Antonio Negri

Antonio Negri, also known as Toni Negri (Padua, Italy, August 1, 1933) is an Italian post-Marxist operaist philosopher and thinker, known for being the co-author of the work Empire, as well as for his work around the figure of Spinoza.

Negri founded the political group Potere Operaio in 1969, being at the same time one of the main members of the autonomous movement Autonomia Operaia. He was accused at the end of the years 1970 on various charges, including being a member of the Red Brigades group (Brigate Rosse or BR), involving him in the assassination of the two-time Prime Minister of Italy Aldo Moro, in 1978. He was accused of several charges, including illicit association and insurrection against the State, and convicted of his participation in two attacks.

Negri fled to France, where, protected by the Mitterrand doctrine, he became a professor at the University of Vincennes and the Collège International de Philosophie, along with Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault and Gilles Deleuze. In 1997, after reaching a plea deal, which reduced his prison time from 30 to 13 years, he returned to Italy to finish his sentence. Many of his most influential books were published while he was in prison. He subsequently resided between Venice and Paris with his companion, the French philosopher Judith Revel.

Activism

He had a brilliant career at the University of Padua and was a full professor at a very young age for his work in the field of "dottrina dello Stato" (theory of the state), a particularly Italian field that relates legal and constitutional theory.

He began his activist career in the 1950s with the Catholic youth activist organization Gioventú Italiana di Azione Cattolica (GIAC). She joined the Italian Socialist Party (PSI) in 1956, of which he was a member until 1963, becoming increasingly involved with the heterodox Marxist movements of the early 1960s.

At the age of twenty he spent some time in a kibbutz in Israel. His contact with this form of collective life strongly influenced his future ideological trajectory, since according to him he commented in an interview: there I became a communist .

In the early 1960s, Negri joined the editorial group of Quaderni Rossi, a newspaper that represented the intellectual revival of Marxism in Italy outside the framework of the PCI, fundamentally promoted by Raniero Panzieri, Mario Tronti, Rita di Leo and Romano Alquati, among others. This group of heterodox Marxists foresaw in advance the cycle of struggles of the mass worker (that is, the massified, deskilled and interchangeable worker figure, a mere functional element of the large mechanized factory), which had its apex in the so-called hot autumn [autunno calor] of 1969, an insurrectional explosion that had its epicenter in the Fiat Mirafiori complex in Turin, as well as in the Petrochemical Complex of Porto Marghera, in the Venetian lagoon.

In 1969, Negri was among the founders of the group Potere Operaio (Worker's Power), a political expression of the most radical operaismo (workerism). Potere Operaio held its last congress in 1973, after which many of its members devoted themselves to the new organizational project of the Autonomía Operaia. Antonio Negri was one of the promoters of this militant experience, which had as its epicenter the new proletarian reality of the Italian metropolises of the crisis and the restructuring of factories and public spending. In particular, Negri contributed to the creation of the newspaper Rosso, based in Milan, which became a publicist reference for the struggles and debates of the new class composition for which Negri and his companions coined the term social worker [operaio sociale].

She has written alongside other famous freelancers associated with the labor, student and feminist movement in Italy during the sixties and seventies, including Raniero Panzieri, Mario Tronti, Sergio Bologna, Romano Alquati, Mariarosa Dalla Costa and Franco Berardi (Bifo). Although he is best known for his work Empire (2000), co-written with Michael Hardt, Negri is the author of several books, in which he proposes original interpretations of the work of Karl Marx or Spinoza's Baruch.

Arrest and exile

On April 7, 1979, at the age of 46, Antonio Negri was arrested and accused of being the intellectual author of the assassination of the Italian Prime Minister Aldo Moro at the hands of the Red Brigades (BR) in 1978, as well as of conspiring to overthrow the government. At that time Negri was a professor of Political Science at the University of Padua, a visiting professor at the École Normale Supérieure and he proclaimed himself a revolutionary Marxist in favor of armed insurrection. Negri has always denied having a personal or ideological relationship with the Red Brigades, which has been corroborated by BR militants themselves.

Most of the charges against Negri (including 17 murders) were dismissed in less than nine months due to lack of evidence. He could not be related to the Red Brigades, so he was accused of & # 34; crimes of association & # 34; and insurrection against the State (charge later revoked) and sentenced to 30 years in prison for being considered "morally responsible" of the acts of violence against the Italian State during the 60s and 70s, due to his writings and his relationship with revolutionary groups and causes. Amnesty International drew attention to the "serious legal irregularities" 3. 4; in the Negri judicial process. Michel Foucault commented in his writing The Masked Philosopher: "Isn't he in prison simply for being an intellectual?"

He spent four years in prison (he narrates part of this experience in The Finland Train), until the Partito Radicale by Marco Pannella, who had worked to achieve his freedom, includes him in one of his electoral lists for the 1983 legislature and was elected. Thanks to parliamentary immunity, Negri was able to leave prison to carry out his duties, however parliament revoked the immunity a few months later. Negri then went into exile to France, where he remained for 14 years, writing and teaching, protected from extradition by the government of François Mitterrand.

