To “Feel” and to “Understand” Political Struggle

While communication scholars who have invoked the Gramscian concept of hegemony have approached it primarily as a designation for cultural stability and domination (Biesecker, 1989; Cloud, 2006; Condit, 1994; DeLuca, 1999; McKerrow, 1989), there have been few calls for its closer consideration in relation to human agency in the process of social change (Aune, 1994, 2013; Zompetti, 1997, 2012). Receptive of these calls, in this article, I develop an alternative to the prevailing reading of the concept to show its productiveness in the analysis of the rhetoric of an emerging political formation.

I claim that my conceptualization advances the discussion toward a dimension of rhetorical intervention that passes from an oppressive to an emancipatory understanding of hegemony, thus moving it from a framework of critique of domination to one implying an active reshaping of social relations. I intend to reactivate a constructive sense of hegemony by examining the transition of an emergent social group from a condition of subordination to a collective political actor with potentials to exercise hegemony.

In order to exemplify this perspective, I take as my case study the rhetoric of Podemos, a recently formed political party in Spain, which, in the context of the recent economic crisis started in 2008, is working toward hegemony by successfully building a collective will. Podemos is a Spanish political party developed as a ramification of social movement Indignados. It was funded in early March of 2014 by a group of intellectuals and activists who have interpreted the popular rage and frustration against crisis measures. Podemos represents an antiausterity project that aims at constructing a social pact against poverty and social exclusion by addressing issues such as social inequality, the private debt of families, and reforming the taxation in order to redistribute wealth across society.

Within only few months after its constitution, the group gained considerable media attention after its surprising success at the 2014 European Elections, as it obtained 1.25 million votes and five seats in the European Parliament. Currently, several political opinion pols consider Podemos as the potential winning candidate for the general national elections in November 2015 in Spain (“Podemos seria,” 2015). In this regard, taking into account the historical situatedness of a Gramscian perspective according to which people’s praxis becomes a powerful historical force only in particular historical conjunctures, my analysis explores the favorable rhetorical situation formed by the organic crisis in Spain and Podemos’s strategic discourse.

In order to advance my argument, I first contextualize my Gramscian approach on rhetoric in respect to the existing body of critical scholarship, and then I develop a framework of analysis building on Bitzer’s rhetorical situation (1968) in and by which Podemos operates. So, as to provide an elucidation of my understanding of national-popular rhetoric embracing an emancipatory hegemony, I will compare it and contrast with the notion of vernacular rhetoric (Ono & Sloop, 1992).

The rhetorical situation of Podemos’s national popular provides a historically situated analysis of the tension between structure and struggle, “objective” and “subjective” conditions (Aune, 1994). Accordingly, I consider the Spain’s crisis as the structural terrain that constrains and enables Podemos’s rhetorical endeavor. In order to show how Podemos rhetorically builds a collective will, I examine its anti–La Casta ethos, the process that turns common sense into logos and its pathetic capability to transform a-politicized social sectors into a “people.”

From Oppressive to Emancipatory Hegemony

In this section of the article, I provide arguments for a conceptualization of a Gramscian or national-popular rhetoric understood as hegemonic—rather than counter-hegemonic—which employs Bitzer’s (1968) rhetorical situation as a prism for a materialist reading of the intersection of social historical conditions and rhetorical interventions. Then, in order to situate it among existing and competing conceptualizations, I will describe national-popular rhetoric in juxtaposition to vernacular rhetoric.

While he never explicitly dealt with rhetoric, Gramsci attributed to persuasive communication the power of shaping the social order by producing the social and cultural basis for a common field of meanings (Williams, 1977), by alternatively raising or sinking consciousness (Cloud, 1996), or by disciplinizing social groups via the enforcement of a dominant grammar (Ives, 2004). Indeed, Gramsci, Hoare, and Smith connect the problem of establishing cultural hegemony and an accepted language in the practical operations of power:

Every time that the question of language surfaces, in one way or another, it means that a series of other problems are coming to the fore: the formation and enlargement of the governing class, the need to establish more intimate and secure relationships between the governing groups and the national-popular mass, in other words to recognize the cultural hegemony. (1985, p. 180)

