Anti-Capitalist Chronicles: Class, Nation & Nationalism
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- Опубліковано 3 січ 2024
- [S6 E01] Beyond Borders: Class, Nation & Nationalism
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Professor Harvey investigates a very difficult and thorny problem, not only for Marxists, but for everyone, which is how to understand the concept of nation and the role of nationalism and what nationalism might do to our thinking when it is inserted into the theoretical discussion of how capital works. Harvey interrogates this question by employing the three basic concepts with which the discipline of geography as a whole is concerned: the environment, space and space time, and place, and places them in dialogue with Aristotle, Hegel, Heidegger, and Marx.
David Harvey's Anti-Capitalist Chronicles is co-produced by Politics in Motion. Politics In Motion is a nonprofit organization founded in May 2023 by Prof. David Harvey and Prof. Miguel Robles-Durán, along with Dr. Chris Caruso, instructional technologist, and noted writer and art curator Laura Raicovich. Our anti-capitalist media platform offers piercing insights and thought-provoking analyses on political, social, spatial, cultural, environmental and economic issues through a range of engaging mediums, including UA-cam streams, podcasts, and live events.
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David Harvey's lastest book "A Companion to Marx's Grundrisse" (Verso 2023):
www.versobooks.com/products/2...
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#class #nation #nationalism #capitalism
This is a super important issue to think about now! Many thanks
So good
I always appreciate David Harvey and that includes this take on a humanist Marxist approach to community. However, in his early work with Guterman on fascist ideology, 'La Conscience mystifiée', Lefebvre approached nationalism as an exacerbation of bourgeois ideology which derails public consciouness (cf. Shields). No longer revolutionary, the nation-state becomes an ideology and ethnic identity, obscuring international capitalist relations, and manipulated by demagogues. In his 'Nationalisme contre les nations' he argues that workers are made to think of themselves as racial groups. Of course people are not simply economic beings, and so the humanist Lefebvre seeks disalienation from bourgeois nationalism and from right-wing appropriations of revolutionary rhetoric, both of which are imperialist. In his postwar work on everyday life, he is more concerned about the triumph of consumer capitalism, which transforms the relation to place and community. The return of ethno-nationalism is part of the same post-Fordist processes that have seen the emergence of identity politics through which, despite their attention to social needs, political solidarity is capitalized and manipulate by state and corporate policy. One interesting question, if you think of it in terms of Bill Readings' analysis in 'The University in Ruins', is what does the predominance of the petty-bourgeois ideology, now in a decadent phase of development, change to this analysis of place, everyday life, and so on.
Could the cultivating a collective sense of self in a place and a politics of place generally have more emancipatory potential at the scale of municipality or region instead of nation?
It's really interesting! I think it would be very appropriate to give the reference of the quotes you read.
At the end, the debate about the rhetoric which attempts to collapse class and nation is invoked. The proletarian nations thesis was first invoked by fascist Italy and the Nazis. It is a way to justify the ethnically exclusionary corporatism which is class collaborationist (internally, apparently, where it doesn't exist). Maybe we could argue that development can benefit both domestic capital and labour, but it is the crisis that evokes the agrarian reaction in the first place that produces romantic anticapitalist nationalism. We might argue for some sense of net interests within a polity, say through net GDP growth or increased income by some median, but this will always exclude some groups. I am not sure there is a real thing we might say is the 'national interests' in some coherent fashion, even though increased capital investment increases the capacity of the government to act, as well as the greater economic position of capital and labour.
The romantic anti-capitalism especially of the German tradition is distinct from Marx's proletarian anti-capitalism. The first is backward looking and romantic and roots itself in cultural conspiracy theories like antisemitism. This is why sovereignty is attributed to the rural Volk and their 'mode of being in place.' The emphasis on 'Being' is not a mistake since 'Becoming' is to be resisted in this conservative rubric. The latter is about the working class 'Becoming,' not a national working class, but one made up of all possible identities and backgrounds (formed by capitalism), as a solidaristic block of those of all wage earners who are thrown together through modernity; not ancestral but formed. These wage earners are not just from one origin, but from many. Antisemitism, in Postone's explanation, is an explanation of displacement from one's native soil through a cultural conspiracy theory which values market abstraction, rather than economics (capital consolidation through development and economic crisis). It is difficult to see how romantic anticapitalist politics can be distinct from a fascist project of rootedness in the return to blood and soil relations, but we can't say the same for the latter. Israel meets the fascist Antisemites halfway, as Kautsky argued. They accept that Europe is not their home so they search for their sense of belonging and legitimacy of habitation elsewhere, where they have ancestral roots (so the nationalist rhetoric mandates), to establish security and sovereignty no longer secured in the multiethnic empire and denied to them in the nation state (due to this conspiracy theoretical romantic anti-capitalism). They commit genocide there, since this is what is generally required to establish a homogenous ethnic nation (which is always rhetorically constructed as well) out of this history of multiethinic empires. Palestinians, also legitimately not wanting to be displaced, make a similar claim of rootedness as a legitimization for sovereignty against the assertion of Israeli sovereignty. Debate seems to be about who's rootedness justifies their sovereignty, but in my view, this accepts too much legitimacy to the fascist's idea of ethnic sovereignty in the first place. Republican democratic rights, right of return, and reparations based on a non-discriminatory legal system is what is necessary, not debates about which fascist conception of belonging is more legitimate. Also, as a diasporic Jew, our safety and legal equality, in republics elsewhere, is what is required to work against the feeling that such fascist projects like Israel feel necessary for some. After the horrors of the Holocaust, I can understand why they might feel they needed this, against a seemingly hostile world, even if I fundamentally disagree with the approach and feel it even undermines my safety where I am, which is also where most Jews are. The undermining of ethnic exclusionary politics of sovereignty is what is required to undermine its victims also seeking a zone of safety and exclusion, who commits genocide on others in turn to secure their rights of habitation after experiencing it themselves. Not everyone has some clear ethnic homeland, as if this some biological fact and not one of political rhetoric which justifies some historical or contemporary administrative unit. Neither is it desirable to 'restore' ethnic sovereignty where it never existed as if this apartheid form could bring some sense of justice. This experience should clarify the externalities of such a pursuit in real human lives. I think this is the lesson we need to draw from this experience, not about the legitimacy of rootedness and the imperialism of the rootless settler or cosmopolitan (aka the Jew), as if these are essential natures of their being. Theories of Volksguist and relative rootedness are inseparable from fascism and its political trajectory. We are not static things from a static essence, but form into our changing conditions since we have the capacity to reason and learn. Marx, I think argued for the possibility for socialism on the foundation of a republican tradition, not one of exclusionary ethnonationalism. The capitalist contradictions sublate the ethnonation anyway, since domestic capital seeks an edge to find a demographic to which it can pay lower wages (or be displaced by those who do) and ethnic majority labour will just lose its bargaining power if it doesn't integrate their solidarity to those who the boss brings in to lower wages. Therefore, the ethno-state undermines itself anyway, after much bloodshed and horror. In a way, Ireland is already experiencing this. All that is solid melts into air...
Thankyou. Its a complex question. Ive never been able to fully grasp what the state means in our current situation, however, its fundamental if we want to adress risk.
I always assume nationalism to be a bad thing but I suppose it could be used for good in certain cases
I want to accumulate a cactus. Capital accumulation. Got to love it!
Phew big stuff happening.
Omg