From the Factory to the Metropolis: Essays, Volume 2

Essays #2

by Antonio Negri, Ed Emery (Translation)

This second volume of a new three-part series of Antonio Negri's work is focussed on the consequences of the rapid process of deindustrialisation that has occurred across the West in recent years.In this volume Negri investigates exactly what happens when the class subjects of industrial capitalism are demobilised and the factories close. Evidently capital continues to make profit, but how and where? According to Negri, the creation of value extends beyond the factory walls to embrace the whole of society; the 'mass worker' of industrialism gives way to the 'socialised worker' (operaio sociale) and the terrain of exploitation now becomes the whole of human life. In postmodernity, the metropolis becomes the privileged arena of value extraction. We must therefore understand the global city, with its stratifications, its enclosures and its resistances. Old categories of the private and the public are inadequate to describe the new matrix of production, which is characterised rather by the 'common', the productive space of cognitive and immaterial labour. Today's metropolis can be defined as a space of antagonisms between forms of life produced, on the one hand, by finance capital (the capital that operates around rents), and on the other by the 'cognitive proletariat'. The central question is then how 'the common' of the latter can be mobilised for the destruction of capitalism.In an analysis that runs from the Italian workerism (operaismo) of the 1970s to the present day, From the Factory to the Metropolis offers readers valuable insight into the far-reaching impact of deindustrialisation, presenting both the challenges and opportunities. It will appeal to the many interested in the continuing development of Negri's project and to anyone interested in radical politics today.

Genres: Philosophy

220 pages, Kindle Edition

First published December 1, 2017

About the author

Antonio Negri was an Italian political philosopher known as one of the most prominent theorists of autonomism, as well as for his co-authorship of Empire with Michael Hardt and his work on the philosopher Baruch Spinoza. Born in Padua, Italy, Negri became a professor of political philosophy at the University of Padua, where he taught state and constitutional theory. Negri founded the Potere Operaio (Worker Power) group in 1969 and was a leading member of Autonomia Operaia, and published hugely influential books urging "revolutionary consciousness."
Negri was accused in the late 1970s of various charges including being the mastermind of the left-wing urban guerrilla organization Red Brigades (Brigate Rosse or BR), which was involved in the May 1978 kidnapping and murder of former Italian prime minister Aldo Moro. On 7 April 1979, he Negri was arrested and charged with a long list of crimes including the Moro murder. Most charges were dropped quickly, but in 1984 he was still sentenced (in absentia) to 30 years in prison. He was given an additional four years on the charge of being "morally responsible" for the violence of political activists in the 1960s and 1970s. The question of Negri's complicity with left-wing extremism is a controversial subject. He was indicted on a number of charges, including "association and insurrection against the state" (a charge which was later dropped), and sentenced for involvement in two murders.
Negri fled to France where, protected by the Mitterrand doctrine, he taught at the Paris VIII (Vincennes) and the Collège international de philosophie, along with Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, and Gilles Deleuze. In 1997, after a plea-bargain that reduced his prison time from 30 to 13 years, he returned to Italy to serve the end of his sentence. Many of his most influential books were published while he was behind bars. He hence lived in Venice and Paris with his partner, the French philosopher Judith Revel. He was the father of film director Anna Negri.
Like Deleuze, Negri's preoccupation with Spinoza is well known in contemporary philosophy. Along with Althusser and Deleuze, he has been one of the central figures of a French-inspired neo-Spinozism in continental philosophy of the late 20th and early 21st centuries, that was the second remarkable Spinoza revival in history, after a well-known rediscovery of Spinoza by German thinkers (especially the German Romantics and Idealists) in the late 18th and early 19th centuries.

Reviews

[Gua Trompa · Rating 5 out of 5]

Te cuento de qué me ha servido a mí el libro, por si eso te ayuda a valorar para qué te puede servir a ti:

Llegué a este libro motivado por mi interés por conocer el pensamiento de los intelectuales-militantes protagonistas de la autonomía obrera italiana de los 70, esperando así ampliar mi comprensión de esa experiencia política. A ese fin me ha sido útil, efectivamente, pero además muchos de los textos de Negri aquí recogidos me han estimulado a reflexionar sobre otros temazos que no tenía previstos: por un lado, las condiciones de posibilidad de la utopía y la lucha popular/obrera en un contexto postfordista. Por otro, la naturaleza del capitalismo contemporáneo, y el papel que en él tienen el trabajo cognitivo, y la continua ebullición molecular de subjetividades diversas. Por último, las formas posibles de relación tensa, pero fructífera y necesaria, entre movimientos sociales, Estado y otras formas institucionales democráticas por construir. No sé si aquí podrás encontrar grandes respuestas cerradas a esos problemas, pero encontrarás material muy potente para pensarlos. ¡Espero que te sirva (el libro, y mi reseña ;D)!

[Pepe Del Amo · Rating 5 out of 5]

Volver a leer a Negri es siempre una tarea difícil por muchas cosas. Por la dificultad de los textos, así como la cantidad de afectos reunidos en sus textos. Como siempre, por momentos te convierte en el más negriniano del mundo y a veces el más anti-negriniano del mundo. Pero siempre está bien leerlo para desmontar las caricaturas que han hecho de él los segundos.

Una muy buena recopilación, sobre todo para ver sus aportes sobre el paso de obrero-masa a obrero-social, de la fábrica a la metrópolis y sus tesis del trabajo cognitivo.