Antonio Negri 1933 – 2023

Antonio Negri was an Italian Marxist political philosopher and revolutionary intellectual, a leading figure of the Italian operaismo movement of the 1960s and 1970s, and a co-author with Michael Hardt of the influential Empire trilogy. Marx Beyond Marx, written during his imprisonment, developed a heterodox reading of the Grundrisse, in which living labor is the constitutive force from which capital must always extract itself. Empire, Multitude, and Commonwealth proposed a global political theory of post-Fordist capitalism and of the multitude as the productive social force capable of constituting an alternative to it.

Antonio 'Toni' Negri was born at Padua in August 1933 in a left-wing Catholic family — his father, a Communist, died of injuries from a Fascist beating before Negri was two. He took his doctorate at Padua in 1956 and was appointed professor of state doctrine there in 1967, becoming a leading theorist of the Italian operaismo and Autonomia movements and a founder of Potere Operaio. Arrested in April 1979 on charges connected with the Red Brigades' kidnap of Aldo Moro, he was elected to the Italian parliament in 1983 from prison, fled to France, and lived in Paris under the protection of Mitterrand until his voluntary return to serve a reduced sentence in Italy in 1997.

His many books include Marx Beyond Marx (1979), the great Spinoza study The Savage Anomaly (1981), The Politics of Subversion (1989), Insurgencies (Il potere costituente, 1992), and the four-volume series with Michael Hardt: Empire (2000), Multitude (2004), Commonwealth (2009), and Assembly (2017).

Negri reread Spinoza's Ethics as a metaphysics of the constituent power of the multitude and applied that framework to a Marxism in which capital is permanently decentred and resistance arises from the cooperative creativity of immaterial labour. The Empire trilogy gave the alter-globalisation movement of the 2000s its central vocabulary. He died in Paris in December 2023.