TRASHFUTURE - UNLOCKED Riley's Commie Book Club: Imagined Communities

Episode Date: July 4, 2019

Well - we did it. We hit $2500 a month of funding, so as promised a special 4th of July edition of Riley's Commie Book Club on graduate politics seminar standby - Benedict Anderson's Imagined Communities.  The “nation” is a concept much beloved of reactionaries and dismissed by Marxists as mere ideology. But it has serious psychological power nevertheless. Anderson’s book asks what is a “nation,” where did it come from, and how has the concept been used and misused over time? Riley then applies Anderson’s rubric to understanding the increasingly psychotic trajectory of the Conservative movement in the developed world. *LIVE SHOW ALERT* Come see Trashfuture live at the Edinburgh Fringe! We’ll perform on August 10th at 21.30. The venue is Venue 277, PQA Venues @Riddle's Court, Edinburgh EH1 2PG. Tickets are £11.50 and there are a ton of discounts available. Get them here: https://tickets.edfringe.com/whats-on/trashfuture-live-at-the-fringe If you want to buy one of our recent special-edition phone-cops shirt, shoot us an email at trashfuturepodcast[at]gmail[dot]com and we can post it to you. (£20 for non-patrons, £15 for patrons) Do you want a mug to hold your soup? Perhaps you want one with the Trashfuture logo, which is available here: https://teespring.com/what-if-phone-cops#pid=659&cid=102968&sid=front

Hello, Trash Future Patrons. Just wanted to give you a heads up. We've hit our goal of $2,500 a month, and so, from now on, Riley plans to record an extra Kami Book Club that will release unlocked on Patreon. We won't drop it on the feed, but you'll be able to access it for free here. Thank you so much again for your support. We absolutely could not do it without you. Hey, so today we're starting this week's Kami Book Club.

This week's, this month's Kami Book Club a little bit differently, with two announcements. Number one, in Riley's recommendation corner this month, is the EP Only the Appraiser by Asma, that's double A, S, T, H, M, A. It is the collaboration of two Swedish techno DJs who are at the top of their form, who've recently played Burghain, who I am just really, really, really into recently, so do listen to that. Secondly, the second track on the EP, it's called Only the Appraiser, it's very good. Secondly, thank you everybody for getting the TF Patreon above $2,500 a month. As a result of that, as promised, next month's Kami Book Club will be a free to everyone

episode, so it will still be released on the Patreon feed, but it will not be behind the paywall. So, essentially, if you want Kami Book Club in the future, it is on the Trash Future Patreon, but not behind the paywall, so free Kami Book Club, free episode every month, what's not to love. So with all of the admin out of the way, with me thanking you all very much for believing in our dumb little project here, I'm going to get to it because I'm talking today about a book that is relatively unconventional.

I'd say, and if you wanted to relate this to another Kami Book Club, I'd say this is most like when I talked about international relations, because I'm going to be talking about a book that, if you've ever been in a graduate politics seminar, is going to be like eye-rollingly common to you, like you're like, imagine Communities, it's a very basic book, because it is. If you're in that discipline, if you've studied politics or international relations, the book I'm talking about, Imagine Communities by Benedict Anderson, is a relatively basic one. However, I think that its core subject is one that really should be understood outside

of politics graduate seminars, even though it's not necessarily Marxist, and it's a leftist progressive book that's concerned with the politics of emancipation, but it's not necessarily historically materialist, even though it's published by Verso, I think it has some good ideas. And so what I'm going to do is I'm going to talk a little bit about the author, what the book itself is arguing, how it fits with historical materialism, because I don't think they're necessarily over-determined. I think they can sit together, if not that comfortably.

And then I'm going to do something where, I can kind of like with the Thomas Carruthers book club, I'm going to kind of veer away from the book and talk a little bit about some more implications, my own thinking on the theories posed therein. So if we're already, let's talk about Imagine Communities by Benedict Anderson, a study of nations and nationalism. That's not the actual subtitle, what is the actual subtitle, hang on, I have it in front of me, I'm just going to have to find it, Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism.

Now, before we get into it, I also want to say, this is again one of these things where we're going to take our bits of the book that I'm interested in, and we're going to leave lots of other very interesting stuff to the side, because there are, I want to talk about the more core theory. There are lots of interesting things in this book about the origins of nationalism as a kind of civic religion, in the way that nationalism spreads in post-colonial areas, and so on and so on, it's very good. And also it's a book that's received its fair share of criticism, especially from authors

not in the global north, and you really should check them out, I'll link a couple of articles that are more critical of this book in the description, but let's crack on anyway. So, Benedict Anderson was born to Anglo-Irish parents in, I believe, China, or somewhere in Asia in 1936, and then after a brief stay in America when they fled the Japanese occupation of China, moved to the UK, where he took in short succession places at both Eaton and Cambridge, and at Cambridge he became a Marxist and anti-imperialist. What he begins to depart from the standard issue of public intellectual template is when he did his doctoral work in Cornell, where he earned a PhD in Indonesian studies, working

under an academic called George Kahn, who wrote anti-interventionist books about Vietnam, including some quite seminal studies about American involvement in Vietnam, who was a specialist in the area. And in fact, he was a suspected Bolshevik who was targeted by Joe McCarthy of McCarthyism fame, and we are all very proud to know that Anderson declined to flip on his doctoral instructor. So, really what we have with Anderson is someone whose areas of interest have actually always been in the study of Southeast Asia, Southeast Asian politics and culture. He was fluent in Tagalog and Thai and several other languages of the region.

He sort of considered Indonesia to be his real home and was very, very, very sort of sympathetic to and worked with sort of emancipatory movements there, post-colonial movements there, sort of resisting Dutch possession and so on and so on. And there's a very good sort of short Jacobin article written by Sandito Descupta about Anderson on the occasion of Anderson's death in 2015, which I'll quote here and may actually return to you throughout the hour. The article notes that while Anderson is most famous for his work on nationalism, which he is, his passion was really for Indonesia.

And so here's the quote here. The country in Indonesia was the subject of Anderson's PhD work and his first major publication co-authored with his colleagues at Cornell University chronicled the massacre of 600,000 Indonesians as part of the 1965-66 repression of the communist left leading up to Lieutenant General Suharto's coup. The work earned him a ban from Indonesia that lasted until 1998 when the reign of the quote mediocre tyrant as Anderson memorably called Suharto finally came to an end. But it was actually the fascination with Southeast Asia that led Anderson to undertake

a seminal study on nationalism. And in fact, this goes back to, I believe the same Jacobin article, I could be wrong. This deep involvement in the political developments of Southeast Asia led him to the work for which he would be most remembered. Though his engagement with the political life of the newly decolonized Third World, he witnessed the discursive centrality of nationalism, including in progressive political projects like anti-imperialism and socialism. And communities began with a reference to the war between Vietnam and China, two revolutionary

socialist countries that were fighting on nationalistic grounds. And Anderson felt that Marxism, the political and intellectual tradition with which he most identified, failed to offer an adequate analysis of, or even take very seriously, the phenomenon of nationalism. Now, any good Marxist, I think, would say, well, of course, you ought not take nationalism seriously because nationalism is just an ideological outgrowth of the relations of production that happened to attain at a certain time. And to an extent, they would be right.

