The consent of the popular masses was fundamental for Octavian's rise to power, who, thanks to them and the support of the Senate, was able to govern and to transform the administrative and institutional structure of Rome in a profound and radical way. They were decisive in the transformation of the cult of Isis, from a forbidden cult to a cult first tolerated and then even officially practiced by the Emperor Vespasian, and in more recent times, the popular masses would have proved extremely significant for the affirmation of movements such as the Nazional Socialism, which would have led to Adolf Hitler's takeover in Germany.
Determining and understanding the historical role of the popular masses represents one of the great problems of contemporary historiography, of strong Marxist inspiration, and is at the same time an extremely topical issue.
According to Orthodox Marxism, the popular masses have a central role in determining the great currents and the great events of history, they are presented as one of the most powerful engines in history, if not the only, true beating heart of history, they are anonymous, without a face or name, but they are the base from which the great protagonists of history were able to rise and fill the prominent place for which they became known. From this point of view, history is not determined by the actions of a few great men, but by the work and work of millions of men who in the shadows have allowed those few men to be remembered.
Napoleon would not be Napoleon without the armies following him, without the soldiers ready to die for those ideals, Columbus would not have discovered the Americas without his crew, and so for Hitler, Lienin, Washington, Cromwell, Garibaldi, Octavian, Charles V, Saladin, etc., etc. .
This historiographic vision, as we said, is of strong Marxist inspiration, and will be central to the public and academic debate, especially in the years following the Second World War and throughout the 1950s and 1960s, and to a large extent at least until the early years. ninety.
But before Marx, what were the popular masses seen by historians and what role did they play in history?
For a long time, at least until the second half of the eighteenth century, the popular masses were considered in an extremely marginal and almost insignificant way on the historical and historiographical level. All this, however, begins to change with the Enlightenment and with the affirmation of the bourgeois class, here Marx could turn up his nose at these words of mine, and also, if the popular masses, workers and peasants, from a certain moment in then, they were able to assume their own identity in the face of history, this is thanks to the affirmation of the working class, whose demand for attention from traditional society, and the desire to penetrate that elitist world, until then the exclusive territory of the nobility , has led to a distortion of the balance such as to allow even the popular masses to enter into that history of which they had always been a part, as silent actors, hidden in the shadow of great events, and in this analogy with the theater, the popular masses they can be perceived as the invisible army of technicians, make-up artists, costume designers etc etc etc who move behind the scenes, allowing the show to go on.
The Enlightenment ideals would have led to the affirmation of the individual and the independence of the American colonies from British rule, thus creating a state free from the ancient noble rule, built and guided for the first time in history by a totally bourgeois leadership; a state, where wealth and power were not predetermined from birth, but the result of work, will, and ability (and even a little luck) of individuals. In short, a nation in which a throat-cutter and a smuggler could sit at the table with the most powerful men in the nation, without them looking at them with contempt. Something similar had already happened in Rome, where the great social mobility would have allowed the nephew of a tax collector to access the highest political peaks, to become King, Consul and Emperor.
American independence would have followed in Europe, a few decades later, the French Revolution and with it the advent of Napoleon Bonaparte, who we could define as the man capable of embodying revolutionary ideals, and above all the man capable of exporting, on a large scale , those same ideals. Napoleon will have fame and fortune throughout Europe and to the sound of battles fought by the People for the Peoples, he will be able to bring the traditional aristocracy to its knees, at least until the moment of its defeat. But Napoleon's defeat does not and cannot mean a return to the past, his contemporaries are aware that the world had changed, too many years had passed between 1789 and 1814 so that one could return to the past without consequences, in those years of the blood had been shed for freedom and equality, children never became fathers, and mothers saw their children fall for that dream of freedom; the nobles could no longer govern moved by their whims, they must listen or at least try to listen to the people, a people who would not have hesitated for a single moment to take to the streets again and take up arms against their sovereigns, and so it would have been 1820, 1830 and finally in 1848.
1848 is the decisive moment, it is there that the magic would take place, the revolution of 48 represents the definitive affirmation of the popular will over the nobility, and it is no coincidence that the 12 February 48, the manifesto of the Communist Party was published in London. The riots of 48 exploded more or less in the same period and rapidly expanded throughout Europe, but beyond the nation and the peoples in the square, the request, indeed, the claim is always the same, the peoples of Europe ask for a parliament elected by universal suffrage and a constitutional charter written by the parliament and not granted by the sovereign. These requests will represent the last nail on the coffin of the ancient regime, which for over 50 years has been trying in vain to survive. to appoint and depose sovereigns, to establish the entry or exit from a war, think in this sense of Russia, whose revolutions of 1917 are perhaps the highest point of political power determined by the will of the people, and again, think to Hitler's rise to power or the deposition of the King of Italy and the consequent birth of the Italian Republic.
