Negri’s Journey: A Roadmap

In his brilliant long essay 'Considerations on Western Marxism', Perry Anderson makes the important observation that after the 1930s a certain schism installs itself between theoretical Marxism and proletarian action.If the 'classical' tradition of Marxist thought understood itself as inextricably linked with socialist practice, lending insight to, and offering interpretations of, collective action, that embeddedness could no longer be taken for granted by the 1930s.It was a decade when three of the grand theoreticians of Marxism, who had been leaders and organisers of mass upheavals, found themselves cut off from revolutionary practice: Antonio Gramsci, founder of the PCI, had been incarcerated and then died in prison in 1937, Georg Lukacs had been expelled from the Hungarian Communist Party, and Karl Korsch was in exile.These developments, says Anderson, 'marked the end of the phase in which Western Marxism was still at home among the masses.' (Anderson 2016, 32).Negri's intellectual-political journey is a defiant and indefatigable effort at a recuperation.'Theory becomes a material force once it has gripped the masses,' states Marx famously in 1844, in his Introduction to A Contribution to the Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right.The long trajectory of Negri's political engagement, as it emerges from the 'workerist' Italian strand of Marxism of the 1960s, through to the 'autonomist' Marxism of the 'years of lead' of the 1970s, all the way to the 'multitude' of Empire is an insistent, imaginative, often brilliant, endeavour to reclaim an adequate form of theoretical practice that might lend itself as material force to the collective self-legislation of the labouring people.And throughout it, Negri is careful not to outrun the historical pace of that endeavour, and keen to remain with the ineliminable dimension of subjectivity and of the collective subject position.We will identify three phases in Negri's theoretical trajectory.The first early stage comprises his involvement with the operaismo ('workerism') movement of the far-Left in Italy in the 1960s, marked by the sharp divide between it and both the Com-