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Antonio Negri

63 quotes

“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 — and yet at the same time it deploys a powerful police function against the new barbarians and the rebellious slaves who threaten its order.”
Antonio Negri (1933–2023) said by 2023 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“We are by no means opposed to the globalization of relationships as such—in fact, as we said, the strongest forces of Leftist internationalism have effectively led this process. The enemy, rather, is a specific regime of global relations that we call Empire.”
Antonio Negri (1933–2023) said by 2023 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The legacy of modernity is a legacy of fratricidal wars, devastating "development," cruel "civilization," and previously unimagined violence. Erich Auerbach once wrote that tragedy is the only genre that can properly claim realism in Western literature, and perhaps this is true precisely because of the tragedy Western modernity has imposed on the world.”
Antonio Negri (1933–2023) said by 2023 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Philosophy is not the owl of Minerva that takes flight after history has been realized in order to celebrate its happy ending; rather, philosophy is subjective proposition, desire, and praxis that are applied to the event.”
Antonio Negri (1933–2023) said by 2023 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“[The] fact of being within capital and sustaining capital is what defines the proletariat as a class.”
Antonio Negri (1933–2023) said by 2023 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The multitude is the real productive force of our social world, whereas Empire is a mere apparatus of capture that lives only off the vitality of the multitude — as Marx would say, a vampire regime of accumulated dead labor that survives only by sucking off the blood of the living.”
Antonio Negri (1933–2023) said by 2023 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Reality and history, however, are not dialectical, and no idealist rhetorical gymnastics can make them conform to the dialect.”
Antonio Negri (1933–2023) said by 2023 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“It is a commonplace of the classical literature on Empire, from Polybius to Montesquieu and Gibbon, that Empire is from its inception decadent and corrupt.”
Antonio Negri (1933–2023) said by 2023 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The refusal of work and authority, or really the refusal of voluntary servitude, is the beginning of liberatory politics.”
Antonio Negri (1933–2023) said by 2023 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“[No] effective blueprint [of a political alternative to Empire] will ever arise from a theoretical articulation such as ours.”
Antonio Negri (1933–2023) said by 2023 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Disobedience to authority is one of the most natural and healthy acts.”
Antonio Negri (1933–2023) said by 2023 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“A specter haunts the world and it is the specter of migration.”
Antonio Negri (1933–2023) said by 2023 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Empire is a very stimulating account of globalisation, but it is hopelessly wrong on two central issues. The state has not withered away. Strong states still exist—USA, China, Germany, etc—but the difference with the past is that there is now only one Empire and this is not the nebulous entity imagined by Cultural Studies, but a real, living organism and it has a name; the United States of America.”
Antonio Negri (1933–2023) first seen 2002 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Tariq Ali, How Bush Used 9/11 to Remap the World. CounterPunch, 8 July 2002.
“The possibility of democracy on a global scale is emerging today for the very first time.”
Antonio Negri (1933–2023) said by 2023 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“When the general population no longer constitutes the armed forces, when the army is no longer the people in arms, then empires fall. Today all armies are again tending to become mercenary armies.”
Antonio Negri (1933–2023) said by 2023 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“All wars today tend to be netwars.”
Antonio Negri (1933–2023) said by 2023 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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.”
Antonio Negri (1933–2023) said by 2023 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“It is not easy for any of us to stop measuring the world against the standard of Europe, but the concept of the multitude requires it of us. It is a challenge. Embrace it.”
Antonio Negri (1933–2023) said by 2023 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Perhaps some day soon we will have arrived at the point when we can look back with irony at the barbaric old times when in order to be free we had to keep our own brothers and sisters slaves or to be equal we were constrained to inhuman sacrifices of freedom.”
Antonio Negri (1933–2023) said by 2023 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The so-called communism of capital, that is, its drive toward an ever more extensive socialization of labor, points ambiguously toward the communism of the multitude.”
