Citizens of the World, Unite!

Abstract

The reader will have identified the title of this concluding chapter with Karl Marx’s famous rallying cry in his 1848 Communist Manifesto.¹ My version stresses the cosmopolitan aspect of the cry but it is not based in class consciousness. A cry for the citizens of the world to unite is inherently pacifist: It is inclusive of all members of the human species and calls for a revolution of the inner self. I have attempted to show throughout this book why our species needs a tale of belonging, an “ethically constitutive” story (Smith 2003) that is not based on othering. Marx’s story for his international communist drive to revolution was essentially based on seeing the capitalist exploiters as others, their existence as an obstacle to the actual flourishing of working humanity. In my version of a rallying cry to revolution, there is no othering, not even the nonhistorical world of nature is seen as outside the human world for it contains life, all of it—human life included. The revolution that citizens of the world can unleash is a peaceful one, and starts at one’s own realm of consciousness. As I have stressed all along, it ought to emerge from a grassroots level and eventually conquer the world. This silent revolution will have consequences for political institutions and their legitimacy, but it will not and cannot come from political authority.