Antonio Negri Quotes

It is not easy for any of us to stop measuring the world against the standard of Europe, but the concept of the multitude requires it of us. It is a challenge. Embrace it.

The political program of nation building in countries like Afghanistan and Iraq is one central example of the productive project of biopower and war. Nothing could be more postmodernist and antiessentialist than this notion of nation building.

All wars today tend to be netwars.

When the general population no longer constitutes the armed forces, when the army is no longer the people in arms, then empires fall. Today all armies are again tending to become mercenary armies.

The possibility of democracy on a global scale is emerging today for the very first time.

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.

A specter haunts the world and it is the specter of migration.

Disobedience to authority is one of the most natural and healthy acts.

[No] effective blueprint [of a political alternative to Empire] will ever arise from a theoretical articulation such as ours.

The refusal of work and authority, or really the refusal of voluntary servitude, is the beginning of liberatory politics.

It is a commonplace of the classical literature on Empire, from Polybius to Montesquieu and Gibbon, that Empire is from its inception decadent and corrupt.

Reality and history, however, are not dialectical, and no idealist rhetorical gymnastics can make them conform to the dialect.

The multitude is the real productive force of our social world, whereas Empire is a mere apparatus of capture that lives only off the vitality of the multitude — as Marx would say, a vampire regime of accumulated dead labor that survives only by sucking off the blood of the living.

[The] fact of being within capital and sustaining capital is what defines the proletariat as a class.

Philosophy is not the owl of Minerva that takes flight after history has been realized in order to celebrate its happy ending; rather, philosophy is subjective proposition, desire, and praxis that are applied to the event.