It is true that there is a historical materialist reason why nationalism comes into being. However, we're not interested in, or at least I'm not interested in, and so on, and nationalism as, oh well, it's just an outgrowth of capitalism because capitalism is fucking everywhere. And the things that are its outgrowth should still be of interest to us, even if we acknowledge that they are outgrows. People are profoundly motivated by national commitments, and these are things that we ought to take seriously as a left if we are going to be actually interested in bringing about a kind of change through a mass movement.

A lot of people's first identification is not with their class, which they have to be awakened to, but with their nation, which they're taught to be part of from the age of nothing. So treating the nation as though it's unimportant is silly. Treating the nation as an obstacle to be overcome is, I think, a more standard left, we might say, preoccupation. And I think what Anderson is going to be talking about, rather than treating the nation as a force to be overcome, treating capital and nationalism, the ideology of nationalism as a problem, but the concept of a nation in general to be something morally neutral, which we

can harness or which can be harnessed against us. So what did imagine communities say? So this is from imagine communities now. My point of departure, writes Anderson, is that nationality, or as one might prefer to put it in view of that word's multiple significations, nation-ness as well as nationalism, are cultural artifacts of a particular kind. To understand them properly, we need to consider carefully how they have come into historical being, in what ways their meanings have changed over time, and why today they command such

profound emotional legitimacy. I will be trying to argue that the creation of these artifacts towards the end of the 18th century was the spontaneous distillation of a complex crossing of discrete historical processes, but that once created, they became modular, capable of being transplanted with varying degrees of self-consciousness to a great variety of social terrains, to merge and be merged with a correspondingly wide variety of political and ideological constellations. I will also attempt to show why these particular cultural artifacts have aroused such deep attachments.

So to interpret this passage, what we're really talking about is the concept of a nation divorced from a specific political ideology. So we're going to try and define that and, let's say, use it in a theoretical grammar. We're also looking at what social purpose nationhood serves. And again, the thing to remember about things that serve social purposes is that they're not always maligned, even if those social purposes are the results of ideology. So what Anderson will argue later on is, and we'll get to that, is that the nation came to supplant religious communities in the 18th century as there was a decline of religion

and a growth of secular society. There is a need for the profound and the sacred that many people have. The whole idea of something bigger than themselves, they need to have, things that bind them into communities, because a society of individual, self-regarding, utility-maximizing, homo-economicuses is not going to be one that works very well. People need to have other larger stories that will make them act in a pro-social way, even if it is to their momentary detriment. The obvious one is people willingly dying in war.

Why do you die for your nation? Your nation is, you're dead. Why do you care whether your nation is living or dead or subjugated or whatever? You're dead. You can't really be affected by it, and it is, and it serves that function of answering the question of why to sacrifice yourself for a group of people you'll probably never meet and who cannot appreciate your sacrifice because, like I just said, you've died. Anyway, we're getting ahead of ourselves.

What is a nation in the vernacular sense? Again, and they're going to be the political science, veterans of political science and IR, graduate seminars, who are shouting at their phones like, fuck you, Riley, I'm very bored. You're taking me back to school, and I'm like, yeah, it's called Riley's Comey Book Club. You listen to it voluntarily, shut the fuck up. A nation and a day-to-day understanding, this is a vernacular understanding, not Anderson's, is a cultural entity that encompasses a people.

It has no independent political force, like a nation can't make laws, but instead is a kind of ephemeral thing, a shared identity, a set of common languages and stories, and a feeling of kinship. While it tends to be contiguous with states, there are many multinational states. There are some states that have no nations attached to them indeed, and there are many nations that also have no states. Again, the relationship between the nation and the state is something that Anderson talks about a great deal, but again, we'll get to that.

Think of a nation like this. What is a nation not? A nation is not the ideology of nationalism, which is a particular belief that a state's policies should promote the interests at home and abroad of a nation, so a cultural stroke ethnic group concomitant with it. Again, not all nations are mono-ethnic. Again, it's very complicated. These things are all overlapping in various ways.

So if I was to think of a nation that is not mono-ethnic, you could say Mexico. Mexico is a nation, yet its ethnicity is mestizo, which is a wide variety of European, African and Mesoamerican, African to a much lesser extent, mainly European and Mesoamerican with some African ethnicities sort of mixed together to varying degrees. Mestizo is compared to other ethnicities, you could say like barely an ethnicity, and yet it is the main group of Mexico. So again, I'm sure there are some mestizos who are like, fuck you Riley, mestizo is an ethnicity, compared to, let's say, other ethnicities that have deeper imaginations in

history, they would consider mestizo to be less of an ethnicity. So this only goes to show that these things are not cut and dry. The idea of a nation of an ethnicity is very, are not identical and have varying degrees of overlap depending on the extent to which it is culturally important to that nation that it is identical with an ethnicity. So like Japan, for example, places an enormous importance on ethnicity, whereas many of these other countries do not. And again, these are cultural commitments.

These are not, these are cultural commitments that could be enshrined in law. They are cultural commitments that may be commitments to some kind of forms of shared genetic lineage, but ultimately at base, they are cultural commitments. So, and the, and nationalism sort of circling back to what we were saying is the idea that those cultural commitments, whether they are to do with an ethnicity or whether they are to do with a multi-ethnic state or whatever, a multi-ethnic nation rather ought to be enshrined in the laws of a state. So the worst example, of course, of nationalism becoming an ideology and being translated into

the laws of a state was Nazi Germany, where the idea that the Aryan nation, so there are a particular subset of legal Germans, were the real Germans, and that Germany ought to legislate specifically in a way that benefited real, quote unquote, real Germans who were of one particular, one particular national group at the expense of others who were considered while Germans excluded from the nation. States also are not identical with nations, as I've mentioned before. Canada is an example of a state that is not identical with a nation. There are French, English, and First Nations, and those are all officially recognized, but

it can be even more complicated than that. The UK has a more contested patchwork. England, Scotland, Ireland, Wales, up Northern Ireland, of course, but within Northern Ireland, there are Irish nationalists and then people identify more with Britain. However, just because Northern Ireland is one of the home nations doesn't mean that that is then one of the nations. That is one of the official nations, but then there are many unofficial nations in the South of England.