In the specific domain of critical rhetoric, scholars have been certainly receptive of the value of a Gramscian approach to rhetoric in order to link communicative practices and dynamics of power, as well as to build on his practically oriented philosophy (Thomas, 2010). However, while critical rhetoric literature has consistently recognized the constructive and constitutive value of “praxis” (e.g., Charland, 1991; Hariman, 1991; McKerrow, 1989; Ono & Sloop, 1992; Zompetti, 1997), most authors according to Gunn and Treat (2005) tend to operationalize Gramscian concepts, such as hegemony in “negative” ways, as a tool for ideological critique (e.g., Artz & Murphy, 2000; Cloud, 2006; Gencarella, 2010).

Such a conceptualization of hegemony could be defined as negative because by concentrating on the reproductive aspects of the notion, it tends to “negate” the possibility through hegemony of radical and progressive social change, therefore reducing it to a resource mostly employed for social criticism rather than social activism. While criticism and activism are indissolubly linked, the above-mentioned literature tends to emphasize resistance to hegemony and “freedom from domination” rather than achieving emancipation through hegemony, understood as “freedom to pursue other power relations” (Mckerrow, 1991, p. 75).

Laclau and Mouffe (1985) in their discursive interpretation of hegemony indeed suggest a propositive hegemony based on the construction of a collective will. Such a project would imply an articulating process, which consists in the “construction of nodal points which partially fix meaning” (1985, p. 113). While their reading considers the revolutionary potential of constructive and alternative hegemony via discursive practices, it leaves unclear the role and placement of human agency in their framework.

In my view, a more significant advancement in the sense of a rhetorical approach to hegemony-as-emancipation is provided by Zompetti (1997, 2012), who advocates an approach to Gramscian rhetoric that privileges praxis oriented by a telos that goes beyond “critical deconstruction or simple demystification of power relations” (1997, p. 80). In his analysis of Occupy Wall Street (2012), he also claims that in specific historical conjunctures, a hegemonic project combining Gramscian rhetorically informed strategies such as war of maneuver and war of position may be successful.

Equally significant is Aune’s perspective about the mediating role of rhetoric in hegemonic projects. In line with his take, I assume that applying a rhetorical analysis to Podemos means interrogating the tension between “the structural limitation upon the available means of persuasion” and “social struggle” (Aune, 2013, p. 15). The most prominent affinity between this particular line of rhetorical criticism and Gramsci can be found in the embracement of a similar sense of history: Both advance a dialectically humanist perspective that assumes that “people make history” but within a framework of social and structural confines. Gramsci solves this tension between structure and struggle (Aune, 1994) by the creative potential of praxis (Greene & Hiland, 2014), which in this study is exemplified by the rhetoric operating in a historically determined rhetorical situation.

According to the materialist approach of Cloud (2009), understanding the efficacy of a rhetorical situation entails a constant interception of a given rhetorical practice with the limits and possibilities provided by the social relations that contain it in any given historic moment. Similarly, Gramsci argued that significant social or political phenomena take place only when the particular configuration of social relations operating in a given society in a given époque meets the formation and intervention of particular political subjects and organizations.

Such a view represented Gramsci, Hoare, and Smith’s (1995, p. 15) way to navigate between voluntarist and determinist debate on historical agency as well as his sense of historical contingency of political action. As Morera (1990) observes, Gramsci’s historicism does not try to deny historical causality but rather aims at providing a sense of the complexity of historical dynamics “that takes into account the open character of that [historical] process” (p. 115). The preoccupation for a historically situated analysis reflects what Thomas (2010) considers as one of Gramsci’s philosophical cardinal points: immanence, which represents Gramsci’s consistent effort to avoid metaphysical and transcendental laws and categories in the analysis of human vicissitudes.

