The following text is based on an intervention at the conference Historical Materialism Paris: Conjuring the Catastrophe / Combating the Catastrophe, held from 26 to 28 June 2025.
“From Nation to People: Reimagining the ‘We’ of Emancipation” is appearing simultaneously in English on Communis and Historical Materialism, in French on Communis and Contretemps. Revue de critique communiste, and in Spanish on Communis and Jacobin América Latina.
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One of the most crucial challenges we are facing today is determining how to turn all the widespread tendencies towards protest and contestation we are witnessing, all these returns to the streets, into a coherent collective subject, able to reverse the current fragmentation and atomisation of the subaltern classes.
This is a challenge all the more important if we consider that, over the past fifteen years, we have witnessed impressive moments of a collective “coming together” of large masses in remarkable cycles of mobilisation — in some instances, of an almost insurrectionary character — yet, at the same time, we have witnessed significant divides within the subaltern classes. This is all the more urgent if we consider the fact that what has been called “the rise of the Far Right”, to a large extent, can also be described as a shift of large segments of the working and, generally speaking, subaltern classes towards the Far Right.
At a time where neoliberal capitalism is becoming even more disciplinary and cynical, also fuelling a warmongering and genocidal imperialism, justified in terms of a neocolonial targeting of the Global South, the question of creating a collective “we” of resistance and emancipation is not only and not primarily analytical. It is, above all, strategic, bearing an almost existential urgency.
Traditionally, this question would have been answered simply by an appeal to a common working-class positioning and by the repudiation of national, ethnic and religious identities in favour of a new common proletarian identity.
In a sense, this is still one of the challenges we are facing; namely, reminding people that, apart from everything else, they share this common condition of having to sell their labour in order to survive and that the enemies they are confronting, from global corporations to genocidal states and imperialist aggressors, are based upon exactly this kind of specifically capitalist exploitation.
At the same time, we also know that actual class relations are more complex and that there are differentiations between various segments of the working classes, along with the fact, very acute in the past and still persisting, that a significant part of the subaltern are not workers: they are peasants or self-employed or urban poor.
However, it is not simply a question of trying to think in terms of a broader social alliance and not just the working class, for it also brings up the issue of how to think of different forms of both designating and interpellating the collective subject of emancipation. Additionally, it has to do with the very form that the antagonistic politics of modernity has tended to take.
I am thinking here about the dialectic between class and mass, of which, following Balibar, we can say that it is a result of the “short-circuit”[1] introduced by Marx between economics and politics, on one hand, and (I could add) ideology on the other. Following once again Balibar, we could indeed say that the proletariat is both a class and a mass, that, in a sense, the proletariat is not a historical subject but, rather, the result of particular conjunctures and relations of force. Conjunctures on which all forms of subjectivity and collective identity depend. This is what “obliges us to search for the conditions in a conjuncture that can precipitate class struggles into mass movements and the forms of collective representation that can maintain, in these conditions, the instance of class struggle within mass movements”.[2]
Antonio Gramsci grasped this challenge when he stressed that:
The subaltern classes, by definition, are not unified and cannot unite until they are able to become a “State”: their history, therefore, is intertwined with that of civil society, it is a “dismembered” and discontinuous function of the history of civil society.[3]
It is in this note from Notebook 25 of his Prison Notebooks that Gramsci also suggests that the aim of the subaltern classes is to have political formations that assert their “integral autonomy”.
However, to “become a State” also means to “become a nation” and to “become a people”. Is not such claim, though, in contradiction with a longstanding tradition according to which both the nation and the people are ideological constructions that mystify social antagonism and class divisions (and justify systemic racism) by means of creating “imagined communities?”
