Antonio Negri

An original member of the Italian Autonomia group Antonio Negri wrote together with many other famous autonomists associated with the "autonomia" movement of Italian workers, students and feminists of the 1960s and 70s, including Raniero Panzieri, Mario Tronti, Sergio Bologna, Romano Alquati, Mariarosa Dalla Costa and Francois Berardi. He later wrote for Futur Antérieur (Future Perfect) with people such as Paul Virno.

Best known as the author, with Michael Hardt, of Information Society, the Network Economy, and globalization, which may account for the relatively high degree of mainstream interest it attracted when it was published in 2000.

Empire has grown in influence since its publication in 2000 and has inspired many projects around the world. Some of these include , Libre Society, , , and many others. The sequel to Empire, called Multitude, was published in August of 2004.

(Antonio Gramsci as point of reference)

The passage toward an informational economy necessarily involves a change in the quality and nature of labour. This is the most immediate sociological and anthropological implication of the passage of economic paradigms. Today information and communication have come to play a foundational role in production processes. [cite]

Biography and Historical Milieu

Perhaps the most telling synopsis of Negri's project comes from a neoliberal critic, , who calls "a postmodern plot to overthrow the City of God."

In fact, Negri's involvement in the early 1950s with the Catholic Worker movement and liberation theology seems to have left a permanent mark upon his thought: His most recent work, Time for Revolution (2003), relies heavily on themes drawn from Augustine of Hippo and Baruch Spinoza, and might rather be described as an attempt to found the City of God without the aid of the "transcendental illusions" and the "theology of Power" that he finds in thinkers as disparate as Martin Heidegger and John Maynard Keynes, extending and attempting to correct the critique of ideology as false consciousness set forth by Karl Marx.

Empire

Capitalism has invested the whole of life; its production is biopolitical. In production, Power is the 'superstructure' of that which stretches out, and is reproduced through society. ... It no longer exploits only workers, but all citizens; it does not pay, but makes others pay it to command and order society. [cite]

[precis tk] [critical responses]

Central Themes in Negri

Among the central themes in Negri are Marxism, Antiglobalization, Anti-capitalism, Postmodernism, Neoliberalism, Democracy, the Common, and the Multitudes.

Although he acknowledges the influence of Michel Foucault, David Harvey's The Condition of Post Modernity (1989), Frederic Jameson's Postmodernism or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (1991) and Deleuze & Guattari's postmodernism, whose only value, in his estimation, is that it has served as a symptom of the historical transition whose dynamics he and Hardt set out to explain in Empire.

(Points of contact with contemporary non-Marxist thought, esp. on globalization)

Recent Works, Affiliations, and Influence

Bibliography/Webography

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