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summary of the arguments in Empire, in particular Negri & Hardt’s contention that Marx’s conception of class struggle is obsolete and that globalisation can be understood as capitalism's response to class struggle (7,000 words).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