Exposes social and labor contracts as masks for foundational and ongoing global violence
Nomad Citizenship argues for transforming our institutions and practices of citizenship and markets in order to release society from dependence on the state and capital. Responding to the challenge of creating philosophical concepts with concrete applications, Eugene W. Holland looks outside the state to analyze contemporary political and economic development using the ideas of nomad citizenship and free-market communism.
Nomad Citizenship argues for transforming our institutions and practices of citizenship and markets in order to release society from dependence on the state and capital. It changes Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of nomadology into a utopian project with immediate practical implications, developing ideas of a nonlinear Marxism and of the slow-motion general strike.
Responding to the challenge of creating philosophical concepts with concrete applications, Eugene W. Holland looks outside the state to analyze contemporary political and economic development using the ideas of nomad citizenship and free-market communism. Holland’s nomadology seeks to displace capital-controlled free markets with truly free markets. Its goal is to rescue market exchange, not perpetuate capitalism—to enable noncapitalist markets to coordinate socialized production on a global scale and, with an eye to the common good, to liberate them from capitalist control.
In suggesting the slow-motion general strike, Holland aims to transform citizenship: to renew, enrich, and invigorate it by supplanting the monopoly of state citizenship with plural nomad citizenships. In the process, he offers critiques of both the Clinton and Bush regimes in the broader context of critiques of the social contract, the labor contract, and the form of the state itself.
Contents
Preface
Introduction: Assays in Affirmative Nomadology
Introduction: Assays in Affirmative Nomadology
1. From Political Philosophy to Affirmative Nomadology
2. Death-State Citizenship
3. Nomad Citizenship
4. Free-Market Communism
Conclusion
2. Death-State Citizenship
3. Nomad Citizenship
4. Free-Market Communism
Conclusion
Appendix: Nomadological and Dialectical Utopianism
Eugene W. Holland is professor and chair of comparative studies at Ohio State University. He recently coedited Gilles Deleuze: Image and Text.
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Hayek (and anarcho-capitalists) got it half right by emphasizing the complex and dazzling benefits of free markets. Marx (at least in one careful reading of him) got it half right by emphasizing the problem of wage-labor. Put these two basic insights together--instead of assuming or insisting that they must be opposed--and what do you get? A truly free free market... a "nomad market"... a market free from the State and emptied of wage-labor. And in certain respects, as Holland demonstrates, such a market already exists today alongside the capitalist market. It not only exists, it provides a way to think through, and possibly a way to reach the beyond, of capitalism and its worst problems. Perhaps we really can work to achieve the best of both worlds (markets, well-intentioned concern for the common good). Refreshingly, Holland develops the argument thoroughly, offering a wide-reaching, historically-informed analysis that is never romantic or naive. In arriving at his conclusions, he never presupposes anything (good or bad) about "human nature" or "society" or "governance" (or even "nature") in the abstract. Neither does he offer any guarantees. He fully embraces the complexity and unpredictability of history.
There is in fact much more going on here, which isn't surprising given Holland's interest in the interrelatedness of psychology, politics, and economics. The book is also a rethinking of "belonging." It provides a conceptual map for a third-way (not reform, not revolution) toward a better future. It offers a lens for seeing important differences between the George W and Clinton presidencies as well as ways they were interconnected in their support of the "infinite debt" that plagues most of today's markets.
If nothing else, after reading this book, you will never make the mistake of equating "market" with "capitalist market." ELB @ Amazon website
This is a brilliant and important book which provides both vital insight into our contemporary political situation and, through a novel synthesis of nomad Marxism and complexity theory, ways for thinking the future differently. Eugene W. Holland’s conceptions of an affirmative nomadology and free market communism make a fresh and invigorating contribution to the contemporary critique of capital and attempts to produce small and large-scale, long-lasting alternatives to its dominion. A superb achievement and essential reading.
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Keith Ansell-Pearson, University of Warwick