In this sense, the materialist and contingent logic as expound above can be viewed from the prism of Bitzer’s rhetorical situation by developing his idea of rhetoric as a mode of action, which is generated by the convergence of the orator and the social contextual conditions of possibility:

A complex of persons, events, objects, and relations presenting an actual or potential exigence which can be completely or partially removed if discourse, introduced into the situation, can so constrain human decision or action as to bring about the significant modification of the exigence. (1968, p. 3)

Rhetorical exigencies and constraints can be, and often are, tied to materialist concerns, such as the material pressure exerted by antiausterity policies. A materialist reading of such circumstances implies incorporating dialectics (Cloud, 2009) as a logic that governs the relations between the orator and his or her social situation as well as the idea that the rhetorical exigence mentioned by Bitzer emerges from concrete social needs because as Marx and Engels notice “language, like consciousness, only arises from the need, the necessity, of intercourse with other men” (1968, p. 18).

When tying this particular reading with a hegemonic plan of a political group such as Podemos, we need to consider Gramsci’s sense of historical contingency of political action, in other words, an opportunistic and favorable intersection of the social historical conditions that create an “exigence” and effective rhetorical constrains. The attention for the contingent moment is crucial for a rhetoric that, informed by Gramsci’s historicist kind of analysis, considers the historical specificity of a given political project. Accordingly, in the next section, I will inaugurate my rhetorical analysis by exploring first the context in which the “exigence” and the “urgency” of the rhetorical situation emerge.

Critical Times and Podemos’s Window of Action

Following my reading of the rhetorical situation, I will treat in this section the recent political and economic crisis in Spain as an “organizing exigence” (Bitzer, 1968, p. 6) expressed at the social, political, and ethical level, which constitutes the scenario in which Podemos’s discourse emerges and operates. Indeed, Podemos developed out of the massive antiausterity rallies that took place in 2011 in Spain, a country that seemed to embody the most dramatic aspects of the 2007–2008 crisis. As we shall see, such a context provides the stage on which Podemos exercises its “constrains”: a logos gradually developing from common sense, an anti–La Casta ethos, and a pathos deriving from the construction of “the people.”

While for Gramsci’s historicism, no two historical moments are the same and different historical contexts require different strategies, he is also interested in “historical translations” (Thomas, 2010), which implies being able to draw conceptual parallelisms between distinct events in order to be able to learn from history. In this sense, there is a significant analogy between Gramsci’s examination of postwar 1929 crisis and the current political-economic downturn in Spain. In both cases, the difficulty of generating political consent, the persistent criticism against the political class, the fear of populism, and the skepticism toward the parliamentary system have sided economic recession. Crises for Gramsci, Hoare, and Smith should be understood as systemic, recurrent, and fluid phenomena rather than a catastrophic collapses of the capitalist system. However, when severe, crises become “organic” and “may weaken the link between state and civil society” (1971, p. 210) as well as the mechanism through which consent is produced, which, in turn, weakens hegemony.

Undeniably, in the case of Spanish Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy’s government, the crisis became “organic” in the sense that the state has not been capable of harmonizing the conflictive and diverse interests of civil society. That caused in turn a crisis of the principle of authority and hegemony, as the very existence of mass mobilizations such as the ones generated by antiausterity social movement Indignados and Podemos confirm.

According to Gramsci et al., hegemony combines a “coercive” component—predominately operating on the terrain of state—and a “consensual” component, predominantly operating on the terrain of civil society (1971, p. 129). In this sense, the tendency of the Spanish government to repress protests and adopt austerity measures has significantly weakened the hegemony of the ruling group by diminishing the “consent” moment. For instance, the 2012 Reforma Laboral has substantially worsened workers’ labor conditions, by facilitating lay offs and diminishing their negotiation capabilities at the level of contract bargaining. Second, the government passed a package of new laws named Seguridad Ciudadana (qualified as Ley Mordaza, “Gag law”), which de facto prevents citizens from exercising basic rights such as manifestation of dissent.

The weakening of hegemony facilitated both the emergence of new worldviews such as one of Podemos as well the group’s synthesizing of two Gramscian political strategies: war of position and war of maneuver. Those two notions reflect Gramscian historicist approach that differentiates between the struggle in Western Europe and during Russian Revolution. Drawing analogies with changes in warfare, he considers how the single insurrection or maneuvering against the state could not work in Western Europe because of the development of civil society as a hegemony site. Thus, Gramsci encourages in the West a “war of position” as the process of weakening the bourgeoisie’s influence over civil society, before trying to seize state power.