First of all, let us recall that “imagined” does not mean “not real”. In this respect, too, Balibar made an important point in the 1980s:
Every social community reproduced by the functioning of institutions is imaginary, that is to say, it is based on the projection of individual existence into the weft of a collective narrative, on the recognition of a common name and on traditions lived as the trace of an immemorial past (even when they have been fabricated and inculcated in the recent past). But this comes down to accepting that, under certain conditions, only imaginary communities are real.[4]
All this said, I think that we need to return to Gramsci and his conceptualisation of the political forms of modernity. Within this historical process we see not only the increased power and influence of the bourgeoisie, in its “long march” towards hegemony but also the emergence of new forms of mobilisation of the subaltern classes, which is the crucial aspect of the formation of this contradictory national-popular collective will, especially in cases where the bourgeoisie has also gone through a revolutionary phase. Yet Gramsci is always aware of how the bourgeoisie would subsequently attempt to counter the emergence of such national-popular collective will or undermine its radical and emancipatory characteristics.
The very syntagm “national-popular” is, in a sense, the site of a tension, that which had Gramsci explicitly make a distinction between people-nation [popolo-nazione] and nation-rhetoric. He also stressed that the working class, although international in nature and bearer of a certain subaltern universalism, also had to nationalise itself, both coming to terms with each particular national relation of forces and acting as a means to unify the subaltern classes:
A class that is international in character has — in as much as it guides social strata which are narrowly national (intellectuals), and indeed frequently even less than national: particularistic and municipalistic (the peasants) — to “nationalise” itself in a certain sense.[5]
When confronting the attempts towards a form of proletarian nationalism that certain segments of the fascist movement promoted, justifying chauvinism and colonial-imperialist expansionism, Gramsci would indeed suggest turning this idea of the proletarian nation into the basis of new proletarian cosmopolitanism. As André Tosel stressed:
It is the Italy of migrants and of factory council, of communes and of civil humanism, of the “catharsis” of the economic into the ethico-political, that can produce the epochal reform of the religion of liberty into the heresy that can create a new mass conformism and at the same time of an internationalism that is both labourist and civic.[6]
Similarly, Nicos Poulantzas offers a way to rethink how we cannot escape the question of the nation. Poulantzas analysed — in what is one of the most original takes on the question of the nation — the “historicity of a territory and territorialisation of a history”[7] within the emergence of the nation, along with the specific spatial articulation of capitalism and imperialism, the emergence of frontiers, of insides and outsides, and of course the role of the state: “The State realizes a movement of individualisation and unification; constitutes the people-nation in the further sense of representing its historical orientation.”[8]
At the same time, Poulantzas insisted that the relation of the working classes to nationalism is not simply one of ideological domination by the bourgeoisie since “[t]he spatiality and historicity of each working class are a variant of its own nation, both because they are caught in the spatial and temporal matrices and because they form an integral part of that nation understood as a result of the relationship of forces between working class and bourgeoisie”.[9]
As Sadri Khiari has stressed, the nation-state is also, to a large extent, a racial State:
National “Gallic” integration within the space of the French borders was juxtaposed with a national colonial integration around belonging to a statutory “French” group, itself within the context of the larger statutory grouping of white-European civilisation. National identity, constructed both in relation to Europe and to colonized peoples, thus blended two types of partly antagonistic identities. The first was specifically national, shaped around the myth of an eternal France with supposedly Gallic origins. The second was transnational, created around a white-European-Christian supremacy of supposedly Greek origins whose first borders were the French territories of the empire. French national identity, which knits the republican pact together and flows through social logics and state politics, is an imperial identity, or, in other words, colonial/racial. The French nation is an imperial nation.[10]
Consequently, it is obvious that we cannot so easily escape the question of the nation. Here, I would like also to point to another notion, especially since the nation (and the people) are not simply designations for communities. They also refer to political forms; namely, the nation-state. In addition, any notion of the state and the nation entails a notion of sovereignty.
As we all know, a certain class reductionism has an easy answer: real power and real sovereignty lie with the dominant social class, today the more aggressive and internationalised segments of capital. However, one of the particularities of the social and political forms associated with capitalist modernity is that sovereignty is projected as it is articulated and exercised in the name of a bigger community; that is, the people and the nation.
