Arif KOŞAR

Antonio Negri, one of the most important representatives of the Italian operaismo (labourism) and Autonomist Marxism tradition, recently passed away.

It is not possible to cover his multidimensional theoretical work, ranging from state theory to philosophy, from international relations to political economy, under a few headings. However, it can be said that the main motivation behind all his theoretical activity, just like his fellow operaists, was to understand the changing composition of the working class and to develop appropriate forms of struggle.

For this he was always in pursuit of the "new". He tried to theorise it. However, at every point where the ideological and political struggle got stuck, he found the way out in the - partial - acceptance of liberal ideological assumptions. In his 90 years of life, this process unfortunately dragged him from a radical revolutionary line to a political position that we can call social liberal, which rejects revolutionary transformation.

OPERAISMO

In the 1960s, operaismo, of which Negri was a part and which reflected the very specific conditions of Italy, proposed a new political line with arguments such as the rejection of work, self-valorisation, autonomy, and the primacy of workers' struggle. What made this line interesting and attractive was its opposition to the official (euro) communist and socialist party line of confining the labour movement to bourgeois democracy during the "Italian miracle" of the post-World War 2. Negri stated in April 1979 that "operaismo was an attempt of a political response to the crisis of the labour movement in the 1950s".

For all his criticisms of the operismo tradition and of classical Marxism, Negri, in all his works, maintained his emphasis on the process of production. However, according to Negri, the dividing lines between production and non-production, between economy and politics, were gradually erased. Everything was now production and everyone was a worker ("socially worker"). This meant a radical change in the production process itself. He described this first as post-fordist, then as post-modern transformation. In the end, when everything was considered production, through a conceptual game, capitalist production itself was trivialised in real terms. The link between social class and the relations of production was severed.

This postmodern transformation, according to the operaismo tradition, was not an intrinsic result of the movement of capital, but rather capital's response to the struggle of the working class, which manifested itself in the 1968 revolt. The working class existed independently of capital, it was autonomous. This political framework was philosophically reflected in the rejection of dialectics. According to Negri, dialectics was the expression of the dependence of the working class on capital. It was a duality that enslaved it. It was the imposition of capital. With the rejection of dialectics, the inner autonomy of the working class had to be established and it had to make itself valuable. This would later merge with the poststructuralist analysis of power, and be formulated as a turning away from power in the face of the practices of socialism, as an "exit" and the autonomy of the multitude.

POSTSTRUCTURALIST INFLUENCE

In the 1970s, when women's, youth, environmental and homosexual movements grew rapidly and extra-parliamentary struggle gained strength, operaismo transformed into the Autonomy movement. Negri was not only a popular theorist within the movement but also an influential political figure. In 1979, when the Red Brigades kidnapped and murdered Italian Prime Minister Aldo Moro, the ruling Christian Democrats launched a counter-terrorism campaign to crush all social opposition. Negri was arrested as a kind of spiritual leader, despite the lack of any evidence. He spent four and a half years in prison. He was released when he was elected as a member of parliament on the Radical Party's list, but this time his immunity was lifted. So, he travelled to France and had to live there until 1997.

In France, Negri had the opportunity to get to know poststructuralism, which he had been hugely interested in while in prison. He attended Deleuze's lectures. He wanted to synthesise Italian autonomism and French poststructuralism. In the poststructuralist approach, power operates not on objects but within them, not from above but from below. It is not only a repressive power but also a creative power. It conditions resistance as well as domination, and often the resistance is in its image. The transition from Operaismo's analysis of the "social factory", which includes the whole of society, to the poststructuralist notion of power, which also includes the whole of society, was not difficult. If power and resistance were everywhere, the struggle between the working class and capital had no special meaning. It gave way to the relationship between power and society, and later, borrowing from Spinoza, between biopower and the multitude.

This analysis gave a poststructuralist basis to the rejection of any kind of "micro-power" already present in the Autonomy movement. Party, trade union or socialism were all seen as a form of capitalist power, and models of organisation were proposed that were horizontal and non-hierarchical but unpredictable. In the following years Negri would carry this analysis of power into the argumentation of the decentralised and transnational Empire.

