Antonio Negri

Toni Negri and Michael Hardt’s recent works, Empire and Multitude, have earned these authors great popularity in the Anglo-Saxon world. Negri is known in Italy for belonging to autonomia operaia in the ’70s and for being on the receiving end of political persecution by the Italian state at the end of that decade. His earlier work (above all Marx Beyond Marx) was a valid contribution to the understanding of the nature of capitalism and influenced many among us who sought an answer to Marxist objectivism and a theory of history based on class struggle. However, Negri’s earlier work circulated among a restricted public, via obscure publishers. The new Toni Negri for the ‘new’ era emerges in 2000 with Empire. A tome written with literature professor Michael Hardt, Empire was warmly welcomed even by the bourgeois press.

Between "historic compromise" and terrorism
Reviewing the experience of Italy in the 1970s

Negri explains his concept of ‘multitude’ in a response to the SWP’s Alex Callinicos at the European Social Forum in Paris, 2003.

[b]In this interview Negri discusses the influence of Michel Foucault on his work, stating how as the radical Italian left drifted towards vanguardist armed struggle after 1968 [i]“we understood that this military drift was something which the movements would not be concerned with; and that it was not only a humanly unbearable choice, but also

This text is effectively a summary of the arguments in Empire, in particular Negri & Hardt’s contention that Marx’s conception of class struggle is obsolete and that globalisation can be understood as capitalism's response to class struggle (7,000 words).

From Reconstruction 8 (Winter/Spring 1996)

Over the past decade, Toni Negri's association with Deleuze and Guattari has made his name well known to English-language readers of radical thought. But as STEVE WRIGHT shows, Negri's most distinctive ideas would first be debated within the Italian revolutionary movement of the seventies.

Empire, by Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt.

Buy Empire now

Part One

To begin with, let us summarize some developments in capitalist and state policies that seem to characterize the 1980s. These are just approximations, examples that come immediately to mind:- (1) the transition from the 'welfare state' to the 'warfare State';

(2) the 'negative' use of Keynesian economic policy as a means of reactivating a 'positive' use of the market;

Introduction

In the spring of 1996, Marcia Landy and I organized a boundary 2 panel for the annual Rethinking Marxism conference held in Amherst, Massachusetts, in December of that year. We thought that Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak's speculation on the relationship between value and affect (Scattered Speculations) afforded an opportunity for rigorous engagement with these concepts, their historical significance, and their viability for understanding the emerging social formations attending the global economy.

Interview with Toni Negri Le Monde, 03 October 2001

"Do you think that after the attacks of September 11th, it is necessary to make more clearly the distinction between anti-imperialism and anti-americanism?

- I hope that anti-americanism is finished. I have never been so. Likewise I have never been anti-russian. I have always opposed the policy of american capitalism like that of russian socialism.

Translated by Charles T. Wolfe. An earlier version of this essay appeared in Chimeres 17 (Paris, Fall 1992). It is printed in Graduate Faculty Philosophy Journal, Volume 18, Number 2, 1995, in honor of the late Felix Guattari. Hacked from it is printed form and publicized by korotonomedya in May 2002.

I

From the dangerous classes to the danger of the multitude.

Publisher's Preface

Translated by Charles T. Wolfe. This article first appeared in Les Temps Modernes 46:539 (June 1991). It is printed in Graduate Faculty Philosophy Journal Volume 18, Number 2, 1995. Hacked from it is printed form and publicized by korotonomedya in May 2002.And subsequently thieved by us. Thanks people!

1. Spinoza, the Romantic

In the polemics that since 200 years have accompanied the development of the theory of value in political economy, I think that we still have not managed to decouple value from labour.

This essay is excerpted from a work entitled Kairos"”Alma Venus"”Multitude. Nove lezioni impartite a me stesso (Nine Lectures on What I Have Taught Myself) (Rome: Manifesto libri, 2000). Thus, certain notions, e.g., kairos, were introduced in earlier chapters of the work.

1. 'Generalising' the strike.

It is interesting to note how, on the occasion of the Spring and Summer 2002 struggles in Italy, the project of 'generalising' the strike of the movement of precarious and socially diffuse workers, men and women, seemed to be harmlessly and uselessly subsumed beneath the workers' 'general strike'. After this experience, many comrades who participated in the struggle began to realise that whilst the workers' strike was 'damaging' to the employer, the social strike passed without notice through the folds of the global working day. It neither damaged the masters nor helped the mobile and flexible workers. This realisation raised a series of questions: how do we understand how the socially diffuse worker fights; how can he concretely subvert in the space of the metropolis his subordination to production and the violence of exploitation? How does the metropolis present itself to the multitude and is it right to say that the metropolis is to the multitude what the factory used to be to the working class?

Introduction

This text, like the preceding one, belongs to Negri's period in prison and was published, in the same anthology, Macchina Tempo, Feltrinelli, Milano 1982. The problematic of these essays is outlined in the introduction to the article above, 'crisis of the Crisis-state'. The underlying theme is the need to redefine the class antagonism in advanced capitalism, at a level corresponding to the real, total subsumption of society, of social labour as a whole, to capitalist domination. This means, as Negri argues here - but also in earlier articles included in this volume - that the conception of the 'working class' has to be broadened and extended to contradiction and antagonism in the sphere of social reproduction as a whole - ie beyond direct production as such.