Antonio Negri is the most popular theorist of autonomist marxism, an Italian tradition that emerged in the late fifties and early sixties with the publication of the first edition of Quaderni Rossi and the growing and spontaneous worker struggles emerging at the same time in Italian factories. Negri participated in journals such as Quaderni Rossi and Classe Operaia with other autonomists such as Raniero Panzieri, Mario Tronti, Sergio Bologna, and Romano Alquati. Precociously brilliant, Negri was made professor at the University of Padova in his twenties, where he participated in the founding of Potere Operaio (its Veneto-Emiliano section was the one he was associated with) and the worker struggles the group engaged in around factories such as the petrochemical plant in Porto Marghera. He and the group around him in Padova were accused of being the moving intellectual and political force behind the terrorism of the Italian Red Brigades in 1979. He spent a number of years in prison before being brought to trial, and after his election to parliament as a Radical Party deputy in 1983 and the subsequent stripping of his parliamentary immunity he fled to France. There he taught political science at the Université de Paris VIII (St. Denis), founded the journal Futur Anterieur, and collaborating with authors such as Gilles Deleuze, Felix Guattari, and Yann Moulier-Boutang. He returned to Italy in 1997, when he was imprisoned again for a total of twenty-five months.
autonomist Marxism
postructuralism
Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari
Maurizio Lazzarato
Franco Berardi (Bifo)
Mario Tronti
Mariarosa Dalla Costa
Disobbedienti
Social Centres
Antonio Negri’s work has spanned
philosophy, political theory, and cultural criticism. Conceptually, his work
relating to social movements has expanded upon Mario Tronti’s notion that
working class struggle determines and anticipates capitalist organization and
command. Negri has been a careful reader and commentator on the work of Marx
(in Marx Beyond Marx), Lenin (in the untranslated 33 Lezioni su Lenin) and Spinoza
(The Savage Anomaly). One of his most important contributions was the notion
of the “social worker”, a post-Fordist subject he suggested was
heir to the revolutionary activity of the Fordist factory “mass worker”.
Here he suggested that as capital was forced to expand production and domination
across society as a whole, that groups such as students, housewives, and the
unemployed were to be considered the new subjects upon which to base a revolutionary
strategy. His work shifts from the late seventies to the nineties, a time in
which he embraces poststructuralism, begins to repudiate the need for an “external”
force that mobilizes class interest and definitively abandons his tormented
relationship with the party-form. His focus on revolutionary subjectivity shifts
from the notion of the mass worker to that of the self-organizing “multitude”,
a concept that finds its history in the work of Spinoza and through which Negri
tries to avoid some of the pitfalls of the Marxist notion of class.
Revolution Retrieved: Selected Writings on Marx, Keynes, Capitalist Crisis and
New Social Subjects 1967-1983 (London: Red Notes, 1988). Contains the following
essays (date of original Italian publication in parentheses):
Capitalist Domination and Working-Class Sabotage in Working-Class Autonomy and
the Crisis (London: Red Notes/CSE, 1979), pp.93-137. Translated by Committee
April 7. Originally published in Italian in 1978.
Marx Beyond Marx: Lessons on the Grundrisse (South Hadley, MA: Bergin &
Garvey, 1984). Translated by Harry Cleaver, Michael Ryan and Maurizio Viano.
Reprinted, with a revised bibliography, in 1991 by Autonomedia (Brooklyn, NY).
Originally published in Italian in 1979.
The Savage Anomaly: The Power of Spinoza's Metaphysics and Politics (Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 1991). Translated by Michael Hardt. Originally
published in Italian in 1981.
Communists Like Us: New Spaces of Liberty, New Lines of Alliance [written in
collaboration with Felix Guattari] (New York: Semiotext(e), 1990). Translated
by Michael Ryan and Jared Becker. Originally published in French in 1985.
The Politics of Subversion: A Manifesto for the 21st Century (Cambridge: Polity
Press, 1989). Translated by James Newell. Originally published in French in
1986.
Labor of Dionysus: A Critique of the State-Form [written in collaboration with
Michael Hardt] (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994). Translated
by Michael Hardt. Consists of revisions of essays written between the 1960s
and 1990s, as well as new material.
Insurgencies (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999). Translated
by Maurizia Boscagli.
Empire (with Michael Hardt, Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2000)
External links:
Amnesty for Toni Negri
http://lists.village.virginia.edu/~forks/TNmain.htm
“Negri’s Class Analysis: Italian Autonomist Theory in the Seventies”
by Steve Wright
http://lists.village.virginia.edu/~spoons/aut_html/opsoc.html
Text of Negri’s interrogation before his judges
http://lists.village.virginia.edu/~forks/TNinterog.htm
Interview With Negri (1997):
http://lists.village.virginia.edu/~forks/TNinterview1.htm
Collection of Negri Writings Online:
http://www.endpage.com/Archives/Subversive_Texts/Negri/index.php