In the case of Podemos, the transition from the antisystem politics of its original movement, Indignados, to the current seeking political dominance reveals the incorporation of “movement” to the existing war of “position.” In fact, while Indignados aimed at positioning itself in the Spanish political landscape working on the construction of a critical consciousness, Podemos targets state power (“Podemos seria,” 2015). As Zompetti (2012) argues, “It is precisely when the hegemony is fragile, weak, and prone to crisis” (p. 12) that can make a war of maneuver effective.

Podemos’s combining of war of position and maneuver in turn leads to a political activity that acts upon the “integral state” (Gramsci et al., 1971, p. 244), that is, an intervention at both civil and state level. Such an integral struggle explains its ambivalent nature, which comprises the official form of a political party and the content of a grass roots movement: As a party, it aspires to “seize state power” and politically represent and mediate the interests of its constituencies; as a movement, it aspires to build a direct democracy environment that actually defies institutional politics; as a party, it has equipped itself with an organizational structure meant to organize action as a coordinated social body; as a movement, Podemos is continuously and fluidly shaped by constant discussion, local assemblies, and the preponderance of horizontal communication among citizens.

In conclusion, the origins of Podemos are to be found in the “exigence” defined by the context of the recent organic crisis and the consequent social mobilization of people. This paved the way for Podemos’s entrance in the political scene by (war-of-) positioning itself in the political map through the generation of a sustained critique against the traditional political class and by “moving a war” that aims at conquering the state. After this excursus of the particular historical conjunctures that defines and makes possible the sense of urgency felt by Spanish social strata, I next examine Podemos’s national-popular rhetoric as rhetorical “constrains,” employed by the political group.

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).

The National-Popular Rhetoric of Podemos

The crisis in Spain (and the way it was dealt with) ultimately created an “exigence” and a sense of “urgency” that was capably addressed by Podemos in the following ways: first, through an ethos based on a moral reform against a corrupted La Casta (the caste), the name given to the ruling political class; second, through a process that aims at turning sentido comun (common sense) into more systematic logos; and third, through a pathos that builds on the a construction of a la gente (the people). While the three rhetorical elements are indissolubly linked to one another, for the sake of exposition, I will try to analytically isolate significant aspects of each.

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).

People Make History

From the perspective suggested in this article, Podemos has been treated both as a product and producer of history, because “every political movements creates a language on its own [..] Introducing new terms, enriching existing ones, creating metaphors” (p. 127), which would be then exported to a larger social experience (Gramsci et al., 1971). In line with his historicism, the goal was to operationalize a Gramscian approach on rhetoric that helped us explore the historically conjunctural circumstances in which the intervention of Podemos could provide the adequate rhetoric and the necessary sociological imagination to go beyond the apparent historical necessity of capitalism and its hegemonic establishment in Spain.

I tried to frame such a connection between rhetoric and the construction of new hegemony by understanding Podemos’s agency in terms of a rhetorical situation in which the Spanish organic crisis, by weakening hegemony, produced a historical contingent opportunity to build a collective will through rhetorical constrains such as sentido comun, la gente and la casta.

Those constrains were organized within a strategic combination war of position and war of maneuver. In fact, Podemos, inheriting Indignados sustained critique of the system, was able to forge a critical consciousness that penetrated the social fabric of Spanish civil society, thus positioning itself in such a way to allow the successive maneuver to seize political of power.

Thus, if Podemos provided a vocabulary of motives to the Spanish crisis, I think I contributed with this article to give a Gramscian theoretical lexis to understand the multilevel struggle of this political formation. Accordingly, I showed how, in its project to establish an alternative political hegemony, Podemos rhetorically goes beyond its vernacular idiosyncrasies in order to propagate its worldviews and actively shape social organization as a political hegemon.

In the end, what emerges from such an illustration is an account of a political force that, in a global scenario of political impasse of left-wing politics, via a populist pathos, a morally polarizing ethos, and a common sensical logos, has shown the capabilities to successfully feel and to understand political struggle.