There are Cornish nationalists who consider themselves a nation, but who are not as officially recognized by the UK state as, say, Scotland, Wales, or Northern Ireland. So there may even be a sort of loose UK nation developed over time that overhangs the other constituent parts, which different people might have different levels of comfort with. These things, and that's to illustrate that these things aren't static. So going back to the Mexico example, the ethnicity of mestizo may have been much, much more varied in the past. Perhaps it is becoming less varied now.

So there is, there might not have always been an ethnic group. There is an ethnic group developing in the UK. We were less bound together as a foreign, a quadranational state than we were, perhaps more than at certain times as well. These things depend on the ebbs and flows of feeling. So what is a nation and imagine communities then? So we understand what a nation is vernacularly and we understand what it is not. So for Benedict Anderson, a nation is defined very simply.

A nation is an imagined political community and imagined as both inherently limited and sovereign. So let's, let's go through all four key elements of this definition piece by piece. So firstly, imagined community, limited sovereign, or rather imagined political community, limited sovereign. So what do we mean by community? It is imagined as a community in particular, writes Anderson, because regardless of the actual inequality and exploitation that may prevail on each, the nation is always conceived

as a deep horizontal comradeship. Ultimately, it is this fraternal fraternity that makes it possible over the past two centuries for so many millions of people, not so much to kill as willingly die for such limited imaginings. That is to say, it is a community that the individual hyper identifies with. Um, and again, we were going to learn some stories as to why and how as we go, as we progress, but the nation is the object of hyper identification of the individual. But what do we mean by imagined?

So it is imagined, this again, Anderson, because the members of even the smallest nation will never know most of their fellow members, meet them or even hear of them individually. Yet in the minds of each live the, it lives the image of their communion. Uh, it's also, it's important to note here that by imagined, we don't mean false. These are ideological realities. These are things that structure the way people live their lives. Think of imagined here, not as meaning a trick or a flimflam, but rather as an act of conceptual creation on the part of many people at once.

Um, so combining these two together, then we have a theoretical group of people who you imagine, but who you know, to be real, you just don't know them individually with whom you hyper identify on the basis of something. Um, and all communities larger, and this is Anderson again, the primordial villages of face to face contact are imagined. Communities are to be distinguished, not by their falsity or genuineness, but by the style in which they're imagined. Javanese villagers, for example, have always known that they are connected to

people they've never seen, but these ties were once imagined particularistically as indefinitely stretchable nets of kinship and client ship. They didn't actually have a word for society until the last couple hundred years. So this is also not a universal or rather not an eternally universal way of understanding an imagined community. So job, the, the example he cites of Javanese villagers, it's not that I have an, I have an imagined community with someone I've never met. However, it's on the basis of a number of relationships I know to exist.

So it's like a straight line. However, in a sort of post national age or sorry, national age, my community with them is based on a sense of shared identity rather than a sense of shared obligation. And it is imagined as a community. This is Anderson again, because regardless of the actual inequality, again, I'm going back to this quote, because I think it's very important. The nation is always conceived as a deep horizontal comradeship. So in effect, what we're looking at is the, and you, again, historical materialists

were saying, well, of course, the, the ideology is that we are all horizontal comrades. When in fact, you know, there are some of us who, when we have policy, quote, unquote policies that benefit the nation are the ones who are the beneficiaries of it because we're looking at GDP growth. For example, we're benefiting the British people by bringing GDP growth and GDP growth just benefits like the five richest people at all. But because we all hyper identify with one another, um, we don't tend to look at that as a problem.

Again, I told you, it sits uncomfortably with historical materialism, but whatever. Um, it doesn't mean it's not an important and effectual thing. People feel deep horizontal comradeship. It's why I said it twice now, three times. And, and the final two, what do we mean by limited and what do we mean by sovereignty? Remember, the definition is an imagined political community and imagined as both inherently limited and sovereign by limited. We mean the nation is imagined as limited because even the largest of them,

encompassing perhaps a billion human beings has finite, if elastic boundaries beyond which lie other nations. No nation imagined itself coterminous with mankind. And I think this actually is something we can go back to Chantel move. And for a left populism, we talk about the problem of agonism. A nation, even though it is a cultural entity, is sees itself as a cultural entity with a project or destiny, which means it is an entity that is nearly entirely cultural or entirely political, but sitting at the intersection of the two.

And as move says, acting politically, quote unquote, means acting with fellows against a foe to achieve a goal. So it is very difficult to make the nation coterminous with all mankind. If you watch the young Karl Marx, this is illustrated very well towards the end. When Marx, Engels and their fellow communists basically do entryism on this society called the League of the Just, which are, you know, a bunch of anarchists whose main slogan is all men are brothers, and they protest capitalism and factory exploitation by saying all men are brothers.

And Marx and Engels and their friends basically take it over and remake it on the basis that the workers in the bourgeoisie are not brothers, but enemies and that workers of all countries must unite against the bourgeoisie. This is another idea we will return to later. So I think this is why nations are in general so profoundly powerful because they tell an us in them story. So what do we mean finally by sovereignty? It is imagined as sovereign because the concept was born in an age in which

enlightenment and revolution were destroying the legitimacy of the divinely ordained hierarchical dynastic realm. So, you know, the divine right of kings in which, you know, the Netherlands can pass to Austria, Hungary on the basis of a marriage has basically gone. And rather, we have come to maturity at a stage of human history when even the most devout adherents of any universal religion were inescapably confronted with the living pluralism of many such religions and the alimorphism between each faith's faith's ontological claims and territorial stretch.

Nations dream of being free and, if under God, directly so. The gauge and emblem of this freedom is the sovereign state. Now, this one, I agree with 75 percent. I think the interests of an imagined community can be said to be sovereign, not just in a geographical sense, but in a behavioral sense. What elements of our lives do the interests of the nation that are acted on not just through state power, but through social bonds have control? So I think one good example is the film Bend It Like Beckham.

In the film Bend It Like Beckham, we are introduced to an Indian family. The daughter of whom wants to play football and the parents say it is unseemly for a girl to play football. Now, what we have is with no state intervention, we essentially have a confrontation between two sets of cultural norms and two sort of claims of sovereignty where we have, and again, it was portrayed in such a way that the parents have a set of more traditional, more Indian cultural norms where it's unseemly for a girl to play football and then their daughter,

having been raised in the UK, has an entirely different set of cultural norms and is essentially making a claim of sovereignty over herself. Whereas the parents are saying, well, no, the claim is that our imagined community is comprised of family units, whereas the daughter is saying, no, my imagined community is comprised of individual units. And then the sort of plot of the film is the working out of this particular conflict over who is sovereign over what. And I think it is strongly implied in the film that the conflict ultimately

is one of nationhood. So one believes they are part of a, let's say diasporic Indian nation, one believes that they are not part of diasporic Indian nation, et cetera, et cetera. I'm not necessarily here to be pointed, point this out clearly, agreeing with that, with what the film is saying, only that the plot of the film, as is told, tells is a convenient anecdote for talking about the ways in which sovereign power of nations can be channeled socially as well as through the state.

