Antonio Negri

Michael Hardt

Discusses how cultural and economic changes around the world have caused a shift in the concepts that shape modern politics and defined the new global order.

Empire

When Empire appeared in 2000, it defined the political and economic challenges of the era of globalization and, thrillingly, found in them possibilities for new and more democratic forms of social organization. Now, with Commonwealth, Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri conclude the trilogy begun with Empire and continued in Multitude, proposing an ethics of freedom for living in our common world and articulating a possible constitution for our common wealth.

Commonwealth

In recent years "leaderless" social movements have proliferated around the globe, from North Africa and the Middle East to Europe, the Americas, and East Asia. Some of these movements have led to impressive gains: the toppling of authoritarian leaders, the furthering of progressive policy, and checks on repressive state forces. They have also been, at times, derided by journalists and political analysts as disorganized and ineffectual, or suppressed by disoriented and perplexed police forces and governments who fail to effectively engage them. Activists, too, struggle to harness the potential of these horizontal movements. Why have the movements, which address the needs and desires of so many, not been able to achieve lasting change and create a new, more democratic and just society? Some people assume that if only social movements could find new leaders they would return to their earlier glory. Where, they ask, are the new Martin Luther Kings, Rudi Dutschkes, and Stephen Bikos? With the rise of right-wing political parties in many countries, the question of how to organize democratically and effectively has become increasingly urgent. Although today's leaderless political organizations are not sufficient, a return to traditional, centralized forms of political leadership is neither desirable nor possible. Instead, as Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri argue, familiar roles must be reversed: leaders should be responsible for short-term, tactical action, but it is the multitude that must drive strategy. In other words, if these new social movements are to achieve meaningful revolution, they must invent effective modes of assembly and decision-making structures that rely on the broadest democratic base. Drawing on ideas developed through their well-known Empire trilogy, Hardt and Negri have produced, in Assembly, a timely proposal for how current large-scale horizontal movements can develop the capacities for political strategy and decision-making to effect lasting and democratic change. We have not yet seen what is possible when the multitude assembles.

Assembly

In their international bestseller Empire, Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri presented a grand unified vision of a world in which the old forms of imperialism are no longer effective. But what of Empire in an age of “American empire”? Has fear become our permanent condition and democracy an impossible dream? Such pessimism is profoundly mistaken, the authors argue. Empire, by interconnecting more areas of life, is actually creating the possibility for a new kind of democracy, allowing different groups to form a multitude, with the power to forge a democratic alternative to the present world order.Exhilarating in its optimism and depth of insight, Multitude consolidates Hardt and Negri’s stature as two of the most important political philosophers at work in the world today.

War and Democracy in the Age of Empire

Multitude

Jim Fleming

Harry Cleaver

A key figure in the Italian "Autonomia" Movement reads Marx's Gr¼ndrisse, developing the critical and controversial theoretical apparatus that informs the "zero-work" strategy and other elements so crucial to this new and "heretical" tendency in Marxist theory. A challenge to both capitalist and socialist apologists for waged slavery.

Lessons on the Grundrisse

Marx Beyond Marx

Goodbye Mr. Socialism offers a gripping encounter with one of today’s leading leftists, presenting his most up-to-date analysis of global events and insight into the prospects for the Left in an age of neoliberalism. In his most accessible work yet, philosopher Antonio Negri discusses the state of the global Left since the end of the Cold War and suggests a new politics in a series of rousing conversations with Raf Valvola Scelsi. Scelsi prompts Negri to critique the episodes in the post–Cold War period that have afforded the Left opportunities to rethink its strategies and objectives. Addressing the twilight of social democracy, Negri offers a compelling defense of the prospects for social transformation.

Goodbye Mr. Socialism

This is not a manifesto. Manifestos provide a glimpse of a world to come and also call into being the subject, who although now only a specter must materialize to become the agent of change. Manifestos work like the ancient prophets, who by the power of their vision create their own people. Today's social movements have reversed the order, making manifestos and prophets obsolete. Agents of change have already descended into the streets and occupied city squares, not only threatening and toppling rulers but also conjuring visions of a new world. More important, perhaps, the multitudes, through their logics and practices, their slogans and desires, have declared a new set of principles and truths. How can their declaration become the basis for constituting a new and sustainable society? How can those principles and truths guide us in reinventing how we relate to each other and our world? In their rebellion, the multitudes must discover the passage from declaration to constitution.

