The contradictory conceptual couple, identity and difference, is not the adequate framework for understanding the organization of the multitude. Inst… - Antonio Negri

Our claim is that a common political project is possible. This possibility of course will have to be verified and realized in practice. … We are capable of democracy. The challange is to organize it politically.

The old form of trade union, which was born in the nineteenth century and aimed primarily at negotiating wages for a specific trade is no longer sufficient. First of all, as we have been arguing, the old trade unions are not able to represent the unemployed, the poor, or even the mobile and flexible post-Fordist workers with short term contracts, all of whom participate actively in social production and increase social wealth. Second, the old unions are divided according to the various products and tasks defined in the heyday of industrial production - a miners' union, a pipefitters' union, a machinists' union and so forth. Today, insofar as the conditions and the relations of labor are becoming common, these traditional divisions (or even newly defined divisions) no longer make sense and serve only as an obstacle. Finally the old unions have become purely economic, not political, organization.

The task of a theory of class is to identify the existing conditions for potential collective struggle and express them as a political proposition.