Friday, December 15, 2006
(1:18 AM) | Amish Lovelock:
Toward a World Republic
This is from the abstract to a talk Karatani did in Zagreb - and is more or less a digested translation of a part of his new book Toward a World Republic (at present in Japanese only). The whole thing can be read here.
"I came to understand why state-socialism was born out of Marxism. It was not because Marx was a statist, but because he was an anarchist and believed that the economic solution of class society will abolish the state. Both Proudhon and Marx lacked the understanding of the state. For them, the state was nothing but a political superstructure, which is placed over the civil society or economic structure. In a word, Proudhon and Marx saw the state from within alone and consequently thought of abolishing it from within or below alone. Today, Negri and Hardt assert that the true democracy of the multitude will abolish the state. In fact, this is Proudhon’s view, which overlooks that the state presupposes the other state (enemy). You cannot abolish the state, as far as other states remain. Of course, Marx was aware that socialism would not make sense on the level of one nation. Thus, he emphasized the simultaneous world revolution. But it was and will be infeasible. The state and capital will bar the revolutionary movements from being unified. (That was what really happened to the 2nd International in the face of the First World War.) We must seek to contain the state not only from “below”, but also from “above”. How is this possible? I found the key to this question in Kant’s idea of world republic. Usually this is romantically referred to concerning the permanent peace or something like that. And his idea is actually realized as the League of Nations and The United Nations. However, I want to stress that what Kant called the world republic is nothing other than the Aufhebung of the state and capitalist economy. Also, Kant’s project for the permanent peace (Zum ewigen Frieden) can be read as the strategy for the gradual but simultaneous world revolution. The counteraction against the capital and the state in each country can be effective, only when it is linked to the containment of the state and capital from “above”. To be more concrete, empowering the United Nations and NGOs will be indispensable."
