Antonio Negri Quotes on Politics
Antonio Negri’s Empire (2000, with Michael Hardt), Multitude (2004), and the long sequence of theoretical and political writings give twentieth-century radical Italian political philosophy its most influential late synthesis. The central thesis of the Empire trilogy is that the imperialism of the long nineteenth and twentieth centuries has given way in the era of globalization to a deterritorialized planetary sovereignty (Empire) whose proper political opposition is the corresponding planetary multitude — the productive cooperative network of singularities that constitutes the principal contemporary subject of revolutionary transformation. The framework, drawing on autonomist Marxism, Spinoza, Foucault, and Deleuze, shaped contemporary global radical political theory and the broader engagement with the politics of immaterial labor and biopolitical production.
Quotes
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Attributed to Antonio Negri:
“Empire is the political form of post-Fordist capitalism.”
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“The multitude is the productive flesh of the world.”
(62) -
Attributed to Antonio Negri:
“Living labor is always already in excess of what capital can capture.”
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Attributed to Antonio Negri:
“Constituent power must never be reabsorbed into constituted power.”
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Attributed to Antonio Negri:
“The struggle is the source; capital is the parasite.”
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“Empire is emerging today as the center that supports the globalization of productive networks and casts its widely inclusive net to try to envelop all power relations within its world order — and yet at the same time it deploys a powerful police function against the new barbarians and the rebellious slaves who threaten its order.”
(20) -
“The refusal of work and authority, or really the refusal of voluntary servitude, is the beginning of liberatory politics.”
(204) -
“[No] effective blueprint [of a political alternative to Empire] will ever arise from a theoretical articulation such as ours.”
(206) -
“[on zapatistas] The goal has never been to defeat the state and claim sovereign authority but rather to change the world without taking power.”
Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire | (85) -
“The task of a theory of class is to identify the existing conditions for potential collective struggle and express them as a political proposition.”
Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire | (104) -
“Our claim is that a common political project is possible. This possibility of course will have to be verified and realized in practice. … We are capable of democracy. The challange is to organize it politically.”
Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire | (226) -
“The political program of nation building in countries like Afghanistan and Iraq is one central example of the productive project of biopower and war. Nothing could be more postmodernist and antiessentialist than this notion of nation building.”
Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire