Anatomia della nazione. Dalla formula trinitaria alle forme della produzione di popolazione

Following Althusser and the Neue Marx Lektüre’s approach to Marx’s critique of political economy, this article aims to reconstruct the structural anatomy of capitalist societies, showing, alongside the forms of use-value production, the necessary emergence of specific social forms of population production process along lines of race, gender and species. The analysis of the Trinity Formula shows how labour and capital appear in this enchanted world as equally necessary so much so that they constitute the anatomy of that “imaginary community” called the nation. Drawing on the Althusserian notion of ideology in its relation with the Verkehrung of Trinity Formula, we claim that the nation is a fetishized social form, a way of organizing political unity. From this perspective, the nation is continually shaped by the actions of the state as a welfare state which assures the reproduction of the labour-power mitigating capitalistic destructive tendencies toward it. The welfare state, though, does not exhaust the ways of organizing unity that are held under the nation form: first, following Balibar, we will briefly discuss the function of imaginary ethnos. Then, confronting Foucauldian population’s dispositif analysis, we will overcome a boundary and a lacuna of Marxian perspective developing a non-reductionist multi-level logic of social materiality able not to fall into the material/cultural dichotomy. Thus, we will demonstrate and fully analyze the emergence of generativity and anthropological social forms and their indispensable role in the process of the production of all the social figures necessary for the reproduction of capitalist social complexes.