It is critical to introduce such a notion of sovereignty because sovereignty is one of the stakes of contemporary social and political antagonism. Here, I am not referring simply to the fact that an emancipatory subaltern sovereignty is at the heart of the specifically Marxist tradition of the need to take power in order to change the world. I am also referring to the fact that contemporary disciplinary neoliberalism operates, especially in the context of the European Union, as a form of reduced national sovereignty, as a ceding of sovereignty but also as a constant undermining of popular sovereignty. One might say that the European Union represents an example of limited or reduced sovereignty as class strategy in particular through the monetary, financial and institutional architecture of the Eurozone. Already in the 2010s, on “testing grounds” such as Greece, we witnessed how violent this process can get. To a decisive extent, averting the social and political disaster we experienced in Greece would have been possible precisely through a reclaiming of national and popular sovereignty following the impressive vote in the referendum and a rupture and exit from the Eurozone and the EU.
I would also like to stress the fact that many comrades, when there is talk of national sovereignty, immediately think of frontiers. However, we are against frontiers as exclusionary borders. We are in favour of open frontiers for migrants and refugees. In the European context, though, it is, in fact, the limitation, the reduction of sovereignty that has enabled the imposition of the anti-migrant and anti-refugee policies of the EU, in particular after 2016 and the EU-Turkey agreement. We would need to recuperate sovereignty to fully re-instate the right to asylum and freedom of movement. To open the frontiers, we need to be truly sovereign.
Let me now address some more strategic considerations. Does this mean that what is needed is simply a return to the nation and a national reference?
In some instances, as during the period following the Eurozone crisis, we saw such a return. I could point to the way in which some segments of the Italian Left, of communist origin, decided to go into this direction, not with the biggest success. Or I could point as well to numerous debates in Greece within the broader anti-austerity milieu, and the emergence of the idea of a “patriotic political space”. Or, to come closer to France, to the problems of certain neorepublican conceptions of the return to the state.
What are the limits of such a neorepublican and traditionally “patriotic” return to the nation? First, its proclivity to exclude from the political (and cultural) space of the people certain cultural or religious reference points, however important they might be for large segments of the subaltern classes of immigrant origin. Secondly, its refusal or incapacity to deal with colonialism as a continuing aspect of the functioning of nation-states as they exist today. It is a conception of the nation that fails to deal with this aspect of exclusion of everyone not considered to be part of the nation. So, it is a return of the nation that runs the danger of undermining the very subaltern unity we are trying to build. Furthermore, this “neorepublican”, “patriotic” or “sovereigntyist” conception can lead to openly reactionary positions, as illustrated by the example of Jacques Sapir who in 2015 proposed a “sovereigntyist” alliance with the National Rally (RN) and also participated in the RN’s summer university in 2016.
It is on this basis that I have suggested that the only way to rethink the possibility of reclaiming popular sovereignty in a manner that avoids the pitfalls of both cosmopolitan universalism and exclusionist nationalism is by means of a redefinition of the people (and the nation) based upon the contemporary condition of subalternity in the context of contemporary capitalist accumulation, which, in fact, has expanded the linkages between subalternity and the subjection to capitalist accumulation, in both direct and indirect ways. This implies a redefinition of the people that delinks it from ethnicity, origin or common history and instead links it to common condition, present and struggle. It is a rather “scissionist” conception of the people and the nation because it also includes an oppositional approach to the “enemies of the people”, many of them nominally “members of the nation”.
