Re: Negri (fwd)

This is part of a longer paper on autonomia.  I have tried to delete a 
fair proportion of it, but ultimately failed.  There is a useful (but by 
now a little out of date) bibliography at the end of Negri's _Marx Beyond 
Marx_ (Autonomedia), a volume which seems fairly accessible.

Just to correct the post 
Judith forwarded, as far as I know Negri was actually sentenced in 
absentia to 30 years.

However, by the sound of it, the 4 year sentence may be from a more 
recent trial, but this seems unlikely.  Among the more ironic facts of 
Italian political history is that while convicted terrorists like Renato 
Curcio (leader of the Red Brigades) are out of prison now, many of those 
high up in government in the late 70s are in prison on corruption charges.

There are a number of sources on the 7 April trials, perhaps among the 
best being the Red Notes pamphlet, _After Marx, Jail_.  At the time (late 
70s, early 80s) the whole issue was indeed something of an international 
scandal, and petitions were written and signed by (among others) Deleuze, 
Guattari and Sartre.  Cf. too the Semiotext(e) special issue (3.3) on 
autonomia.

Further, re. the original message, I believe that Negri is alive and well 
and living in Paris (with Tom Lehrer?).  He has recently published a book 
co-written with Michael Hardt called _The Labor of Dionysus_ (Minnesota).

Jon Beasley-Murray
Department of English and Comp. Lit.
U. of Wisconsin-Milwaukee
jbmurray@xxxxxxxxxxx

---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Wed, 20 Jul 1994 12:07:44 -0500 (CDT)
From: Jonathan Beasley Murray <jbmurray@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Subject: Re: Autonomia (long message!)

                   i. operaismo and autonomia

     Toni Negri is the most widely known theorist of so-called
"autonomist" marxism (or autonomia), a diverse movement in 1970s
Italian political and intellectual culture that developed from
1960s Italian "workerism" (or operaismo).  Now that four of his
books have been translated into English, Negri has in effect been
made into the sole representative of an otherwise neglected
theoretical tradition.  That he has achieved this relative
prominence is in large part because of the circumstances
surrounding the autonomists' decline: Negri became notorious for
his alleged role in the kidnapping and murder of Christian Democrat
patriarch Aldo Moro in 1978.  Negri was accused of direct
involvement in the kidnapping, imprisoned in 1979, elected to the
Italian Parliament in 1983 and thus subsequently released.  Shortly
afterwards he went into exile in France and was sentenced in
absentia to thirty years for "subversive association."
     The subsequent prominence given to Negri as an individual
theorist (he is the only autonomist who has had book-length texts
translated into English) undoubtedly distorts any interpretation
both of his work, and of the intellectual contexts and milieu from
which it arises.  

[deletion]

Moulier [in the introduction to _The Politics of Subversion_ 
acknowledges] that the lack of an anthology of the major texts of 
operaismo and autonomia is complicated and
supplemented by "the problem of the aridity or the obscurity of
this form of Marxism which is like no other manifestation we have
known" (5).  Though its fearsome difficulty is, I would suggest,
hardly the foremost reason for the poor dissemination of this
tradition outside Italy, this is not a factor to be taken lightly;
clearly to be arid and obscure by comparison to other marxist
discourses is to be arid and obscure indeed.
     Despite this, however, and without going so far, for example,
as to say with Jim Fleming that Negri's Marx Beyond Marx is "one of
the most crucial documents in European Marxism since . . . well,
since maybe ever" (Marx Beyond Marx vii, Fleming's ellipsis), I
would suggest that autonomia constitutes a significant challenge
not only to the interminable debates within marxist theory itself,
but also to the major paradigms of cultural studies in both Britain
and the US.  

[deletion]

        ii. from Quaderni Rossi to "wages for housework"

     To understand the autonomists' theoretical innovations--and
thus to understand Negri's own conception of the ethical multitude-
-we must briefly examine at least a small portion of the history of
postwar Italy to which they are intimately tied.  Some of the
difficulty the texts present can be ameliorated if returned to the
context of the social movements in what Negri terms "this odd
country of ours" ("I, Toni Negri" 255).
     The precursor of autonomia, operaismo, can be traced back to
the review Quaderni Rossi ("Red Notes"), founded in September 1961
by Raniero Panzieri, Mario Tronti, Romano Alquati and Toni Negri. 
This review was only one of the many small, obscure and short-lived
expressions of the left-wing intelligentsia that were current in
the early 1960s; however, as Lumley says of both Quaderni Rossi and
the subsequent Classe Operaia ("Working Class"), "[t]heir role has
retrospectively acquired mythic qualities"  (States of Emergency
37).  These journals formed the nucleus of the first attempts to
theorize and practice left-wing politics outside the Italian
Communist Party (PCI) and its associated union federations,
primarily the Confederazione Generale Italiana dei Lavoratori
(CGIL).  

[deletion]

Importantly [...] during the Italian
"economic miracle" of the late 50s and early 60s, the expansion of
the Northern industrial base (which created some of the largest
concentrations of industrial activity in Western Europe) fueled a
massive series of internal migrations, first from the North-East
and later from the largely rural South, to the "industrial
triangle" of Turin, Milan and Genoa.  [...] These new arrivals 
significantly
altered the composition of the Italian industrial working class
and--in part because they were soon consigned to the bottom of the
blue collar hierarchy, in part because they brought no tradition of
adaptation to Fordist and Taylorist divisions of labor--found it
hard to accept that "the key mechanisms of division and
hierarchical control within the factory were not comprehensively
challenged by the unions" (Lumley 25).
     The intellectuals of Quaderni Rossi were inspired by this
mounting frustration in the factories, which was marked above all
by the Piazza Statuto incident in 1962 when Turin FIAT workers
attacked union offices.  However, they had also been given room to
manoeuver following the crisis of PCI legitimacy after Khruschev's
revelations in 1956 [...]
Their point of departure was an analysis of the current political
situation situated resolutely del punto di vista operaio--"from the
working class point of view."  

[deletion]

     












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