casta.

Again, the way la gente is interpellated synthetizes the two elements of the national popular. On the one hand, Podemos as the converser of the people is capable of elaborating on popular images, needs, and emotions—as Iglesias exemplifies by the way he opens his interventions by saying “we like to dream,” and “dreaming is beautiful” (2014b). In a recent speech in Madrid, Iglesias argued that the Spanish people “need to be treated with respect and be appreciated for the insights derived by their common sense” (Iglesias, 2014d).

On the other, la gente is also rhetorically invoked by Podemos as an agent of Kantian publicity, a public that is mobilized for matters of public concerns. This represents the rationale that supports the postideological and partially postclass appeal to the “people” (the people vs. La Casta represents a mythic and simplified kind of class antagonism). This is in my view symptomatic of a hegemonic project that trades the immediate vantage of ideological sectarism for a possible future much larger social body, which reflects Podemos’s objective of becoming the expression of “collective will.”

Wrapping up, Podemos uses its national-popular rhetoric in order to address its own public (the vernacular moment) but also to organize it into a political force, to elaborate its weltanschauung and to extend its social or political project to the entire society (national-popular moment).