This would point in turn to a conception of the people and the nation that is post-national and de-colonial. A politically performative conception of the people and — to use Gramscian terminology — of the people-nation and at the same time a conception that is class-based. We are no longer dealing here with the “imaginary community” of “common blood”; it is the unity in struggle of the subaltern classes, the unity of those who share the same problems, the same misery, the same hope, the same plight. The notion of the people does not speak of a common origin; it represents a common condition and perspective. In this sense, following Deleuze, we are talking about a people that is missing, a people that has to be produced, a people-to-come, “[n]ot the myth of a past people, but the storytelling of the people to come. The speech-act must create itself as a foreign language in a dominant language, precisely in order to express an impossibility of living under domination”.[11]
From such a perspective, are we abandoning class analysis? No! Contemporary forms of capitalist accumulation create “objective” material conditions that bring together working-class strata with new petty-bourgeois strata (in the Poulantzian sense), state employees and even segments of the traditional petty-bourgeois strata as a result of the inability of contemporary neoliberal policies to enhance a lasting historical bloc around finance and multinational capitals. This, indeed, creates common demands and interests, based upon the common condition of labour, precariousness, unemployment, exploitation, increased difficulty in dealing with basic needs that, in a certain manner, can unite a broad spectrum of agents, from the undocumented migrant to the young degree-holder moving from unemployment into precarious part-time work and back into unemployment. Although theorists of populism have tended to treat recent big political upheavals and mass protest movements as mainly political events, articulated around common political demands, they also represent the visible encounter of segments of the collective labour force, who share a common condition. The class character of such mass mobilisations is not to be ignored.
It would be wrong to assume that we are suggesting that a reconceptualisation of the people should be based only on social-class criteria. The contemporary condition of subalternity also includes the consequences of patriarchy, sexism, racism and colonialism. Contemporary forms of capitalist accumulation incorporate racism, neocolonialism and sexism into the dominant regime of accumulation as crucial aspects of social reproduction. These aspects contribute to the formation of the subaltern social groups and, at the same time, present the challenge of including these struggles and antagonistic practices in the attempt to “create a people” or to “create a nation”. This enables new encounters between popular movements and struggles not only against racism and nationalism (struggles which for a long time have been considered an integral part of emancipatory class politics) but also sexism, patriarchy and heteronormativity, as conditions for the formation of the necessary unity of the people. This articulation is overdetermined by the dynamics of capitalist accumulation, the many ways in which sexism and racism become indispensable aspects of the dominant regime of accumulation but also of the attempts of the dominant classes to maintain the subaltern in a disaggregated and passive position.
In such a perspective, the notion of the people is obviously not a discursive construction ex post, as it has been suggested by theorists of “left populism”, and it is not simply the result of an ideological interpellation. It is a strategic concept based on class analysis, in the sense described by Poulantzas:
The articulation of the structural determination of classes and of class positions within a social formation, the locus of existence of conjunctures, requires particular concepts. I shall call these concepts of strategy, embracing in particular such phenomena as class polarization and class alliance. Among these, on the side of the dominant classes, is the concept of the “power bloc” designating a specific alliance of dominant classes and fractions; also, on the side of the dominated classes, the concept of the ”people”, designating a specific alliance of these classes and fractions.[12]
Consequently, we must return to Gramsci and his strategic and transformative conception that links the popolo-nazione and a potential historical bloc:
If the relationship between intellectuals and people-nation, between the leaders and the led, the rulers and the ruled, is provided by an organic cohesion in which feeling-passion becomes understanding and thence knowledge (not mechanically but in a way that is alive), then and only then is the relationship one of representation. Only then can there take place an exchange of individual elements between the rulers and ruled, leaders [dirigenti] and led, and can the shared life be realised which alone is a social force with the creation of the “historical bloc”.[13]
This conception of the historical bloc, though, points to something more complex than the formation of the people by means of a process of signification that creates both a common identity and an opposition to a common ‘”enemy”, however important such aspects for this re-emergence of the people as the collective agent of transformation and emancipation.