EMPIRE

Negri's poststructuralist - quasi-anarchist synthesis, often described as Autonomist Marxism, was quickly domesticated in the 1990s. In these years the USSR had collapsed and liberalism and capitalism had triumphantly proclaimed their victory and the "end of history". With globalisation, oppressive nation-states would fade, the imperialist conflicts of the past would end, and prosperity and peace would spread across the globe.

Interestingly, Negri shared this hope of liberal globalisationism with a "left" interpretation. In 2000, he and Hardt co-authored the book Empire, which brought them worldwide fame. With this book, Negri and Hardt became, in a sense, the theoretical spokespersons of the alternative globalisation movement. In Empire, the age of imperialism was over, the polarisation and power struggles between imperialist states had come to an end. There was no outside. There was no centre. The oppressive nation states were disappearing. Although there was still a form of hegemony, the Empire was better than the cruel imperialism of the past: "Today we see the Empire eliminating the tyrannical regimes of modern power and at the same time multiplying the potential for freedom."

Optimistic hopes for globalisation and empire might have been credible in the 1990s perhaps to some extent. And they were. Today, however, the picture is quite different. With the rise of China, the idea of decentralisation has become meaningless. The US and China are two centres in their own right, and the economic and political struggle between the imperialists continues at an incredible pace. Russia is challenging NATO with its invasion of Ukraine. The international supply chain, just as in the theory of imperialism, provides an intense flow of surplus-value from the dependent regions of the world to the imperialist centres. At least two foci are taking shape in the struggle to rule and share the world. This is imperialism as we know it, and the series of events of the last 20 years has made the Empire hypothesis an argument that cannot be taken seriously.

MULTITUDE

The opposite of empire was the multitude. Borrowing from Spinoza, multiplicity was the non-power or counter-power. Every "singular" that was opposed to power and had an inherent potential for resistance was a component of the multitude. The transition from Operaismo's assumption of the social worker, that counted everyone in the "social factory" as a worker, to multiplicity was not difficult. Negri thought of the multitude as a class concept and defined it as a product and subject of postmodern transformation.

According to Negri, the basis of postmodern production is immaterial production. What is meant by intangible is the intangible. "... products such as ideas, symbols, codes, texts, linguistic figures, images". Immaterial labour was "labour that not only produces material goods but (...) produces social life itself".  So much so that, interestingly, Negri, with a conceptual sleight of hand, made all kinds of labour immaterial labour. The engineer, the textile worker, the software developer or the stripper... All were immaterial labour and this was the main substance of multiplicity.

He thus forcibly linked multiplicity to labour, but the emphasis had shifted from relations of production to relations of power. Capitalist production itself ceased to be fundamental. The labour-value mechanism based on production had collapsed despite capitalism, as he elaborated - and again coercively - in his book Marx Beyond Marx. In fact, despite Marx's reference to the Grundrisse, this was not the same as the mainstream economists' emphasis on services, knowledge and immaterial production, as well as on the price mechanism.

In fact, despite the reference to Marx's Grundrisse, this was similar to the mainstream economists' rejection of the labour theory of value with its emphasis on services, knowledge and immaterial production, as well as on the price mechanism. The result of all this theoretical activity was the disappearance of the idea of a modifying subject linked to capitalist relations of production. Thus, what remained was an amorphous multitude, an amorphous mass that encompassed everyone except the poststructuralist analysis of power and "centralised power".

Just like the liberal optimism in Empire was invalidated by the overt presence of real imperialism, the multitude would experience a similar outcome with rapid processes of proletarisation. In the 1970s, when it was claimed that the working class had become middle class and even bourgeois, Operaismo overcame this liberal claim by considering social movements as workers and deriving the term "socially worker" through a conceptual operation. Under conditions where the working class had achieved significant economic and democratic gains through the trade union and political struggles of the time, this observation was understandable, but not correct. However, the claim that the working class has been bourgeoisised by the massive income inequality, precariousness, usurpation of vested rights, de-unionisation, privatisation and commodification created by the neoliberal era has become nonsense today. However, Negri had detached the working class from the capitalist production process and this line extended to the multitude. As Negri's political claims softened, the multitude would regress to a kind of civil society activity against power.

