Populism , Social Reproduction and Authoritarian Statism

The central contention of this paper is that contemporary radical right wing populism needs to be placed in the context of state transformation and the emergence of the new forms of political regimes. We build on the work on Poulantzas and his work on the exceptional state – including fascism – to tease out the key elements of transformation b We argue that radical right wing populism reflects twin forces : a ) a political crisis of social reproduction and its management by the state and its increasing coercive management of these crises of social reproduction B) broader global capitalist process and their impact on the fragmentation and disarticulation of classes of labour –. We draw attention to the fragmentation of the labour classes and their increasing disincorporation ( or disarticulation) from formal political processes. We see populism and the exceptional state as a way of managing this disincorporation. C) finally, the ideological resonant role of the ‘household’ in both the economic and ideological dimension of populism.