But let's go back to Benedict Anderson, or rather go back to the notes I've written. So we can also say, does the sovereignty claim by a white nationalist over women's bodies begin and end with the state? Because they believe it is essential that women give birth as much as possible, that basically white women not be allowed to get abortions. They say all women, but the white nationalist is concerned with white birth rates because they have an imagined community that is defined by ethnicity that is attempting to use the channels of the state to advance

a nationalist agenda. So one of the main white nationalist sort of achievements in the last little while is the massive over-turnings of rights to bodily autonomy of women in many sort of southern and midwestern states. Unfortunately, I think more to come because they have seized control of the state. In this sense, the state is the gauge and emblem of their freedom to advance their agenda. Now, they have seized control of subunits of the state, which in the US are called

states, all very confusing. And so nations and states, I think what this should show us is that they relate uneasily. The state tends to be the goal of the nation, whether it's the establishment of the state, the takeover of a state, their defense in position of the state because the state has the power to what has the, again, very old hat to anyone from a politics or IR graduate seminar, but bear with me, the state commands the monopoly, the exclusive monopoly on the use of force in a given area.

And if you're going to advance a group of people's interests, it is, let's just say very beneficial to have the moral and physical authority of the state more or less on your side. So the other thing is the nation has traditionally, at least as it was born, been the cultural outgrowth of a state bureaucratic apparatus. So it is the assignment of cultural significance to, for example, the fact that because I was, I was born in, in Canada, that I was then given a Canadian passport that then has a lot of connotations of bureaucracy.

So I am in a tax system. I'm in an education system. I'm also in an education system with tons of other Canadians or other people born in that area who are in the same bureaucracy, who are then told the same stories about what being involved in that bureaucracy means. And we are, we are then have Canadians stamped on us as part of our identity and then have hyper identification or identification with other Canadians on some level.

However, it is ultimately a set of bureaucratic processes which have been given a kind of mystical story. How the fuck does that happen? How do we get from I'm part of a census to I'll fucking die for you without like a lot of ecstasy. This is where print capitalism comes in. And it's the only bit of materialism really addressed seriously in the book. So quoting from from Anderson here, we can summarize the conclusions to be

drawn from the argument thus far. So I'm looking at the conclusion of the section hint for anyone wanting to do a commie book club beginnings and ends of sections are where you get your poll quotes by saying that the convergence of capitalism and print technology on the fatal diversity of human language created the possibility of a new form of imagined community, which in its basic formal morphology set the stage for the modern nation. So a brief aside, French was not really a national language until relatively

recently in say 1500, for example, France would have been like a patchwork of tons of different languages. French as we know it, but also Basque, but also forms of the Spanish, but also forms of German and Breton and all these other languages. And they didn't really hyper identify with one another. They just sort of all owed allegiance to a given King. So instead of horizontal cross identification, there was vertical shared obligations.

And so why was it important that they all speak the same language? There are bilingual governors who can sort of make sure that the King's will is carried out. It's not that important that, you know, a bunch of, a bunch of Basques and a bunch of Bretons basically feel like they have some kind of very intense community until we get to modernity. And a big part of that, what makes that possible is a shared language. So moving on, the potential stretch of these communities was inherently

limited and at the same time, born none of the most fortuitous relationship to none, but the most fortuitous relationship to existing political boundaries, which were on the whole, the high watermarks of dynamic expansionisms. It is then, of course, important to note, as I don't think Anderson does. I can't remember. This is a Google doc in Europe, because the idea of nationalism as it exists now is not universal. Um, it is essentially one that comes from conditions in Europe.

Different countries did things differently. Um, because I mean, it was in Europe, we had capitalism in Europe. We also had a small patchwork of dynastic kingdoms with similar enough languages that we could, um, essentially unify them, uh, over time. Uh, and, and, and so on and so forth. But nonetheless, this allows us to tell common stories and Anderson uses this quite affecting example of from an Indonesian writer, um, because, as we'll get into later, uh, emancipatory or third world or anti-colonial nationalism, uh,

arises from a kind of creole of, um, you might say colonizer forms. So as the colonizer brings the forms of their bureaucracies into the areas they colonize, just as those bureaucracies generate cultural outgrowths in the, in Europe. So too, do they generate, um, cultural outgrowths in the colonized world. It's just the colonized world takes them, turns them and does their own thing with them, which is much more emancipatory and less genocidal than European nationalisms.

So here's the opening of Samarang Hitam, uh, the tale, a tale by the ill-fated young Indonesian communist nationalist, Mass Marko, uh, Karto DeCromo published serially in 1924. So this is now from the book, which Anderson is himself quoting. A young man was seated on a long ratten lounge reading a newspaper. He was totally engrossed. His occasional anger and other times smiles were a sure sign of his deep interest in the story.

He turned the pages of the newspaper thinking that perhaps he could find something that would stop him feeling so miserable. All of a sudden he came upon an article entitled prosperity. A destitute vagrant became ill and died on the side of the road from exposure. The young man was moved by this brief report. He could just imagine the suffering of the poor soul as he lay dying on the side of the road. One moment he felt an explosive anger well up inside.

Another moment he felt pity. Yet another moment his anger was directed at the social system, which gave rise to such poverty while making such a small group of people wealthy. So Anderson explains, our young man, not least in his novelty, means a young man who belongs to the collective body of readers of Indonesian and thus implicitly an embryonic Indonesian imagined community. The imagined community is confirmed by the doubleness of our reading about our young man reading.

He does not find the corpse of the destitute vagrant by the side of a sticky Samarang road, but he imagines it from the print in a newspaper. Nor does he care the slightest who the dead vagrant individually was. He thinks of the representative body, not the personal life. And we tell stories about ourselves in newspapers, novels, TV, reporting, and so on all the time. And those stories, what they actually do is fill gaps of meaning and purpose left by left blank in effect, but the absence of religion.

And this is, sorry, I'm not saying this, Benedict Anderson is saying this. It is the need to do something, to, in some ways, to defeat mortality and other ways to become larger than yourself or in other ways to, you know, simply not live as a homo economicist to be part of a thing, to be part of a whole is something that we seem to know this is reactionary or not to say we desire inherently, but it is something that seems to be affecting for many of us most of the time. So what is the relationship between religion and nation that Anderson posits?