AN INJECTION OF CONATUS

One of the main features of Operaismo is the emphasis that the working class, and indeed every identity group, has an inherent autonomy. But where does this autonomous power come from? Negri, who rejected dialectics, would find it in the thought of the 17th century materialist philosopher Spinoza. His multiplicity could both contain differences (modus) and be a single whole (essence). There was no hierarchical relationship.

According to Negri, Spinoza's philosophy was the philosophy of "potentia" (power) against "potestas" (power). The power and autonomous existence of the multitude was based on conatus, an intrinsic quality of every living being, a kind of will to live.  When a metaphysical conatus was injected into the constitution of the human and the multitude through a conceptual operation, for Negri, the exit of the multitude from power and its autonomous establishment was philosophically grounded.

FROM REVOLUTION TO LIBERAL REFORMS...

In the 1960s, in the face of the gains of the working class and its turn towards reformism, Negri and Operaismo implicitly accepted the assumptions of the liberal middle-classisation thesis and set out to search for a new working class. When social movements rose, they thought that they had solved its relationship with the labour movement with a conceptual operation, with the definition of "socially worker", which considered everyone a worker.

It interpreted flexible forms of labour as a tacit acceptance of the working class struggle by capital, as a kind of achievement in this respect. Like the liberals, he saw globalisation, which is nothing but the process of establishing the international domination of capital, as the end of imperialism and a potential for emancipation. As the forms of appropriation of value became more complex, he started from different motives and came to a similar conclusion to mainstream economists that the labour-value mechanism had disappeared.

Under the influence of these theoretical attempts, which had almost no empirical basis, Negri's political approach became increasingly domesticated. For him, capital and power were one and the same, but he took this to such an extreme that the struggle against capital was reduced to the struggle against power everywhere. As the analysis of power and class was detached from production and thus from capitalism, the struggle was limited to a liberalised horizon such as the autonomy of civil society.

For example, in Multitude, written with Hardt, Negri formulated his programme of struggle as follows: "Seismic Adjustment: A Reformist Programme for Capital". This was not an irony. "... at the very least, it was necessary to establish this democracy in order to cure the ills of capital and support the development of bio-political production". The demands put forward for this democracy were quite "reasonable" proposals: Global citizenship, basic income, free access to information and the right to control.

These were demands that even a "consistent" liberal would not object to, if such a thing were possible. The free movement of labour in international markets, a minimum basic income for all to prevent social collapse, free access to information for the healthy functioning of markets, and perhaps some improvement in governance were goals that mainstream thinkers endorsed. It was Negri's renunciation of his old revolutionary claims that was at the heart of the enthusiastic reception of Empire in liberal circles on the left and right. For Negri, a revolutionary rupture was no longer necessary: "The type of transformation we are working on ... requires the transformation of social subjects through the education and training they receive in co-operation, communication and social encounters".  The first task was the liberation of capital.

Sergio Bologna's self-criticism in evaluating the experience of Operaismo, of which he himself was an important representative, can be considered valid for Negri's theoretical adventure:

"Above all, I think that 'operaismo' is a glorification - sometimes in an uncritical way - of the working class, and at the same time an excessive glorification of power. ... it is no coincidence that many of its theorists have become theorists of the state and now theorists of governance. And I don't think that these people can be called traitors, because this eulogy to the power of capital is a risk in the 'operaismo' that later turns into an eulogy to the power of the political, to the autonomy of the political. I think this is a fairly consistent conclusion."

These risks became a reality in Negri. In the 2000s he participated in campaigns in favour of the neoliberal EU constitution, led by German and French imperialism. In the last years of his life, he supported the social liberal group "Movement for Democracy in Europe 2025".

His personal odyssey began with a radical leftist departure, but ended in a kind of globalist reformism. He did not lose his original oppositional identity, but his opposition was confined within the limits of capitalism.