Declaration

"Metamorphoses: art and immaterial labour" talk given at the Tate Britain, 19 Jan. 2008.

Art and Multitude

Communists Like Us (Semiotext)

Empire. Studienausgabe. Die neue Weltordnung.

Stefano Boeri

Akeel Bilgrami

Robert Misik

Upendra Baxi

Iain Chambers

Isolde Charim

Carlos Basualdo

Homi Bhabha

Marta Calsina

Gerald Eibegger

Elsa LUpez

Rudolf Scholten

Zhiyuan Cui

Documenta 11_Platform1

Democracy Unrealized

Ed Emery

Essays

Marx and Foucault

Reason, Ideology and the Bourgeois Project (Radical Thinkers)

Political Descartes

La forma Stato. Per la critica dell'economia politica della Costituzione

Nanni Balestrini

In 1970s Italy a young working class man joins a political protest movement, tries to help set up a free radio station, is arrested, and endures the brutalities of imprisonment.

The Unseen (Second Edition)

A Critique of the State-form

Labor of Dionysus

Today, Empire no longer has an outside: it no longer tolerates realities external to itself. Hence every war cannot but be a civil war, an internal battle, a domestic strife. But if the enemy is always within, militarization is part and parcel of normalization and every war necessarily appears as a policing operation. And yet has the sun really set on the old materialist dream of transforming social conflict into the beginnings of liberation? In the cracks of Empire one can discern an emergent capacity to remould the world. The anti-Empire is represented by the multitude, the collection of impassioned and desiring individuals whose potential for action offers the best hope for a better world. In this book Antonio Negri explains the key concepts and methods which he and Michael Hardt have used to analyse Empire and the new forms of power and counter-power that are shaping and reshaping our world today. Through five introductory lectures and several supporting texts Negri constructs a democratic discourse on globalization, renews the premises of a materialist analysis of social and political life and offers some glimpses of the future.

Empire and Beyond

Imperialism as we knew it may be no more, but Empire is alive and well. It is, as Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri demonstrate in this bold work, the new political order of globalization. It is easy to recognize the contemporary economic, cultural, and legal transformations taking place across the globe but difficult to understand them. Hardt and Negri contend that they should be seen in line with our historical understanding of Empire as a universal order that accepts no boundaries or limits. Their book shows how this emerging Empire is fundamentally different from the imperialism of European dominance and capitalist expansion in previous eras. Rather, today’s Empire draws on elements of U.S. constitutionalism, with its tradition of hybrid identities and expanding frontiers.Empire identifies a radical shift in concepts that form the philosophical basis of modern politics, concepts such as sovereignty, nation, and people. Hardt and Negri link this philosophical transformation to cultural and economic changes in postmodern society—to new forms of racism, new conceptions of identity and difference, new networks of communication and control, and new paths of migration. They also show how the power of transnational corporations and the increasing predominance of postindustrial forms of labor and production help to define the new imperial global order.More than analysis, Empire is also an unabashedly utopian work of political philosophy, a new Communist Manifesto. Looking beyond the regimes of exploitation and control that characterize today’s world order, it seeks an alternative political paradigm—the basis for a truly democratic global society.

Cesare Casarino

A publishing event -- the history and evolution of Antonio Negri's philosophical and political thought. A leading Marxist political philosopher and intellectual firebrand, Antonio Negri has inspired anti-empire movements around the world through his writings and personal example. In Praise of the Common, which began as a conversation between Negri and literary critic Cesare Casarino, is the most complete review of the philosopher's work everpublished. It includes five exchanges in which the two intellectuals discuss Negri's evolution as a thinker from 1950 to the present, detailing for the first time the genealogy of his concepts.

A Conversation on Philosophy and Politics

In Praise of the Common

Antonio Negri wrote the two essays that comprise Time for Revolution while serving a prison sentence for alleged involvement with radical left-wing groups. Although the essays were written two decades apart, their concerns are the same: is there a place for resistance in a society utterly subsumed by capitalism? In the wake of the global crisis of capitalism heralded by the 2008 crash, the question has never been more relevant and Negri remains an insightful and passionate guide to any attempt to answer it.

Antonio Negri

Books

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