Hey ho, multitude, let’s go: Antonio Negri discusses with visitors to the 14th Documenta in Athens in 2016.
Photo: NIKOS LOLIS/dpa
The Italian philosopher and Marxist strategist Antonio Negri died in Paris at the weekend at the age of 90. Together with the American literary scholar Michael Hardt, he formed a productive author duo that attempted to reformulate Marxist theory at the beginning of the 21st century: first came “Empire” (2000), then “Multitude” (2006) and finally “Common Wealth« (2009) into the discussion.
After the collapse of real socialism, in the midst of the stagnation of the Zapatista movement in Mexico and at the same time as the new awakening critical of globalization, Negri and Hardt presented a grand narrative in “Empire” that culminated in the invocation of a new, communist and classless society. This was boldly written towards the end of history, and quite a few left-wing initiatives and projects, such as the Viennese magazine “Grundrisse”, explicitly referred to the proposals developed by Negri and Hardt. But significant parts of the left-wing community, to which both feel committed, rebelled. Her theory turned out to be too flowery, not Marxist enough, too anarchoid; incidentally, “Empire” is reminiscent of professionally optimistic managerial reading.
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The optimistic outline of a new, network-like empire that had left behind the dominance of old imperialist nation states or militarily ruling hegemonic states in the world system was criticized. In particular, the Bush administration’s unilaterally fought Iraq War in 2003 seemed to represent a return of classic imperialism and denied this imperial network theory. Hardt and Negri also had to correct themselves in “Common Wealth,” which contains passages about the recent Gulf War, but in it imperial and imperialist actions only appeared as exceptions: the neoconservative Bush adventure is interpreted as a random anomaly and a failed coup that… The tendency towards global governance as a post-democratic practice of rule by capital was only briefly interrupted, which is located more in Davos, the venue for the annual World Economic Forum, than in Washington.
Post-operaism developed from so-called operaism, an Italian Marxism that placed the behavior of the working class at the center of its considerations and research. Post-operaism emerged in the 1970s and was shaped as a theory by the struggles of Italian youth and young workers in the 1960s and 1970s. Based on his experience of the class struggles during this time, he knows that the work ethic is quite full of holes. He offers a description of capitalist society against the background of social conflicts and can thus perceive fractures and processes that are lost in other varieties of Marxism.
Negri, who was born into a rural background in Padua near Venice on August 1, 1933, was a professor of political theory as a young man. The Operaists began in the early 1960s in the context of the Socialist Party, from which they mostly distanced themselves. In 1969, Negri founded the left-wing radical alliance Potere Operaio (Workers’ Power), which kept a long distance from parliamentarism and thus from both the Socialist and Communist parties. Based on this, Negri became the theorist of Autonomia in the 1970s: the autonomous groups that, against the Attendism of the traditional left, insisted that the forms of anti-capitalist self-empowerment should be practiced in the now and here. After the kidnapping and murder of Aldo Moro by the Red Brigades in 1978, the repressive state proclaimed Negri as its supposed head. For this he was sentenced to 34 years in prison, but he went into exile in France. When he returned to Italy in 1997, he was arrested and allowed to go to prison, but was no longer allowed to teach. He was only released in 2003.
Negri’s post-operaism, developed in the noughties, has something of a colorful magic box. Postoperaists are sometimes better, sometimes worse magicians who produce huge conceptual smokescreens and make everything under the sun disappear into hats and conjure up other things. And Negri was a great magician. He enchanted German universities, galleries and museums – and with his theory in their ears, some dressed up in imaginative plague suits to demonstrate at places of supposed power such as Davos or Genoa. Who still remembers the Tute Bianche?
Negri was a player with concepts, always relaxed and never polemical. Foucault’s concept of biopolitics, which is actually associated with state control and governmentality, simply underwent a positive recoding. For Negri and Hardt, biopolitics was the multiple blurring of old boundaries such as between culture and nature, the emergence of new subjectivities and a generally increased ability of the multitude to control life and productive activity itself. In addition to the creative use of Marx’s terms, there are also outrageous corruptions of Marx’s intention. Where Marx used the concept of value exclusively for capitalist societies, meaning that a communist society is beyond value, Negri and Hardt immediately wanted to design a “new theory of value” that would put resistance at the center because this would constitute value. Only when the state and capital can no longer keep “the resistance of the multitude, the workforce and the social singularities in their entirety under control” will “value exist.” That may have read nicely, but it is not Marxist.
In Germany, post-operaism encountered a scene interested in Marx that was largely influenced by the so-called value criticism. Two extreme forms of un-Marxist Marxism met here. In both representations and theories there was a fusion of worker and work. They are no longer separated from each other. In the criticism of value, work is as damnable as the workers, who are viewed as identical to work and were therefore denounced as “spent,” as was the case by the great theorist of value criticism, Robert Kurz, who has long since died.
Post-operaism, in the old social democratic style, portrays class not as a torn, potentially negative force, but as a gigantic positive entity. In order to objectify the supposed power, the forms of work with which a small part of the multitude is entrusted are described as preliminary forms or immediately present communist assets. In order to liberate this, the multitude only has to shed its parasitic outer shell, since communism already exists as a technical one. Suffering – to use Adorno’s words – or the torment and strain of wage labor – to use Marx’s words – has been driven out of theory. The post-operaist description of reality turns out to be an ideology when one reflects on the terror of new independent work, on the situation in writing rooms, web design offices, in private and inpatient care or on the home laptop.
However, post-operaism does not trust its own prophecies at all. In “Common Wealth,” Hardt and Negri clearly acknowledged that we are currently dealing with weak subjects. They made “fair and reasonable demands on the powers that be today,” such as those for basic income, basic education, global citizenship, and the dismantling of private property. However, they formulated this in the expectation that those in power would not respond to it. An exception for them seems to be the demand for a guaranteed minimum income, because Negri and Hardt expected concessions from the ruling party. Separating income from work would give everyone more control over time, and autonomy over time is essential for capital “to promote productivity in the biopolitical economy.” But the debates about basic security go in a completely different direction, and not just in Germany.
On the other hand, however, where other authors coming from Marxism and social struggles only remain within the Keynesian framework and appeal to the state in view of the crisis-ridden world, Negri and Hardt always focused on the upheaval, on the Jacquerie and their potential attentive. Since outrage and revolt are not sufficient, but necessary, rebellious intersections are needed in which the common as well as the singularities are present. Negri’s call for liberation, which must start from his own experience and the identity politics based on it, but must not be limited to it, is formulated just as clearly and clearly as his rejection of Gramscian alliance politics, which simply wants to collect identities and put them on a common platform sabotaged the process of self-liberation from fixed identities. This was Antonio Negri’s achievement in the noughties of 21st century capitalism. Others would have to judge his role in the 70s and 80s of the 20th century.
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