No more arresting emblems of the modern culture of nationalism exist than cenotaphs and tombs of unknown soldiers. The public ceremonial rel, reverence accorded these monuments precisely because they are either deliberately empty or no one knows who lies inside them has no true precedence in earlier times. Yet void as these tombs are of identifiable moral, mortal remains or immortal souls, they're nonetheless saturated with ghostly national imaginings. So man, that's quite a passage.

Um, number one, it's very crucial that none of the individuals, whether it's the destitute beggar by the road or the unknown soldier are identified because the idea is they could be anyone. You imagine the sacrifices that are made by you or people close to you and then you hyper identify with people who have in fact made those sacrifices or even could only in theory be called upon to make those sacrifices because it, it feels as though they have overpaid into their part of a hole. They generate a surfeit of gratitude on the part of the people looking.

So carrying on the cultural significance of such monuments becomes even clearer if one tries to imagine, say a tomb of the unknown Marxist or a cenotaph for fallen liberals, if the nationalist imagining is so concerned, this suggests a strong affinity with religious imaginings. So these are not things we came to agree upon. I, I, I, at some point, I was not a Marxist. At some other point, I had become a Marxist. Um, I was born a Canadian and, you know, short of renouncing my citizenship,

I will die one, even if I die, you know, I will die with not simply a Canadian, but still, um, that is, that is just a, a, a reality of, of bureaucracies of how different global bureaucracies see me. Um, you know, they see me as at least in part Canadian. Um, and that's something that even if I renounce my citizenship, I can get it back because they say, well, you can renounce your citizenship, but you are still Canadian. Um, and this is not something you can just give up being, um, much as much

like you could give up being a Marxist and it is the idea that it is eternal and universal, even though the nation is historically bound. Like in 1500, if you'd said the nation of England, people would have looked at you like you were crazy, they probably also would have killed you because you were a giant compared to them. They had very low protein diets. They were like five feet tall. Um, but nonetheless, uh, they didn't have this kind of idea.

Um, and what Anderson says is that he proposes that nationalism has to be understood by aligning it, not with a self-consciously held political ideologies, but these large cultural systems that precede them out of which, as well as into which they came into being. So I say in effect, we can more profitably compare modern nationalism with medieval ideas, medieval and early modern ideas of like Christendom than we can with like the patchwork of kingdoms that eventually made up England. You know, people who were part of Christendom would more identify with one

another than they would identify with like a Saracen who lived near them. So this is from an article published on Verso by Gopal Balakrishnan. But how do such cultural formations come to be as imagined as nations in Anderson's sense? That is to say, how do they appropriate the experience of the sacred attributed to world religions and give it civic and territorial shape? A recurring theme in the book is Marxism's failure to address the sacred understood as a longing for immortality through membership and imperishable

collectivity. As in Durkheim, Anderson conceives the sacred as an anthropological constant of social life. The novelty of modernity lies in the fact that the national form it assumes is essentially secular. So destiny, compassion and ideas of sacredness have essentially been with us in various forms, more or less forever, and they're not going anywhere. Whether they're generated by false consciousness or not. So the way that we might act out the drive to the sacred is different from the

way we might have done it sort of 600 years ago. The way we're doing it is shaped by the relations of production we have now. It's shaped by modern state bureaucracies. It's shaped by ideas of employment, labor and so on. But that does not mean that it is meaningless or even that ideas of the sacred in general are bound up in the relations of production. I half agree with what I've said here, but I think it bears more thinking about. So I think that gives us a nice sort of segue to talk about the next section

here, which is how does imagine communities relate to historical materialism? Because imagine communities is not a work of historical materialism. I mean, think about it. It ultimately is exploring the independent causal effects of ideological beliefs. That's literally the opposite of historical materialism. The only nod gives to any kind of materialism is the idea that print capitalism, where I should probably explain a little bit more, drives nationhood, that is to say, the need of publishers and printers of like

newspapers and pamphlets or whatever to distribute their products as widely as possible means that they are trying to tell common stories and common languages just to sell more. There's the materialism. There is no more materialism in this book. But not everything needs to be completely historical materialist. I like to think of it this way. The broad strokes of history can be explained by shifts in the relations

of production and the conditions for everything else is created thereby. However, when it comes to motivating particular people to do particular things at particular times in particular ways, non-directly material factors can be important too, even if we recognize that material factors have shaped the conditions in which all of these come to be and shaped the incentives that govern sort of most action. So we can say that nationalism is a form of belief in the sacred that arose from material conditions.

However, it also has some subordinate, but nonetheless semi-independent causal power vis-à-vis how people act under given sets of relations of production, not only can it make people say act against their own economic interest, it can also be used as a way to get to organize a large movement of people to say engage in some an emancipatory action. So regardless of where you place it in the causal chain of historical materialism, nationalism is objectively and has objectively been a powerful force that is felt by a lot of people.

Whether or not it is true or false consciousness or ideology, it deserves a careful attention and any grand political project requires coordination of masses of people. Both socialism and its democratic and Leninist variants and fascism require the organization of the masses. Both socialism and fascism represent dramatic breaks with the now, one to build a better world, which is the one we all identify with, I hope, and one to return to a purer imaginary past, which is ought to be fought at every turn,

obviously. So a community of comradeship with people, many of whom you never meet and have never met and will never meet, is absolutely necessary in both cases. The question is one of whether, not one of whether compassion, but wither compassion and my compassion. And I know I'm stealing a concept from Millen Candera here, but whatever. I'm your edgy university boyfriend for a second. Calm and with and passion feeling have two meanings when put together.

It means with feeling, as in comradeship, as in empathy, as in feeling for another, and with feeling, as in with gusto. And near religious devotion to a community of like-minded people is an incredibly powerful tool when you are trying to have a break with what is known, when you're trying to build something new, when you are doing an essentially modernist project, it's completely necessary and has been used for both good or ill, that is to say it's been used for sort of modernist projects, adventures into the new, that requires sort of trust to take a leap

of faith, and also for romantic projects, returns to the old, a willful, a group willingness to engage in, you know, the atrocious. So there are two main ideologies of nationhood explored in the book. So the one Anderson's most interested in is emancipatory or an anti-colonial nationhood. So Anderson evokes the spirit of anti-colonial nationalism with this absolutely heart-rending passage from the Constitution of Makario Sake's short-lived Republic of Katugalugan, 1902, which said, among other things,

no Tagalog born in this Tagalog archipelago shall exalt any person above the rest because of his race or the color of his skin, fair, dark, rich, poor, educated and ignorant, all are completely equal and should be in one bob, which means inward spirit. There may be differences in education, wealth or appearance, but never in essential nature, an ability to serve a cause. Emancipatory nationalism, in other words, is possible. It must just be connected to some struggle, destiny or deep sense of

shared comradeship. And this is where we talk about it as a kind of creole, a reinterpretation of European norms of nationhood across the world as a kind of binding agent for an emancipatory struggle. And so we were going to reflect on the power of that passage as a creator of mass solidarity. And then just let's pull forward in time a little bit. Just think of trying to do the same thing by citing, say, how much benefit

immigration brings to the economy and the fact that immigrants commit a relatively low rate of crime. How can anything short of that passage undermine a deep, nativist solidarity that regrettably exists in the US and UK? Like anything short of the feeling of a shared destiny based on a radically fairer world is essentially bringing a calculator to a gunfight. Not only is it weak, it doesn't even sort of, it's not even the same contest. Like if someone just has decided that, I'll get to this later, but if someone

has made the decision that their story is one of white people reclaiming the world for their own grandeur, how the fuck are you going to convince them to abandon a story of deep solidarity with other white people for a shared sense of racial destiny with statistics? It's insultingly stupid. It requires a story of, say, multiculturalism, not just as, oh, I like the curry shops, but as a deep sense of solidarity with your fellow man. And it has been done before.

It's just that it seems like liberal politicians are unwilling to do it. I don't know, because of think tanks or whatever. Anyway, but that brings us on to official nationhood. Official nationalism is what we might more readily recognize as capital and nationalism. Specifically, Anderson describes it as, quote, an anticipatory strategy adopted by dominant groups, which are threatened with marginalization by growing popular mobilization and class consciousness.

The official nationalism consolidates the Algarquist domestic position and at times takes on an aggressive and peerless character. And that tends to be bound up with control of a state and expanding control of the state elsewhere. Because if you think of yourself of the state and turning the power of the state to fulfill the destiny of a cultural group, that destiny of the cultural group can very easily be, say, I don't know, Leibnzraum. Germans are better than Czechs.

We must protect all Germans. We need a big part of Czech, of the Czech Republic or Czechoslovakia or whatever it was at the time. So sorry, the Sudetenland is ours now. Like this is how we like, like Benedict Anderson was a huge, huge devotee of Walter Benjamin. So it's not difficult to see the overlaps between the Frankfurt school, which was concerned with how revolution, socialist revolutions failed, where they should have

succeeded in Germany. So the main question that got the Frankfurt school going was how come Germany didn't have a socialist revolution, but Russia did? And they looked to cultural factors as the answer. And so you can very easily see official nationhood, the telling of a dangerous daring story, the esthetization of politics, the idea that there is a national destiny beyond just our borders, but that Germans, that the Germans ought to turn the power of the German state to, to advance not just their interests at home,

but abroad, you could see how that takes on an aggressive character. But the idea of oppression is important here as well. So think of the disdain that people like Andrew Doyle or Toby Young, the dumbest, baldest, whitest outriders of official nationalism in the UK, have for the idea that others might realistically be oppressed. This is because they hyper identify with a group that has to event its own oppression at the hands of people who allegedly weaponize their own powerlessness to demand people stop oppressing them.

And it's because if you have no one left to fight, but you're desperate for a story to tell about yourself, you need a villain. So this is what I often say that like the, the baby boomers were such a psychotically rebellious generation that they turned their own children who are just people who statistically have more of an interest in say, I don't know, the basic rights of one another, not all of them, but statistically, um, then the, their hyper individualist parents. And so their hyper individualist parents have construed their own children,

the millennials and Gen Z, as the new oppressors against whom they have to rebel. That's why Andrew Doyle made comedy unleashed because he, in his fantasy world, his destiny is being occluded by a bunch of millennials who don't want him to tell his, I identify as an attack helicopter joke for the 75th, 75,000th time. You know, it's, they, is that if there is no one standing in the way of your destiny, whether you're an expansionist state or just a whiny old bald fat white man, you need to invent the people who are standing in the way of it so that you always are fighting a defensive war of aggression in every direction because

otherwise you have to wrestle with the fact that your religion was wrong and people are very, very bad at that, but it makes empathy very, very hard. And in this sense, official nationalism is the kind of swindle that Marxists often talk about when we talk about nationalism, where it's the game of three card Monty, where the working class hyper identifies with the ruling class rather than the working class of other countries and is willing to hyper exploit themselves essentially in order to advance the interests of the nation, even though most of the benefits of, quote, advance in the interests of the

nation go to IG Farben or Dyson or whoever. So I now want to, with the last sort of 10, 15 minutes of this, is apply the concept of nationhood to the conservative movements of the UK and US. So let's go back to Anderson's definition. What's the community we're talking about? It's generally white, generally suburban and or semi-rural and generally wealthier. They're feeling threatened, but they don't know why. And their imaginations, they are hated and sneered at and MS 13 and grooming

gangs are coming to get them and their families. It is, this is the community and I've sort of gone over, I've hinted a little bit at what has bound them together, which is a feeling of shared threat. And if we go back to print capitalism, we talk about how the nation, the imagined community, the nation is created by the telling of common stories at a kind of base level that publishers know will sell. And I think it really is very difficult to overstate the importance of the Murdoch press and media machine in deciding to tell common stories about how if you are

an older white person with say two houses in a jet ski at any moment, ISIS and Black Lives Matter are going to come and socialistically kill you because that's the story that they've been telling for years. They have been terrifying a, they have been terrifying white nationalism into more overt existence. Now, white nationalism was not the invention of the Murdoch press. I mean, the America, Australia, Canada, the UK, et cetera, most European countries, like none of them have really dealt with their original sin that they were all

sort of built on slave labor and that stays with us today. But I think what the modern conservative movement has brought anxieties about that original sin to a kind of fever pitch. And so I think it's appropriate to talk about it, not as qualitatively, but quantitatively different. It is a more intense, overt, variant of the same thing that also is occurring at a time of national rupture. So when I say, again, when I say national, I mean in the sense of an imagined

community, that community is essentially gone. We have sort of two communities, two major communities and many more, of course, where we used to sort of not have to, we had the beginnings of two, but after 2016, there was the moment where we had to. So I'll go into why that is in a moment. So let's talk about the community. What are the limitations in this community? Limitations are not absolute, but they require acceptance of certain stories.

A white supremacist movement has largely abandoned the, not completely, but largely abandoned the language of overt white supremacy and instead talks about how immigrants push down wages or depending on whether in the US, UK, Asians or black Americans have cultures of poverty and then they are willing to find representatives from these groups to come and say, yes, I agree with the white supremacist talking points. I agree with these policies that when they're enacted, like quote, unquote, tough on crime, broken window policing, et cetera, actually do, by the

numbers, do more harm to these communities than good. Um, and though the people who then buy those stories are welcomed into the community, um, but the community is essentially a white supremacist one. Uh, and white supremacist also like in, in, in the US and UK is not the same. Uh, for example, in the, the US does not have the same kind of limits on who is white. Um, so in the UK, um, Eastern Europeans, for example, are also often the target of, of racism from groups who could otherwise be called white supremacists.

It's easier to call them official nationalists. They are, they, they, they, they hate and fear members, not of their community. And in the course of the UK, it's Europeans. Well, not the Europeans I know, of course, they are in a real community with me, but the Europeans I imagine are in conflict with my imagined community. Um, and so that's what makes this very different. And what are they claiming sovereignty over? And it's you, me, everything, destiny, the country, the world, they want to make

sure we burn with climate change because, because enemies of their nation are the people who are advocating for like turn off your lights when you leave the house. Maybe don't fly everywhere all the time and they hate and want to spite the enemies of their imagined communities. I mean, it's no small, it's no small coincidence that most of them understand, say the left or even liberals on the basis of the right wing media's interpretation of liberals for them. So they don't, they might not even know someone who might try to explain

global warming to them or climate change or whatever we're calling it now. They won't know them. They will have an imaginary enemy that has been constructed for them by the print capitalism of the right wing media. Um, and they're, they're, they're therefore in a defensive war of indefinite expansion because they have been given this bunker mentality. And so we can also say, how does this brand of paranoid psychosis relate to the state because right now you could be forgiven for saying that this brand of

nationalism is entirely the product of the right wing media and took the state by surprise when in the US and UK, um, right and, you know, around the world, et cetera, but I mostly, I mostly just know about the politics of the US and UK. I'm aware that like in India, also there's a right wing nationalist government. But, um, in the US and UK, um, like this is the cultural outgrowth of the state we've been building. The national security infrastructure has created since nine 11 or seven seven GCHQ, the Patriot Act, NSA, a series of imperial war has fought for basically no reason.

You know, you'll look for it and you'll find the basis for this sort of paranoid bunker mentality everywhere in the state, even like the way welfare reform has worked has assumed that there are unscrupulous people who are trying to cheat real Americans who work hard for a living, even though when you hear this, when most people hear the stories of individual recipients of welfare, they'll say, okay, well, no, they're clearly trying. Well, they wanted to go get an education, but okay, well, their car broke down. Of course they couldn't get to their meeting, but then when all of these

things are aggregated into, um, into statistics, then the fear comes back in that that represents the unknown imagined other that is threatening the imagined community of taxpayers. Um, but you'll also find it outside of foreign policy, like go home, vans, the creation of ice, none of these happens in economic or political or cultural vacuums. So you could say without Fox news, maybe there is the political movement that created the pressure to create ice doesn't exist, but without ice, then Fox

news doesn't have a story to tell about a real political project. So these things are not, can't be seen in isolation from one another. They are in effect the same part of parts of the same process and the relations of production, specifically the tendency of the rate of profit to fall and capitals and satiable thirst for growth requiring more division, exploitation of workers, productive powers may provide the root causes for both these elements of the superstructure, but those elements of the superstructure are there for a reason because they're persuasive because

people will act accordingly. And so we can either use that persuasive power or not. And so just like Anderson might say is the last gasp of failing business oligarchy is shoring up their domestic rule against the potential for growing national consciousness. And based on what we've said here, also, can we please put to bed forever the idea that Steve Bannon is some kind of strategic mastermind. He advocated a return to official nationalism when print capital had been

in place for years, setting up the idea that there are quote unquote real Americans and Brits who need to be protected and traders who need to be crushed, all of whom are imaginary. All Bannon did was encourage a couple of politicians to jump on a bandwagon that had already been designed by the wealthy, that had already had the infrastructures in place of the post 9 11 security set security state, all to shore up that this failing oligarchy promulgated that promulgated throughout the culture.

Like all he did was do the obvious. It could have been anyone. It could have been a drinking bird hitting a Y key. It just happened to be this guy who's like, you know, like, like slimer before he died, who seems to be always like, you know, falling out of cupboards, muttering about how much you inspire him. But in effect, the print capitalism of Rupert Murdoch, Fox News, et cetera. Has been creating common stories, heroes and languages and so forth.

I'm going to go broad swat through British and American populations. And 2016 didn't start this process as many liberals believe, but it provided the moment of rupture in the imagined community of Britain and America, as it became undeniably clear what you were. You voted Trump or you hate him. You voted leave or remain, although due to real legitimate left criticism of the EU, it is far clearer in the latter case that leave makes you a fascist. There are many people who voted leave for very good reason.

And I myself, a very, very, very strong, you're a skeptic. I'm essentially only a remain person because I think that leaving the European Union gives thatcher rights far too much room to act and that we are much better off staying in and breaking the rules of the European Union to try to create, eliminate borders and create a more equal radical community of many nations. That's completely beside the point. Actually, it's not beside the point. I'll get back to that later.

But regardless, in effect, 2016 was the moment that state administrations without powerful cultural outgrowth had cultures reattacked themselves because it's true. The neoliberal state administration specifically exists not to inspire a culture of anything but excitable universities, careerists who want to, you know, become the, you know, become the home secretary or something at some point because they're addicted to homework and achievement. You know, liberals couldn't react to the growth of nationalism and neoliberals, especially because they had no idea it was going on or because they didn't

believe it was serious. But more importantly, the neoliberal state apparatus suppresses storytelling. So it had no grand story of its own and had no destiny beyond the continued managerialism and a dry dependence on pure facts. It was basically trying to control everyone by boring them to death, which works until someone tells a more compelling story. And so it had this assumption that people would tell their own stories based on the facts and that those stories would basically be the same because

everyone's provided the same facts and everyone has more or less the same interests, everyone's a home economics, we all calculate. And so we would just end up self organizing in a certain way where things would end up being more or less good through consumer decisions. But of course, that's not what happened. And in this way, it's an abdication of the work of imagination for the much simpler task of calculation or the act of building a political project for the much simpler to act of problem solving.

The fact that neoliberalism had no forward project, but had nonetheless marketization and risk management left it so vulnerable to the telling of stories that bound people back together again. And the question is largely what form these stories would take. The liberal commentary in the last two years largely missed the wood for the trees when they say that Trump or Brexit or whatever were delivered on lies. That's only incidental. They were delivered on turning the conservative movement into nations

within states in the UK and US through engrossing and involving storytelling. The Daily Mail and Fox News have spent the last year telling aging boomers this epic story where they get to be the heroes with a full cast of minions, villains, megabosses and dramatic twists and turns. So what is the relationship between a fact and a story, especially when that story is about you and the people with whom you hyper identify? It feels as though there is a blight of immigrants in your community. And then crime and immigration will therefore taste the same to you.

