The People Are Not One

By: Daniel Tutt, C. Derick Varn

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Paperback | 26 June 2026

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82 Pages

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19.84 x 12.85 x 0.51

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In The People Are Not One, Daniel Tutt and C. Derick Varn dismantle the central illusion of contemporary left politics: that "the people" can serve as a coherent subject of emancipation. Against both right and left populisms, they argue that this fantasy of unity obscures real class antagonisms and traps socialism in a dead-end politics of moral appeal and electoral maneuver.

Through a sustained critique of left-populism, post-Marxist theory, and Democratic Party-oriented socialism, Tutt and Varn show how the collapse of mass politics, alongside debates over the professional-managerial class and the atomization of working-class life, has produced a strategic impasse on the left.

What follows is not a lament but a provocation: a call to abandon populist shortcuts and rebuild socialist strategy on the terrain of class struggle as it actually exists-uneven, divided, and politically unformed. The People Are Not One is a manifesto for a post-populist left willing to confront fragmentation head-on and begin the long work of reconstructing class power.

Industry Reviews

Writing in the great Marxist tradition of class analysis associated with thinkers such as Nicos Poulantzas, Ellen Meiksins Wood, and Mike Davis, Tutt and Varn detail the dangers of a left populist political strategy that seeks to displace class struggle (and the struggle of the oppressed in general) by subsuming all workers within a political matrix dominated by the petty bourgeoisie or middle class. This is a work for our time; one that is ultimately as significant in its implications for the fight against so-called right populism as in its opposition to left populist strategies.

John Bellamy Foster, author of Breaking the Bonds of Fate: Epicurus and Marx

"The left populism that emerged from Eurocommunism via Gorz, Laclau and Mouffe, and so on, has proved to be a dead-end for the left: mere branding opportunities for left-talking political careerists. By deprioritising class it has given up the working class to the right-populists. Daniel Tutt and C Derick Varn attempt to engage the theoretical arguments, and to think seriously about what reconstructing a working class socialist movement (or a socialist labor movement) could mean. An important project."

Mike Macnair, author Revolutionary Strategy: Marxism and the Challenge of Left Unity

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