Editorial Note, Sep-Oct, 2013

A comprehensive essay by Sukumar Muralidharan on ‘The Nation and Its Citizens’ constitutes the lead article in the current number of Social Scientist. The article sets the stage for a discussion of what should be the nature of political praxis in the current era of globalization.

Finance Capital in the years before the Second World War was essentially ‘nation’-based, in the sense of being British or French or German or American Finance Capital. Its ideology consisted, in Rudolph Hilferding’s words, in a glorification of the ‘National Idea’, which served to justify wars between rival finance capitals over ‘economic territory’. Centralisation of capital in the subsequent period however has brought into being an ‘international finance capital’ whose interests demand a free flow of capital and commodities transcending national boundaries. This has given rise to a peculiar ‘bourgeois internationalism’ which provides the ideological basis for imperialist globalisation.