When dealing with the particular problems posed by the need to create new forms of popular unity between the different segments of the subaltern classes and groups, divided as they are by ethnic or religious lines, but also by the institutional division between citizens and migrants and also undocumented migrants, more important than the common “cultural referents” are the collective practices, demands, strategies, re-writings of histories, knowledges of each other, and — above all — common aspirations, that can indeed induce the common identification of such groups and segments as being part of the people. This process also requires concrete struggles for the institutional forms that enable this convergence, especially full social and political rights, but also the forms of political organising and mass political intellectuality that link this common condition to common hegemonic projects of transformation and emancipation and help the articulation of common struggles and alliances. In sum, what Gramsci tried to define as the “Modern Prince”, the political form of a modern united front.
This means that, when we are talking about the people or the nation as a metonymy of a potential subaltern historical bloc, we are not talking about a social alliance or a “collective identity”. Nor are we talking about a simple political intervention. On the contrary, we are talking about a truly hegemonic practice, a historical process, one that includes not only ideological or discursive interpellations but, above all, a strategic political programme, along with the tactics and organisational forms that can enable such a programme to be turned into a new historical narrative for a country.
Having said all that, the question remains whether we can describe this line as a recuperation of the nation. I am referring here in particular to Houria Bouteldja’s recent writings and interventions.[14] Leaving aside how we name this potential unity, I would say that I find myself in general agreement with Bouteldja’s argument. Moreover, what I find highly original and also pertinent to contemporary debates and political exigencies is that Bouteldja does not attempt to point to the way in which the different segments can come together on the basis of “realising” that they share some common essence or experience a revelation-like moment where they transcend their differences. Instead, Bouteldja points to the manner in which there can be common political goals and, in particular, a reclaiming of national sovereignty by way of an exit from the EU and a new patriotism as a means to create a new political and social unity that combines the subaltern strata today attracted to the Left (at least in places where there is still a Left) with the working classes and other subaltern strata currently conforming the core of the of the Far Right’s constituency.
This is why the return to the nation-state must also be seen as a phase of this utopia, or even as its precondition. We would have to envision both a decolonial strategy for a return to the national framework for indigenous people who don’t give a damn about Europe but are in need of a homeland; and an anti-liberal strategy for the white working classes, for whom the homeland is a safe haven as strong and secure as a bar of gold.[15]
I am also in agreement with Bouteldja’s description of the impasses of the contemporary traditions of the Left.
When the left is internationalist, it doesn’t understand the need for nationhood (and hence security); when it is republican and universalist, it doesn’t understand the need for identity and religion. When it is antifascist, it fails to understand the harmful consequences of the State’s differential treatment of antisemitism and other forms of racism, and when it is feminist, it fails to understand the oppression of nonhegemonic masculinities, whether white or non-white. Whatever the face of this left, it stubbornly insists on providing inadequate analyses and responses, without taking into serious consideration the singularity of subaltern subjects of class or race.[16]
To conclude, it is also important to note that such a conception of the people — and of the nation — as a potential new “historical bloc” is opposed both to a certain conception of multiculturalism that tends to view societies as mere agglomerations of people and differences and which can be entirely compatible with neoliberalism, and to a neorepublican version of the nation as shared national history and values, which would tend to exclude a large part of contemporary subordinate classes and groups. This refers to a people and a nation that must be built and accepts all points of reference of the subaltern classes as necessarily contradictory elements of a future people (and nation) and of pages of a new history to be written together.
In this conception, the “national-popular” element is not defined on the basis of elements or the legacy of the past, but rather as something that comes from the future. In this sense, the “national-popular” element must be constructed, be the object of a constant process of reconstruction, reproduction and renewal. Contrary to the fundamental nationalist belief that “others” must learn our history or “our” values, it is a question here of producing a new popular perspective to which “others” are called upon to contribute from the outset. It is a perspective that considers that “we” and “the others” can effectively produce a new “we”, a new form of unity based not on the exchange of cultural elements, but primarily on the common condition of exploitation and resistance, contrary to all positions of an almost inevitable “war of civilisations”. It is a perspective that insists that the necessary starting point is the acceptance of relative difference, i.e. the recognition that segments of the subaltern classes who are migrants or refugees have an inalienable right to autonomous organisation and collective identity, and that this recognition is the necessary condition for the emergence of a new form of popular unity.
