Lost and Found. State, Law, Sovereignty and the perpetual Class Struggle
by Stefano Pietropaoli
pp. 202-219 Issue 11 (6,1) – January-June 2019 ISSN (online): 2539/2239 ISSN (print): 2389-8232 DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.14718/SoftPower.2019.6.1.10
Abstract
We are seeing today an extraordinary form of class war. Its winning weapon is in facing one against another, stable and precarious, old and young, men and women, citizens and foreigners, residents and immigrants. In this scenario, the State —emptied of its political-democratic content— isn’t died: it preserved his administrative and bureaucratic framework, establishing the ideal environment for neo-capitalist ideology. Just like the State, law also experienced an intense transformation, functional to the interests of neo-capitalism.
The State survived as an institution without sovereignty. The lost sovereignty decomposed the public sphere and allowed the privatization of the political subjects. But sovereignty is not disappeared, people is not necessarily a subject without identity, classes exist and class struggle is not a rusty tool of the old-Marxism. A renewed popular sovereignty, restrained by politics, represents, perhaps, the only actual alternative to the “sovereignty of the market”.