The Provisional Power. Marx and Politics as a Critique of Society

The overall aim of this book is therefore to reconstruct the Marxian semantics of power and to investigate its complex articulations to identify what Marx sees as the coordinates of a political action capable of challenging the constellation of powers that legitimise and reproduce capitalist society. It is thus possible to highlight the existence of a complex semantic field in which different terms establish a conceptual constellation in which, unlike the liberal and democratic doctrines, political and social subjugation are not alternative and independent, but overlap to the point of constituting a single field of tension. The analysis of this semantic and conceptual field makes it possible to redefine the fundamental features of the Marxian critique of a society constituted by the thresholds of power that characterise it. At the same time, since power is not something that can simply be seized, it is possible to grasp how, according to Marx, the working class can constitute itself as an autonomous power capable of confronting the domination of capital.