> Nations are required to organize for mutual well-being for purposes that
> families, voluntary associations, and local governments cannot fulfill.
> In other words, nations are become real thru the states they construct.
> Nations also provide a collective memory that serves certain purposes.
> Obviously these functions can be flawed in all sorts of ways, from the
> standpoint of the working class.
Below is Pierre Bourdieu's take on the nation-state in the era of multinational capitalism...
-- Dennis
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"I think that, even if it may appear very cynical, we need to turn its own weapons against the dominant economy, and point out that, in the logic of enlightened self-interest, a strictly economic policy is not necessarily economical - in terms of the insecurity of persons and property, the consequent policing costs, etc. More precisely, there is a need to radically question the economic view which individualizes everything - production as much as justice or health, costs as well as profits - and which forgets that efficiency, which it defines in narrow, abstract terms, tacitly identifying it with financial profitability, clearly depends on the outcomes by which it is measured, financial profitability for shareholders and investors, as at present, or satisfaction of customers and users, and, more generally, satisfaction and well-being of producers, consumers, and, ultimately, the largest possible number. Against this narrow, short-term economics, we need to put forward an economics of happiness, which would take note of all the profits, individual and collective, material and symbolic, associated with activity (such as security), and also all the material and symbolic costs associated with inactivity or precarious employment (for example, consumption of medicines: France holds the world record for use of tranquillizers). You cannot cheat with the law of the conservation of violence: all violence is paid for, and, for example, the structural violence exerted by the financial markets, in the form of layoffs, loss of security, etc., is matched sooner or later in the form of suicides, crime and delinquency, drug addiction, alcoholism, a whole host of minor and major everyday acts of violence.
At the present time, the critical efforts of intellectuals, trade unions or associations should be applied as a matter of priorituy against the withering away of the state. The national states are undermined from outside by these financial forces, and they are undermined from inside by those who act as the accomplices of these financial forces, in other words, the financiers, bankers and finance ministry officials. I think that the dominated groups in society have an interest in defending the state, particularly in its social aspect. This defense of the state is not inspired by nationalism. While one can fight against the national state, one has to defend the 'universal' functions it fulfills, which can be fulfilled as well, or better, by a supranational state." Pg 39-41, The 'Globalization' Myth and the Welfare State. Pierre Bourdieu, Acts of Resistance. Translated by Richard Nice. (c) 1998 The New Press and Polity Press, NY.