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You see nations as a support/correlary to older captialist organization. I see it as the only viable check on unbridled capitalism, as the nation is the largest unit with enough power to counteract large capitalist units (big business)
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going back to the opening post for a minute--in the above, alansmithee, where you use the term nation i think that you mean state.
the nation, a set of signifiers that articulate a sense of "horizontal solidarity" between people/communities by situating each element in a relation of part to whole (individual to community, community to other communities, extending through a kind of level-crossing repetition to entail the set of all imagined communities grouped as nation)--this is an ideological form. this ideological form serves quite complex functions--it links people together horizontally (in the present) and provides a way to add density to these linkages by opening onto a way of reading/fabricating history or tradition. since the whole of the snigifer nation operates in a kind of mythological register, it hardly matters, when you think about it, if the elements that orient this history or tradition are "real" or not--since the history/tradition are basically articulated across images and rules of interacting with them, it does not really matter if any particular element is or was what folk think it was in the past--it stands in for the past, modifies the past and does what almost all history does anyway, which is to adjust the sesne of the past to fit the needs of the present.
the idea of nation is important in education/social reproduction in that it forms the basis for the imposition of an assumption that the existing order is legitimate and that children become what they are and will be within a given political framework to whcih they owe allegiance (a repressive operation if you think about it)---insofar as it is a co-ordinating mechanism that makes aspects of social reproduction (the reproduction of labor pools) also political reproduction (in that education imposes the assumption that the existing order is legitimate because it exists--a correlation that folk, no matter theuir politics as adults, have to work through) you can say that it is linked to the state because it (nation) is a political expression of the interests of the state.
but it (nation) is not identical to the state for all that.
what limits unbridled capitalism is the state because states generate the legal structures within which capitalism operates...states provide the material infrastructures on the basis of which capitalism can function at all...states assure a minimal level of social and political stability, which capitalism needs (despite the effects of its own operation), and insofar as states enframe education legally and institutionally, it also provides a continuous supply of labor for capitalist organizations.
so the principle mechansism through which capitalism is shaped, reproduced and limited is law--even within the history of the left, the social democrats understood revolution as a distant possibility and so turned their attention to working within the legal order as a pressure group the goals of which were to influence the character of the law that shapes how capitalism unfolds in a particular space. so what provides a check on unbridled capitalism is the state, not the nation.
it is curious that the american right has worked so hard to stand this perfectly obvious empirical situation on its head. for the right, the state is an adversary, a principle of arbitrariness that stands over against the nation, which they like to pretend is a space of unanimity. the right imputes power to the nation and sees the state as an obstacle. that view is entirely insane--historically false and conceptually incoherent as a description of conditions that acutally obtain in the world. what this reversal is about, it seems to me, is wholesale self-disempowerment.
right ideology these days is predicated on generating a priori suspicion of the state--it opposes the redistribution of wealth, it opposes public education, it opposes the generation of laws that restrict what the right argues is a god given right to unlimited profit through unlimited exploitation of resources they like tp pretend are themselves unlimited. the right therefore presents ideological obstacles that obscure the actual role of teh state, and by doing that manage somehow to convince folk that acting against the state is a way of increasing the political power of the nation.
what this is really about is depoliticization of the consequences of mutations in the organization of capitalism that individual nation-states cannot control.
it is not in any way about giving power to the people--it is about giving the illusion of power to people across a politics that would result in isolation, fragmentation and impotence, and which would also create any number of diversionary strategies for redressing problems because the ideology operates on the basis of an whiolly irrational understanding of the state.
the nation--groups of people who understand themseves to be linked together within a general community and its history---outside the purivew of the state is an incoherent fantasy. the nation as such has no political power on its own. unless the signifier of nation can be used to mobilize folk politically to act upon the state--which has happened, and is happening in a kind of inverted and self-immolating way thanks to the contemporary right---but disconnected from the state, that is from the modes of democratic accountability theat have developed within the state and which the state in fact relies upon to adjust its activities--the nation has no effective power. because by insisting on a separation of nation from state, it separates itself from the instruments for the exercize of power, and sinks into a kind of self-congratulatory impotence....
the funny thing is that in fact the right as organization does not believe the ideology that structures much of the support for these organizations--the right is in fact and up of a range of interest groups that jockey for position amongst themselves and for influence on the state. organizationally, the right knows full well that political power is expressed under capitalism across the medium of law, and that control of the state apparatus is a fundamental political goal.
caveat: in this post i have been making a particular argument about the terms nation and state and have framed the whole thing without reference to the problems that globalizing capitalism raise for the state...but the post is already too long.