Italian political philosopher (1933–2023)
Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri are the co-authors of Empire and Multitude. Michael Hardt (born 1960) is an American political philosopher and literary theorist and political philosopher, professor of Literature and Italian at Duke University. Antonio Negri (1 August 1933 – 16 December 2023) was an Italian Libertarian Marxist sociologist and political philosopher. Negri was accused of being the mastermind behind the far-left terrorist group The Red Brigades 1978 kidnapping of Aldo Moro, though the court was unable to conclusively tie Negri to the organization. Negri fled to France to escape prosecution, only to enter into a plea bargain in which his thirty-year prison sentence was reduced to thirteen years. During this time Negri wrote prolifically with many of his important works being written while he was incarcerated.
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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.
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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)
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)
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.
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.
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)
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.
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.
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.