The Unfinished History of the Indebted Nation-State

Description

This book traces the genesis of the indebtedness of the nation-state in the West, arguing that it is a phenomenon which preceded the emergence of capitalism. Even prior to the emergence of the capitalist mode of production, the ruling class of feudal landowners in the West were dependent on credit, and had to repay the loans provided by their international creditors. Those monetary loans were unavoidable, both for the defence of the emergent territorial state against its rivals and for its expansion in the struggle against them. However autonomous the early Western nation-states may appear to have been, in reality they were all dependent on the transnational creditors of the time, while the latter in their turn depended on them for the extraction of surplus value from the geographically widening circle of their subject populations. In the modern world of international capitalism, the various nationalisms are still inseparable from the international framework of financial institutions which struggle to sustain the global regime for the perpetual extraction of surplus value. Preface Contents 1 The Pre-capitalist Double-Bind and Its Persistence The Emergence of the Contradictory Symbiosis of Market and State A Eurocentric History? 2 Nation-State Formation and Antisemitism: A History of Duplicity The History of a Contradictory Ideology Market Versus State: The Contradiction Concealed by Capitalist Ideology The Paradoxical Nature of Antisemitism 3 Purification and Paranoia: The Legacy of Early Modern Ethnic Cleansing Monetisation Versus Feudalism Conclusion 4 Imperial Legality Versus Its Adventuring Warlords Caudillismo and Charismatic Authority A Social Unconscious Revealed by Novelistic Discourse The Imperial Sublime The Return of the Social Repressed: A Moment of Truth 5 From the Retrospective Transition Debate to the Revolutionary Transitional Demand The Persistence of Rentier Capitalism The Imperialist Paradox: Nationalism Supports International Capitalism The Transitional Demand: From Reformism to Revolution Index