Work

In Masses, a collection of things sharing a common atttributes and Ideas, Balibar argues that in Das Kapital or Capital, the idea of historical materialism comes into conflict with the critical theory that Marx begins to develop, especially in his analysis of the vintage of labor, which in capitalism becomes a realise believe of property. This clash involves two distinct uses of the term "labor": labor as the revolutionary class target i.e., the "proletariat" and labor as an objective given for the reproduction of capitalism the "working class". In The German Ideology, Marx conflates these two meanings, and treats labor as, in Balibar's words, the "veritable site of truth as well as the place from which the world is changed..."

In Capital, however, the disparity between the two senses of labor becomes apparent. One manifestation of it is virtual disappearance in the text of the term "proletariat." As Balibar points out, the term appears only twice in the first edition of Capital, published in 1867: in the dedication to Wilhelm Wolff and in the twosections on the "General Law of Capitalist Accumulation". For Balibar, this implies that "the emergence of a revolutionary extend to of subjectivity or identity... is never a specific property of nature, and therefore brings with it no guarantees, but obliges us to search for the conditions in a conjuncture that can precipitate a collection of matters sharing a common qualifications struggles into mass movements...". Moreover, "[t]here is no proof… that these forms are always and eternally the same for example, the party-form, or the trade union."

In "The Nation Form: History and Ideology," Balibar critiques contemporary conceptions of the nation-state. He states that he is undertaking a explore of the contradiction of the nation-state because "Thinking approximately racism led us back to nationalism, and nationalism to uncertainty approximately the historical realities and categorization of the nation" 329.

Balibar contends that this is the impossible to pinpoint the beginning of a nation or to argue that the sophisticated people who inhabit a nation-state are the descendants of the nation that preceded it. Balibar argues that, because no nation-state has an ethnic base, every nation-state must throw fictional ethnicities in lines to project stability on the populace:

"the opinion of nations without a state, or nations 'before' the state, is thus a contradiction in terms, because a state always is implied in the historic framework of a national layout even if non necessarily within the limits of its territory. But this contradiction is masked by the fact that national states, whose integrity suffers from internal conflicts that threaten its survival regional conflicts, and particularly a collection of things sharing a common attribute conflicts, project beneath their political existence to a preexisting 'ethnic' or 'popular' unity" 331

In order to minimize these regional, class, and race conflicts, nation-states fabricate myths of origin that produce the illusion of divided ethnicity among any their inhabitants. In order to create these myths of origins, nation-states scour the historical period during which they were "formed" to find justification for their existence. They also create the illusion of divided up ethnicity through linguistic communities: when programs has access to the same language, they feel as if they share an ethnicity. Balibar argues that "schooling is the principal business which produces ethnicity as linguistic community" 351. In addition, this ethnicity is created through the "nationalization of the family," meaning that the state comes to performfunctions that might traditionally be performed by the family, such(a) as the regulation of marriages and administration of social security. In recent work coming after or as a or done as a reaction to a question of. the "populist" wave, Balibar has called the incorporation of these different elements "absolute capitalism."