Therefore, it is a question of a conception of the people and the nation that does not bracket class antagonism but, rather, treats such antagonism as a constitutive condition. In this sense, it is an antagonistic and agonistic conception of the potential unity of the people that does not fear its contradictory character.
Choosing to reclaim popular sovereignty in the form of a break with supranational institutional arrangements that undermine democracy and reinforce aggressive capitalist regimes of accumulation, such as the Eurozone and the European Union, while demanding full rights and full citizenship for every person living and working in a country (and contributing to social life in general), does indeed offer an alternative.
Let me now make a final point. First, as I already mentioned, the discussion we are having is not a discussion about identity. It is not simply a discussion about how to designate a collective subject, although names and designations play an important role. It is about how to rethink politics, that is about how to rethink a politics of emancipation that in the words of Machiavelli should aim high in order to go further, a politics of emancipation that dares to think big, to think in terms of new historical blocs and the Modern Prince able to produce such historical blocs, a revolutionary politics that avoids the comfort of the small sect and attempts to really engage with history. A political practice that, yes, believes that it can construct a people and a nation out of the contemporary explosive combination of mass contestation and increased disaggregation of the subaltern classes.
References
Balibar, Etienne 1994, Masses, Classes, Ideas. Studies on Politics and Philosophy Before and After Marx, tr. by James Swenson, London and New York: Routledge.
Balibar, Étienne & Wallerstein, Immanuel 1991, Race, Nation, Class : Ambiguous Identities, tr. of Etienne Balibar by Chris Turner, London and New York: Verso.
Bouteldja, Houria 2024, Rednecks and Barbarians. Uniting the White and Racialized Working Class, tr. Rachel Valinsky, London: Pluto.
Bouteldja, Houria 2025, «Rêver ensemble – Pour un patriotisme internationaliste», https://qgdecolonial.fr/rever-ensemble-pour-un-patriotisme-internationaliste/.
Deleuze, Gilles 1985, Cinéma 2. L’image-temps, Paris: Les éditions de Minuit.
Gramsci, Antonio 1971, Selections from the Prison Notebooks of Antonio Gramsci, edited and translated by Quintin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell Smith, London: Lawrence and Wishart – New York: International Publishers.
Gramsci, Antonio 2021, Subaltern Social Groups. A Critical Edition of Notebook 25, edited and translated by Joseph A. Buttigieg and Marcus E. Green, New York: Columbia University Press.
Khiari, Sadri 2021, The Colonial Counter-Revolution in France. From de Gaulle to Sarkozy, tr. Ames Hodges, New York: Semiotexte.
Poulantzas, Nicos 1975, Classes in Contemporary Capitalism, London: Verso.
Poulantzas, Nicos 2000, State, Power, Socialism, London: Verso.
Sapir, Jacques 2016, Souveraineté, démocratie, laïcité, Paris: Michalon.
Tosel, André 2009, Le marxisme du 20e siècle, Paris: Syllepse.
[1] Balibar 1994.
[2] Balibar 1994, p. 147.
[3] Gramsci 2021, p. 10 (Q25, §5).
[4] Balibar and Wallerstein 1991, p. 93. Emphasis in the original.
[5] Gramsci 1971, p. 241 (Q14, §68).
[6] Tosel 2009, p. 179. Translation is mine.
[7] Poulantzas 2000, p. 114.
[8] Poulantzas 2000, p. 113.
[9] Poulantzas 2000, 118.
[10] Khiari 2021.
[11] Deleuze 2000, p. 223.
[12] Poulantzas 1975, p. 24. Emphasis in the original.
[13] Gramsci 1971, p. 418 (Q11, §67).
[14] Bouteldja 2025.
[15] Bouteldja 2024, p. 148.
[16] Bouteldja 2024, pp. 141-142.
