Leaving all these statements aside, in every epoch, the language and culture of the ruling class remained different from the ruled. In England, even now how many people can speak the royal language taught in Oxford or Cambridge? In the US, since capitalism developed early on, one can see the uniformity of language among both the rulers and the ruled. With the crises in capitalism, not only the economy of the US deteriorated but it ruined the language as well. One can see a visible difference in the language spoken in Hollywood before the 1960s and thenceforth. The language of Mutiny on the Bounty vividly differs from the very best today. However, certainly this language is a tabooed one in the Congress or Senate, since the ruling elite is not supposed to speak the language of commoners, at least not in public. Based on whatever is deemed necessary, capitalism feels no hesitation in using or discarding its own favourite cards. The sanctity of any language is decided by economic exchange, which according to the requirement of the international market determines its suitability. Capitalism, through its historical necessity, has selected English as the lingua franca of the world. Karl Kautsky was the first to point out: “National languages will be increasingly confined to domestic use, and even there they will be treated like an old piece of inherited furniture, something that we treat with veneration even though it has not much practical use.” He apprehended this far too early that the world would have to be content with one language — either French or English. For the formation of a nation, capitalism itself has weeded out the criterion of language. What is good for the goose is good for the gander. Similarly, what holds true for language is true for culture as well. Despite having the same culture and civilisation, Europe has gone through two world wars. India and Pakistan have met the same fate, and so did the Balkan states. One can dispute by imputing that culture is in one’s blood. Jews, Muslims and Christians can have their respective common cultures but even this does not hold much water. The Saudi culture is drastically different from the one prevalent in Indonesia, Iran or Pakistan, to name a few. Indeed, it is often deemed an atrociously stifling culture and a smothering experience for many a visitor if not a scourging one. However, even in Saudia, the culture of the ruling elite vastly differs from that of an Arab Bedouin. Indeed, even in the same country, there can be vast differences between inter-province and intra-province cultures. The rich most certainly have a varied culture from the poor living in the same city. In fact, culture belongs to the ruling class since “the class, which is the material ruling force of society is at the same time its ruling intellectual” (Marx). It is in command of the means of production and hence it is the one in possession of all those means, which affect the mind of those ruled by it. From the ordinary language they create another one, which “gives the listener the distorted and abridged meanings. The content’s development is blocked. People are forced to accept what is offered to them” (Herbert Marcuse). Ethnicity is akin to the question of immigrants. When the economy is booming, many ethnic groups live side by side in social harmony. In Europe, gypsies had been living alongside the native populations for nearly 1,500 years but, ever since the invariably cyclic capitalistic recession has come to afflict Europe, these people are singled out as outcasts, especially in France. They are being persecuted and victimised as criminals by the ‘socialist’ government of President Hollande. To overcome recession and to exterminate communists, Hitler used Jews as his prime target. In Pakistan, Bhutto found scapegoats as well in order to divert the attention of the masses from socialistic leanings. As the economic crisis has worsened, so has the Sunni-Shia conflict, in particular the persecution of the Hazara community. It is a kind of civil war and every civil war is the reflection of a class war. Both the US and Australia (including New Zealand) are the states of migrants. Today, those desirous of seeking refuge from persecution are often labelled as illegal migrants, economic refugees and ‘boat people’. Of course, the real natives were never allowed to pose this question at the time of the British colonisation of Australia. Would it not be a fiendish jest of history if these countries were to call themselves nation states? But the tragedy is they actually do. The main failure of free market capitalism lies in the fact that, unlike the flow of capital, it remains unsuccessful in establishing the free flow of labour, but then it never wanted it to happen. To sum up, there are hardly any objective grounds upon which the foundation of a nation can be laid. Nations are, in Anderson’s words, “imaginary” entities. They need a myth or two to make this deception real, and indeed the national flag and national anthem come in handy. Chris Harman succinctly points out, “For nations as entities have not always existed. The modern nation, with its ideal of a homogeneous body of citizens, enjoying equal rights, expressing loyalty to a single centre of sovereignty and speaking a single language, is as much a product of relatively recent history as capitalism itself. It is a notion as out of place in any serious account of the pre-capitalist societies, which dominated the whole world until the 16th century, and more than 90 percent of it until little over a century ago, as that of the motor car or machine gun. In fact, it is the connection between the rise of the nation state and the rise of capitalism, which enables us to understand the strength of the myths that lead people to slaughter each other — as always with wars, most of the slaughter being of the poor by the poor, not the rich by the rich.” The myth of the nation state is being waved off by the very hands that moved its cradle. Capital is forging new alliances between members of different ‘nations’. In football, the elite soccer clubs, in cricket, the IPL-type leagues are attracting players from all over the world. The Brazilians, Colombians, Spaniards are all playing together. Likewise, in cricket leagues, the Aussies, the English, the Indians and their arch rivals, the Pakistanis (where possible), and so on are all playing for money. No one represents any nation. It is money that has become a divine gospel and flows from all ends. Test cricket is dying because no one wants to play for years just to collect a handful of dollars when a windfall awaits in the T20 leagues. Eric Hobsbawm has rightly pointed out, “ If twenty-first century states now prefer to fight their wars with professional armies or even with private contractors of war services, it is not only for technical reasons, but because citizens can no longer be relied upon to be conscripted in their millions to die in battle for their fatherland. Men and women may be prepared to die (or more likely to kill) for money or for something smaller, or for something larger, but in the original homelands of the nation, no longer for the nation-state.” (To be continued) The writer is based in Australia and has authored books on socialism and history. He can be reached at saulatnagi@hotmail.com