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Paper short abstract

This paper revisits Gerald Sider’s Culture and Class in Anthropology and History to examine the class alliances and collusions that constitute right-wing populism. Rather than a rupture, this paper transcends the liberal compact to analyze the evolving relations of working-class politics.

Paper long abstract

This paper revisits Gerald Sider’s Culture and Class in Anthropology and History to analyze right-wing populism in the United States. Drawing on Sider’s concept of culture as the force that makes class dynamic, I analyze right-wing populism’s demarcation of class antagonisms and inter-class alliances. In this way, populism is neither a ‘rupture’ nor the ‘return of the repressed.’ Instead, right-wing populism in the United States provides a window into the evolving organisation of capitalist accumulation. In going beyond the view of class struggle between labor and capital, Sider insists on the subtleties of the internal dynamics of interclass confrontations and collusions. Through terms such as ‘woke capital’ and the ‘liberal elite,’ populism embodies a class politics that focuses class struggle upon consumption and property ownership, which grows from contradictions in the way the US version of social democracy conscripted working class Americans into corporate models that bureaucratized trade unions, transforming working class politics in ways that demobilized militant politics and focused class struggle upon consumption and property ownership, predisposing workers to corporate power and imperialism. At the same time, I will explore right-wing populism's ambiguous relationship with neoliberalism by placing its practices in history and the relations of production, uncovering internal dynamics that produce specific interclass confrontations and collusions that arise from the changes in the material basis and productive activities, which also express the working classes’ changing political and ideological claims.