Transcending the nation: a communist strategy in the era of globalization. A reply to Velissariou

Abstract

Neoliberalism and austerity are not ‘false policies’, but strategies of increasing profits by reducing labor and welfare costs. In the process of dismantling labor rights and the welfare state, a part of the population is being marginalized. It becomes ‘superfluous’, and its living conditions approach those of the inflowing refugee masses. However, between indigenous and ‘foreign’ (refugee and immigrant) superfluous populations a clear demarcation line is being reproduced by state apparatuses and the ruling ideology: the demarcation line created by the nation, which excludes the non-nationals (refugees and immigrants) from the polity and certain state provisions. In fact, the nation may be regarded as a facet of the state itself: the ‘historically homogenized’ population of a given capitalist state. Marginalized Greek (or other European) ‘nationals’ tend to consider themselves ‘superior’ to (equally marginalized) foreigners. Fighting nationalism and, even more, transcending divisions reproduced by ideologies of particularism (often being reproduced in solidarity movements that focus on ‘the rights of the ethnic other’), is a precondition for shaping of a radical left internationalism, through the consolidation of what is universal in all subaltern classes and communities: the need of proletarian unity, first of all within the country, struggling against capitalism.