In France, Negri taught at the Université de Paris VIII (Saint-Denis) and at the Collège International de Philosophie. Although his resident status in France prevented him from engaging in political activities, he wrote prolifically and participated in a broad coalition of leftist intellectuals. In 1990, Negri, Jean-Marie Vincent and Denis Berger founded the publication Futur Antérieur. The newspaper ceased publication in 1998, but reappeared under the title Multitudes in 2000, with Negri as a member of the international editorial board.

In 1997 Negri returned to Italy voluntarily to serve the remainder of his sentence (which had been reduced to 17 years thanks to successive appeals), in the hope of bringing to public debate the situation of hundreds of exiles and prisoners involved in the political activities of the radical left during the 1960s and 1970s, the so-called "anni di piombo" (years of lead). Negri was immediately taken to Rebibbia prison and later placed under house arrest. Until the end of 2004, Negri enjoyed a regime of freedom under certain conditions.

Writings and political work

Negri's prolific, iconoclastic, highly original and sometimes dense and difficult work attempts to critically review some of the main intellectual currents of the second half of the century XX, putting them at the service of a new Marxist analysis of capitalism. Taking up the lesson of Michel Foucault and his analyzes on biopower, as well as the contributions of the schizoanalysis of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, during the 1980s, years of exile and relative secrecy in Paris, Negri reformulated his research and thought plans. elaborating the bases of the definition of a new figure of Marx's living labor, adequate in an ontological sense to the new completely social dimensions of production, cooperation and command power. This figure, prospective and strategic, as well as conceptual, is the crowd.

The central theses of his work Empire, according to which the nation-state has lost its central role as a primary political formation to make room, in a trendy sense and not exempt from catastrophes, to a global mechanism of diffuse and decentralized power, precisely called Empire. In the work, the hidden actors that have driven these transformations of power and sovereignty have been the struggles of the working class and postcolonial subjects, that is, the transstate dimensions of production and the conflict in the dimensions of the world market have led to an "interregnum", that is, to a networked sphere of world power, the Empire, precisely, in which different actors (monarchical, as is the case of the USA; aristocratic, such as some nation-states and large multinational corporations, and democratic ones, as is the case of NGOs, the mass media) give shape to an imperial constitution, based on networked power. His thesis has sparked enormous controversy, particularly based on the aggressive and unilateralist role adopted by the United States after 9/11.

Among his previous works, two of the most important are surely The Savage Anomaly (1982), where he proposes an original interpretation of the figure of Baruch de Spinoza, and Marx beyond Marx (1996), a series of lectures on the Grundrisse, the body of manuscripts that Karl Marx wrote in preparation for Capital.

In 2005 he expressed an unpopular position within the European radical left, defending the YES in the referendum on the European Constitution in various articles and interviews, also participating, together with Daniel Cohn-Bendit, in an event of the Parti Socialiste (French socialist party) in favor of yes in the French referendum. Negri considered that the European Constitution was positive for reducing the weight of nation-states and increasing the weight of Europe. A defense of Europe can be found in his book Europe and the Empire.

Bibliography available in Spanish

• State form. For the critique of the political economy of administration (2004 [1978])
• Marx beyond Marx: Nine lessons around the Grundisse (2001 [1979])[1]
• The wild anomaly. Test on power and power in Baruch Spinoza (1990 [1981])
• Nomadic truths. For new spaces of freedom (with Félix Guattari) (1999 [1985])
• The train from Finland (1990)
• End of century (1992)
• Constituent power. Testing on the alternatives of modernity (1994)
• Exile (1998)
• Empire (2000) [Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt]
• Art and crowd. Eight letters (2000)
• Subversive Spinoza (2002)
• Intangible Work (2002)[2] (breakable link available on the Internet Archive; see history, first version and last).
• From the return. Biopolitical grant (2003)
• The strategy factory. 33 lessons on Lenin (2004)
• Books of autonomy (2004 [1970-1978])
• Europe and the Empire (2005)
• Multitud (2005)
• GlobAL. Biopower and struggles in a globalized Latin America (with Giuseppe Cocco) (2005)
• Spinoza and us (2011)
• Commonwealth: The Common Revolution Project (2009).[Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt]
• Declaration (2012) [Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt]
• Biocapitalism, government processes and social movements (2013) [Antonio Negri, Michael Hardt, Sandro Mezzadra]
• The coming Prince of the crowd (2014)
• Biocapitalism. Between Spinoza and the political constitution of the present (2014)
• The wild anomaly. Test on power and power in Baruch Spinoza, Buenos Aires, Waldhuter Editors, 2015. Translation: María Teresa D'Meza and Rodrigo Molina-Zavalía. ISBN 978-987-2754-08-2
• Marx and Foucault. Trials 1, Buenos Aires, Editorial Cactus, 2019. Translation: Fernando Venturi. ISBN 978-987-3831-35-5
• From the factory to the metropolis. Tests 2, Buenos Aires, Editorial Cactus, 2020. Translation: Fernando Venturi. ISBN 978-987-3831-48-5
• Spinoza yesterday and today. Tests 3, Buenos Aires, Editorial Cactus, 2021. Translation: Emilio Sadier. ISBN 978-987-3831-45-6

Biographical documentaries

• "N" by Negri
• Antonio Negri, a revolt that never ends
• Another Round of Tuerka - Paul Churches with Toni Negri (Complete Program)