Empire, by Hardt and Negri

[theuproar]

I'm helping a friend, who is a Soviet Marxism student/scholar, pore over some books in his assigned reading list. One of them is Empire.

There is a particular line in the first chapter that I'm a little confused about, and perhaps some of you could unpack it for me.

"...the liberal ideology that rests on the peaceful concert of juridical forces and its supersession in the market; and the socialist ideology that focuses on international unity through the organization of struggles and the supersession of right."

I'm a little confused by the syntax of "juridical forces and its supersession in the market", and the semantics of "right", which seems to be Right (with a big R).

[Zalkin]

The supersession of right should not be glossed as vanquishing the Right-wing. Its meaning is stronger and broader than that. They mean that socialism seeks a socioeconomic political order beyond the bourgeois liberal framework of civil and/or human rights. Think back to Marx's critique of rights in his early work on Hegel's Philosophy of Right and in On the Jewish Question.

As for "the peaceful concert of juridical forces" what they mean is that liberalism conceives of the state in terms of legal norms and their transparent bureaucratic enactment. The state is founded on a constitution that spells out all of its powers. The political order consists of laws that are publicly available and before which everyone is equal. These laws are carried out by legally mandated forces of the state, which act transparently and in scrupulous accordance with the law as written.

Simply put, politics is not about the struggle between opposing classes or irreconcilable interests. To the extent that conflict exists, it takes the form of peaceful debate between rational persons.

The part about "its supersession in the market" is harder to explain, in part because I'm not sure what "its" refers back to. My take on it is that liberalism denies politics as struggle at two levels. First, as we just saw, in its emphasis on the rule of rational law. Secondly, its economic ideology of emergent social order (i.e. the invisible hand of the market) through autonomous individuals freely entering into contract with each other again denies the political reality of collective social struggle.

[theuproar]

"Its" is equally vague in the context of the preceding paragraphs, as well. That was part of my confusion.

Thanks for the explanation. I have a better grip on it now.