Antonio Negri (1933–2023) said by 2023 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“It is no coincidence that the ABM Treaty was signed midway between the delinking of the U.S. dollar from the gold standard in 1971 and the first oil crisis in 1973. These were the years not only of monetary and economic crises but also of both the beginning of the destruction of the welfare state and the shift of the hegemony of economic production from the factory to more social and immaterial sectors. One might think of these various transformations as different faces of one common phenomenon, one grand social transformation. (39)”
Antonio Negri (1933–2023) said by 2023 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“postmodern warfare thus has many of the characteristics of what economists call post-Fordist production: it is based on both mobility and flexibility; it integrates intelligence, information, and immaterial labor; it raises power up by extending militarization to the limits of outer space, across the surfaces of the earth, and to the depths of the oceans.”
Antonio Negri (1933–2023) said by 2023 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“We have to construct the figure of a new David, the multitude as champion of asymmetrical combat, immaterial workers who became a new kind of combatants, cosmopolitan bricoleurs of resistance and cooperation.”
Antonio Negri (1933–2023) said by 2023 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Beginning in the 1970s, however, the techniques and organizational form of industrial production shifted toward smaller and more mobile labor units and more flexible structures of production, a shift often labeled as a move from Fordist to post-Fordist production.”
Antonio Negri (1933–2023) said by 2023 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“[on zapatistas] The goal has never been to defeat the state and claim sovereign authority but rather to change the world without taking power.”
Antonio Negri (1933–2023) said by 2023 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Today we have arrived at a point when the three principles [of modern resistance: 1. measure of efficacy, 2. the form of political and military organization correspond to the current forms of economic and social production, 3. democracy and freedom] coincide. The distributed network structure provides the model for an absolutely democratic organization that corresponds to the dominant forms of economic and social production and is also the most powerful weapon against the ruling power structure.”
Antonio Negri (1933–2023) said by 2023 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“we will argue that the dominant form of contemporary production, which exerts its hegemony over the others, creates "immaterial goods" such as ideas, knowledge, forms of communication, and relationships. … what is produced in this case is not just material goods but actual social relationships and forms of life. We will call this kind of production "biopolitical" to highlight how general its products are and how directly it engages social life in its entirety.”
Antonio Negri (1933–2023) said by 2023 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Multitude is a class concept. … Class is determined by class struggle. There are, of course, in infinite number of ways that humans can be grouped into classes - hair color, blood type, and so forth - but the classes that matter are those defined by the lines of collective struggle. Race is just as much a political concept as economic class is in this regard. … Class is a political concept, in short, in that a class is and can only be a collectivity that struggles in common.”
Antonio Negri (1933–2023) said by 2023 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The task of a theory of class is to identify the existing conditions for potential collective struggle and express them as a political proposition.”
Antonio Negri (1933–2023) said by 2023 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“A multitude is irreducible multiplicity; the singular social differences that constitute the multitude must always be expressed and can never be flattened into sameness, unity, identity, or indifference. … the compact identities of factory workers in the dominant countries have been undermined with the rise of short-term contracts and forced mobility of new forms of work; how migration has challenged traditional notions of national identity; how family identity has changed and so forth. **(105)”
Antonio Negri (1933–2023) said by 2023 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“the question to ask, in other, is not "What is the multitude?" but rather "What can the multitude become?" … common condition, of course, does not mean sameness or unity, but it does require that no differences of nature or kind divide the multitude.”
Antonio Negri (1933–2023) said by 2023 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“multitude is an open and expansive project”
Antonio Negri (1933–2023) said by 2023 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“in any economic system there are numerous different forms of labor that exist side by side, but there is always one figure of labor that exerts hegemony over the others. This hegemonic figure serves as a vortex that gradually transforms other figures to adopt its central qualities.”
Antonio Negri (1933–2023) said by 2023 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“affective labor is biopolitical production in that it directly produces social relationships and forms of life. … When affective production becomes part of waged labor it can be experienced as extremely alienating: I am selling my ability to make human relationships, something extremely intimate, at the command of the client and the boss.”
Antonio Negri (1933–2023) said by 2023 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“the hegemony of immaterial labor does, though, tend to change the conditions of work. Consider, for example, the transformation of the working day in the immaterial paradigm, that is the increasingly indefinite division between work time and leisure time. In the industrial paradigm workers produced almost exclusively during the hours in the factory. When production is aimed at solving a problem, however, or creating and idea or a relationship, work time tends to expand to entire time of life. And idea or image comes to you not only in the office but also in the shower or in your dreams.”
