Populism/people/popular: Reflections from a Latin American perspective

The motives for writing this essay are twofold. First, there is a risk that the stigma currently associated with populism may contaminate the notions of people and popular struggles that are so relevant in the Latin American political and organizational context. Thus, this essay contributes towards overcoming the predominant discussion on populism from the perspective of the Global North West. The second motive arises from the understanding that the organizational processes within popular movements and struggles cannot be comprehensively studied without fully appreciating the knowledge theoretically elaborated in, and that emerges from below, which most often remains restricted to the practices and spaces of struggle. Dussel’s philosophy and ethics of liberation can contribute to a renewal of the way we study and theorize organization to include the radical potentiality of developing anti-management studies in the engagement with popular struggles, such as those organized against the destructive impacts of business and management in the production and reproduction of people’s lives and livelihoods. Therefore, this contribution is directed specifically to the study and theorization of these processes, providing inspiration for our practices of co-constructing knowledge that can be relevant and meaningful for activists and their organizational processes. Besides that, Dussel’s philosophy and ethics of liberation also provide contributions for the negative critique of populism as the political expression of fetishized vertical power that, in concrete historical situations, subordinates the original foundational popular power.