1945 and with it the end of the Second World War marked a temporary interruption, at least in the Western world, of this sort of golden age of the popular masses. The crimes committed in Europe by Nazism (and beyond) produce a drastic change of direction. The idea is affirmed at the political level that the popular will alone is not capable of governing a people, since by itself, it allowed Hitler to govern in Germany, with all the consequences that this would have entailed, liberal historians they see the failure of popular power in European fascisms and in the Soviet Union, underlining the limits of its capacity for judgment. We realize that the popular masses, especially the rural plebs, peasants and workers, can be easily plagiarized and manipulated, to the point where they will come to believe all sorts of propaganda hoaxes told to them by the manipulator on duty. At the same time the pillars of the earth begin to take root in the economic and financial strongholds of the planet, thus, the long nineteenth century, which began with American independence and the affirmation of the bourgeoisie over the aristocracy, ends with the Second World War, giving to civilization a new aristocracy with "green blood", daughter of American independence and whose power is legitimized by a new god of money.
The shift of power from the popular masses to the new capitalist bourgeoisie is an ongoing process since from the American Revolution, but after the Second World War, and above all with the failure of the experience of real socialism in the Soviet Union, it will undergo such an acceleration that in little more than a decade, the whole world (or rather, a large part of the world) from a capitalist perspective.
Power, especially in Europe, has progressively taken refuge in supranational mechanisms and institutions i, delegating more and more and more and more often the choices for one's future. Thus, at the dawn of the third millennium, between wars, natural disasters and economic crises, like reactionary forces pushed by an apparent loss of decision-making power, echoes of the Volksgeist, the spirit of the people, and slowly the masses, aided by the web, return , return to the streets, but unlike in the past, the third millennium squares are virtual, where everything is faster, everything is more immediate, and manipulation is more effective. Here, the new Hitler more simply than in the past, can create their own squadrons, militants, ready to claim, for themselves and in the name of the people, a central place in determining the historical evolution of the world, thus always new and more numerous popular movements of hypernationalist and individualistic faith, disguised as collective and social movements. These movements claim the well-being and dignity of man, and aim to create social equity, obtaining easy consensus, but paradoxically, in order to achieve their ends, they systematically deny, in their own intentions, well-being, dignity and social equity, to minorities and so, in those movements, whose words cloud and drunk the minds of peoples, the ideals that in the darkest years of the twentieth century, had led to the systematic destruction of human lives, too easily forgetting the crimes of Nazism were also the crimes of the German people, as well as of all the European peoples of the world, but above all, to quote Hannah Arendt, they were the crimes of human stupidity, a stupidity that is very widespread today as then, a stupidity that derives from the inability to really see themselves in the shoes of the other.
Our ancestors have sinned of superficiality, allowing and their greatest fault is that of being opposed to Nazism, but indeed, to have supported and supported it, despite its programs and plans, were widely exposed and widely shared for a long time, before the war began for purely political reasons.
Popular consensus it allowed Hitler, Napoleon, Octavian and many others to rule undisturbed (or nearly so) while depriving republican institutions of meaning. The people supported them because they were able to protect their people, their nation, from any external interference, and while they presented themselves to the people as bulwarks of the nation, they took possession of them, creating empires and establishing monarchies or dictatorships.
Our world and our time are enveloped in that same darkness that destroyed Europe seventy years ago, not with bombs, not with airplanes, but with ideas, and if then Europe lost its humanity by transforming men in numbers, today as then, ideological, cultural and physical walls are built, born to divide men from others, those that we are not, those walls lead the Western world to turn away when a man, one of the others , he is no longer a man but an illegal immigrant, and he can die at sea, in a tunnel or in a van, he dies of hunger because he lost his job or a bomb destroyed his house.
Those walls deprive him men of their dignity to be hum anus, and once again destroy the power of the people, concentrating it in the hands of opportunists and manipulators, ready to build on the rubble of our civilization in crisis.
History has taught us the extremization of popular and nationalistic movements can lead to a single inevitable conclusion, the end of every republican and democratic order, and the concentration of extraordinary powers in the hands of a single man, be it Octavian, Cromwell, Napoleon, Hitler, Stalin, Putin or Trump.