Anyone telling you something not in line with that story doesn't make sense. And so it just doesn't come in. So trying to fight this with facts is ludicrous. It's like trying to blow on a house fire. It doesn't make any sense. You have fundamentally misread the situation. I mean, you can go back to like Victor Frankel, who was a Holocaust survivor. He wrote this book called Man's Search for Meaning, which sort of is about

this innately human desire to be part of something larger than yourself. And it's this problem of destiny and an incoherent meaningless time where all politics, those things we have an ambition to do together was reduced to the management of risk, the people searching for meaning nonetheless found it in a new place and they found it in an easy place to find it where it was readily available because of the incentives of the market. Hyper-identification with the collective destiny of a group of people you have never met is a powerful tool.

And I think it accounts for the failure of people like Emmanuel Macron to convincingly make the case that, for example, capital and nationalism is the opposite of patriotism because true patriotism is a civic virtue embodying the multi-ethnic and very tapestry of all French citizens, blah, blah, blah. It may be true, but it's not compelling because there is no story around it. Or rather, liberals have basically abdicated telling the story of why we ought to have solidarity with one another. When was the last time you heard a liberal say something with this sort of

power of the constitution of that 1902 Indonesian republic that we talked about earlier in the episode? They shy away from that kind of language specifically because they're afraid of the idea that politics is an emotional process that requires emotional engagement. And the liberal counters to nationalism like, oh, I believe the real patriotism is being friends with each other, that they're purely negative. They would never have said that if there wasn't a risk of reactionary nationalism

to the status quo that needed, that arose and needed to be managed. And they're rooted, and they're not rooted in these decades of storytelling and child identity. The French who reject Marine Le Pen, additionally, don't do so because of some formal argument about real patriotism, but because they themselves have been constituted as a nation, basically distinct from those who vote for Front National. This is why families are rupturing all across the developed west, the north,

the developed world, whatever you want to call it. Because there are now families that are part of essentially different nations that have been constituted by entirely different and completely unconnected forms of print capitalism. And also, I want to make it clear that I don't think that this rupture is bad because it's a rupture. We, as a civilized society, should want nothing to do with white nationalists, pure and simple.

They are, the Nazis, not welcome. The problem is not that we no longer agree with the Nazis. It's that there are Nazis. However, we have to accept the fact that the Nazis and us are now different nations, and we cannot re-identify. We cannot regain hyper-identification with one another, nor should we really want to, in my opinion, by the sharing of a bunch of dry facts. Rather, we have to understand the power of storytelling from our side,

because nature abhors a vacuum and people naturally dream about the future. The question is, will they dream about it as socialist moderns or fascist romantics, because we were told to not dream about the future for a long time, and now we're here? So I'll conclude on this. Is socialist internationalism in the requirement that we, and I hope you can hear the leading capitals in the next three words, do something new?

If we attach the idea of nationhood to states, nothing good comes of that. Even if we attempt to be socialist, the socialist movement can never just be about the English or the French or the Indonesians or whatever, because it will always be inherently limiting. Nation is the idea of a horizontal comradeship bound by a common destiny created by a common language history and stories. It is, in effect, the cultural arm of a political project. And as we mentioned in the episode with James Medway, we cannot build

a socialist society in a neoliberalized globe of capital freedom by restricting the realms of popular sovereignty to states, because capital already has the upper ground, because capital can already bid between multiple states, no matter how under popular control they are, contempt one. And then it can force a race to the bottom in terms of workers' rights and minimum wages and capital controls and taxes and so on and so on. So we need to look at creating a global imagined community, which is incredibly fucking hard, because how do you vote for that?

How do you campaign for that? How can we achieve that in one election cycle? We literally can't. National borders, national political jurisdictions and so on are set up specifically to ensure that workers in India have no say over the political conditions of Britain and vice versa, but that capital can move freely between either and determine what goes on. You know, Lakshmi Mital has more influence in the politics of any

nation he chooses than any one citizen of that nation. So this is not to say that, you know, how dare a foreigner have influence in the nation, but rather this is to say that billionaires have transnational influence, citizens have national influence. Transnational influence always wins because it can move. It's faster, it's more nimble. The creation of a post-state political consciousness will not only require to us to leave the idea of the nation's state behind, but to take inspiration

from the nationalisms from below that Anderson discusses to imagine our own genuinely emancipatory community of workers, because if we don't, climate change is going to fucking kill us all. Marks and Engels said it already, workers of the world unite, but it must not only be in the narrow pursuit of tactical or economic goals, rather we must unite through common histories, languages and the stories of the worlds we are trying to build. That one took it out of me.

As ever, thank you very much for listening. I love doing these. These are some of my favorite episodes to do. And to all of you who listen to these episodes, I'm aware it's not everyone, but to all of you who do, I'm very appreciative. Do, if you're on our Discord, you know, do let me know if you want me to look at a certain kind of book. Tell me who the publisher is as well, because I'll try and get it, get

them to send it to me, and I'll try to do that. I'd like to look at fewer authors from the global north. I'd like to see what some other people are saying, you know, there's been a lot of Oxford educated white people in this, not exclusively, but a whole bunch. So, you know, let's, let's switch it up a bit. Otherwise, you know, you're already on the Patreon, or if it's next, if it's next month, the last coming book club that's getting released as a Patreon first with a time lag, then, you know, consider signing up to the

Patreon, we could use it. And actually, you know, this hasn't been announced. Oh, wait, no, I can't announce this yet. Never mind. I didn't say anything, printed it and say anything. Come see us at Birmingham transformed on August 8th in Birmingham, and come see us at the Edinburgh Fringe on August 10th in Edinburgh. I'll be really fucking tired having done two live shows in three days, but I'm

sure it'll be really fun. And, um, what else, you know, you can, there's still, we still have a few of the, what if your phone was the cop's shirt? I think I'd like to make more. These are really fun. I may even, I also really like, I also really like the skull, um, in the police hat on official mascot. I think it's really cute.

Um, anyway, so I think that's more or less all from me. Um, yeah. Thank you again as ever for listening. Uh, do let me, do let me know what you think, you know, tweet, tweet, tweet with tweet at, tweet at me with what you think of these. I will never solicit anyone's opinion on anything but commie book clubs. If you're trying to give me your opinion on anything but a commie book club, don't, but give me your opinion on this because I actually care about these.

Um, anyways, uh, love you all, and I will talk to you all soon over the airwaves, or if you're Nate listening to this one, editing it, talk to you in a couple of days when we continue to record this podcast that we have record because we have been cursed by a witch. Bye everybody.