Nations and Capital

Capitalism survives by adapting. Marx exposed its reliance on exploiting labour to generate profit. Polanyi warned that its hunger to commodify everything-nature, work, and even human bonds-destroys societies, sparking chaos. Yet capitalism endures, mutating through crises. Why?Nations and Capital reveals the missing mechanism: nationalism.Where Marx saw revolution, and Polanyi foresaw self-destruction as capitalism's endgames, this book uncovers nationalism as the system's ultimate safeguard. When markets erode trust or class conflict threatens profits, nationalism steps in-manufacturing loyalty, dividing the oppressed, and recasting exploitation as collective destiny. Capitalism doesn't merely use nationalism; it depends on it to fragment resistance, privatize solidarity, and keep us fighting each other instead of the system devouring us all.When neoliberalism irreversibly ripped society's fabric, capitalism didn't abandon nationalism: hyper-capitalism, today's system of limitless extraction, abandons democracy instead and turns to authoritarian nationalism. This shift isn't a rupture but a revelation: nationalism was never a phase; it is capitalism's life support, mutating to sustain accumulation, from colonial empires to digital oligopolies.Why does this matter? Because tomorrow's crises-global economic collapse, the breakup of international order, pandemics-will be met with nationalism's toxic embrace unless we confront its role as capitalism's oxygen. Written from Bosnia and Herzegovina-a periphery where global capital and nationalist oligarchies joined forces to entrench ethnic partition-this theory of nationalism sees what thinkers in capitalism's core could not: nationalism is not a byproduct of industrial capitalism's need for labour's cultural homogeneity (Gellner) or print capitalism's construction of 'imagined communities' (Anderson). It is the lifeblood of a system that cannot survive without converting solidarity into division, belonging into exclusion, and hope into fear.Marx and Polanyi gave us the diagnosis. Nations and Capital completes it: understanding capitalism's survival requires understanding nationalism as the other side of capitalism's coin.