Nation and Memory in Zavaleta Mercado

Abstract

In this article we examine René Zavaleta’s proposal on the national question. Against economicist and essentialist readings of the topic, Zavaleta conceives it as a productive force of social organization that reproduces life, generates contradictions and opens possibilities for emancipation. In our analysis, we distinguish three determining moments and two decisive ones that ground the nation: 1) the dissolution of rigid relations of dependence and the emergence of legally free subjects; 2) political centralization and homogeneity around the internal market regulated by the State; 3) the capture of economic surplus that enables the development of economic autonomy and sovereignty; 4) the dialectic of State-nation, whose form expresses the tensions between national projects that attempt to inscribe their programs in the State; 5) democratic constitutive moments as historical events that open the possibility of emancipatory projects. We aim to understand these moments according to the degrees of unification achieved through their realization. The nation is both transformation and continuity.