Antonio Negri (1933–2023) said by 2023 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“in general, the hegemony of immaterial labor tends to transform the organization of production from the linear relationships of assembly line to the innumerable and indeterminate relationships of distributed networks.”
Antonio Negri (1933–2023) said by 2023 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“this is not to say, we repeat, that the conditions of labor and production are becoming the same throughout the world or throughout the different sectors of the economy. The claim is rather is that many singular instances of labor processes, productive conditions, local situations, and lived experiences coexist with a "becoming common", at a different level of abstraction, of the forms of labor and the general relations of production and exchange - and that there is no contradiction between this singularity and commonality.”
Antonio Negri (1933–2023) said by 2023 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“In the same way that the figure of the peasant tends to disappear, so too does the figure of the industrial worker, the service industry worker and all other separate categories.”
Antonio Negri (1933–2023) said by 2023 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The contradictory conceptual couple, identity and difference, is not the adequate framework for understanding the organization of the multitude. Instead we are a multiplicity of singular forms of life and at the same time share a common global existence. The anthropology of the multitude is an anthropology of singularity and commonality.”
Antonio Negri (1933–2023) said by 2023 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“We share bodies with two eyes, ten fingers, ten toes; we share life on this earth; we share capitalist regimes of production and exploitation; we share common dreams of a better future.”
Antonio Negri (1933–2023) said by 2023 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“All of those who are "without" - without employment, without residence, without housing - are really excluded only in part.”
Antonio Negri (1933–2023) said by 2023 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“what is called the flexibility of the labor market means that no job is secure. There is no longer a clear division but rather a large gray area in which all workers hover precariously between employment and unemployment. Second there is no "reserve" in the sense that no labor power is outside the process of social production. The poor, the unemployed, and the underemployed in our societies are in fact active in social production even when they do not have a waged position. (131)”
Antonio Negri (1933–2023) said by 2023 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“In the contemporary economy, however, and with the labor relations of post-Fordism, mobility increasingly defines the labor market as a whole, and all categories are tending toward the condition of mobility and cultural mixture common to the migrant. **133”
Antonio Negri (1933–2023) said by 2023 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Fleeing from a life of constant insecurity and forced mobility is good preparation for dealing with and resisting the typical forms of exploitation of immaterial labor.”
Antonio Negri (1933–2023) said by 2023 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“In fact, the old Marxist distinctions between productive and unproductive labor, as well as that between productive and reproductive labor, which were always dubious, should now be completely thrown out.”
Antonio Negri (1933–2023) said by 2023 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Contemporary capitalist production is characterized by a series of passages that name different faces of the same shift: from the hegemony of industrial labor to that of immaterial labor, from Fordism to post-Fordism, and from the modern to the postmodern.”
Antonio Negri (1933–2023) said by 2023 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“[Michel Foucault] argues, prison resembles the factory, which resembles the school, which resembles the barracks, which resembles the hospital and so forth. They all share a common form that Foucault links to the disciplinary paradigm. Today, by contrast, we see network everywhere we look.”
Antonio Negri (1933–2023) said by 2023 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Material production - the production, for example, or cars, televisions, clothing, and food - creates the means of social life. … Immaterial production, by contrast, including the production of ideas, knowledges, communication, cooperation, and affective relations, tends to create not the means of social life but social life itself.”
Antonio Negri (1933–2023) said by 2023 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The capitalist call workers to the factory, for example, directing them to collaborate and communicate in production and giving them the means to do so. In the paradigm of immaterial production, in contrast, labor itself tends to produce the means of interaction, communication, and cooperation for production directly. Affective labor always directly constructs a relationship. (147)”
Antonio Negri (1933–2023) said by 2023 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Every identity, such (third) critics say, even the multitude, must be defined by its remained, those outside of it, call them excluded, the abject, or the subaltern. … There can certainly be points or nodes outside a network but none are necessarily outside. Its boundaries are indefinite and open. … None is necessarily excluded but this inclusion is not guaranteed: the expansion of the common is a practical, political manner. (226)”
Antonio Negri (1933–2023) said by 2023 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source