2023-12-16 11:00:31
by ANTONIO CARIOTI
The intellectual who supported the need for political violence has passed away. Already at the helm of Potere Operaio and Autonomia Operaia, elected to the Chamber in the Radical Party, he had been accused of armed insurrection and had escaped arrest by taking refuge in France. Among his books is «Impero» released in 2002
He enjoyed considerable prestige abroad, but in Italy he was considered above all a “bad teacher”. On the other hand, it is undeniable that after 1968, Professor Toni Negri, who passed away at the age of 90 (his companion and philosopher Judit Revel reported this), had preached political violence and led far-left groups that practiced it (said in their complex Organized Workers’ Autonomy), so much so that he was sentenced to 12 years in prison with a final sentence. Equally undeniable was his intellectual stature, which made him one of the most authoritative scholars of the philosopher Baruch Spinoza and many years later allowed him to establish himself as a leading figure of international antagonistic thought with the bestseller Impero, written together with his American colleague Michael Hardt (Rizzoli, 2002).
Since he was a boy, Antonio Negri, commonly known as Toni, had shown a marked propensity for intellectual activity and also political commitment, initially in the Catholic context. Born on 1 August 1933, the son of an Emilian anti-fascist who died when he was very young, he was raised by his mother Aldina, a teacher, who had raised him in the cult of education as a gateway to personal and collective freedom. His brother Enrico, born in 1927, had joined the Bersaglieri of the Republic of Salò and died tragically on the eastern border. A tragic background that undoubtedly had a bearing on young Toni’s choices.
Director of the Youth of Catholic Action (Giac) in the 1950s, but already placed on decidedly heterodox positions with respect to the conservatism of the pre-conciliar Church, Negri was soon expelled from it and had passed through the ranks of the Socialist Party for a few years, where his path intellectual had crossed paths with that of Raniero Panzieri and his magazine «Quaderni Rossi», cradle of Italian workerism. This is the current of thought which, after the de-Stalinization started in Moscow in 1956, was looking for a revolutionary way out of the crisis of the Soviet model and believed it had found it with the resumption of trade union struggles brought about by the economic boom, in which the immediate needs and spontaneous expressions of real workers found an expression capable of overcoming the cautious and moderate attitude of the official workers’ movement. Obviously the student protest and even more so the hot autumn of 1969 in the factories had given a strong boost to these extremist tendencies, also determining Negri’s separation from other exponents of workerism, such as Mario Tronti, Alberto Asor Rosa and Massimo Cacciari, who they did not approve of his choice of a complete break with the trade union and the Communist Party, which he considered reformist organizations and therefore in fact alien to the real interests of the proletariat.
The young professor, who in the meantime was establishing himself as one of the brightest minds in the faculty of Political Science in Padua, had thus become perhaps the most authoritative leader of the far-left movement Power workers: certainly the voice with the greatest influence on young militants for its boundless culture and suggestive, dark but galvanizing language. They were tumultuous and violent years, in which the desire to give the Italian crisis a revolutionary outcome was gaining ground. In June 1973 at the conference in Rosolina (in the province of Rovigo) Potere Operaio had ended its parable and in its place the Autonomia Operaia had arisen, which had its main ideologist in Negri. It was then that the Marxist philosopher had developed the theory of the “social worker”, according to which the logic of exploitation of capital had now extended well beyond the confines of the factory, so much so as to generate a new revolutionary subject, in which they no longer only converged industrial workers, but also the various forms of precarious workers, the unemployed, especially students.
The time was ripe, according to Negri, for a frontal struggle against the State and also against representative bodies, such as parties and trade unions, now reduced to simple articulations of capitalist domination. A struggle that certainly could not be limited to peaceful methods. Apart from his most fiery militant writings, even in a text with a strong theoretical commitment such as Marx beyond Marx (Feltrinelli, 1979), Negri did not hesitate to state: «Violence is an immediate, auroral, vigorous affirmation of the necessity of communism» . Words that were then translated into deeds by the young militants of the Padua Autonomy and beyond, protagonists of intimidation, aggression, looting (“proletarian expropriations”, in their jargon), arson attacks (the so-called “nights of fires”). On 7 April 1979, a date still in historical memory, the reaction of the State arrived, with the investigation conducted by the magistrate Pietro Calogero which led to the arrest of Negri and many other leaders and militants of the Autonomia on very serious charges. of armed insurrection against the powers of the State. Indeed, the Paduan professor was later indicated as the brains of the Red Brigades, an organization distant from his ideas despite sharing an insurrectionary perspective, and he was attributed a leading role in the Moro crime.
After more than four years of preventive detention, Negri regained his freedom in 1983 following his election to the Chamber on the Radical Party’s list, then he escaped arrest by taking refuge in France, where he found authoritative support in the intellectual world and benefited from of the tolerance towards Italians accused of subversive activities practiced by the Paris government under the presidency of François Mitterrand. Furthermore, even in our country the most serious charges had been dropped and the very heavy first degree sentence of 30 years in prison had been reduced to 12 on appeal, confirmed by the Supreme Court.
In 1997 Negri returned to Italy and finished serving his sentence, first in prison and then in semi-freedom. No one could anymore consider him a danger, indeed the former president Francesco Cossiga had welcomed him cordially, maintaining that there had been excessive judicial fury against him. But above all, Negri had fully returned to the intellectual debate and established himself as one of the most listened to thinkers in the galaxy of anti-global movements that flourished after the protests against the WTO in Seattle in 1999.
In 2000, the former ideologue of Autonomy co-authored the essay Empire with Michael Hardt, first published in English in the United States and then in Italy by Rizzoli, which placed him at the forefront of critical thinking on globalisation. Here Negri argued that, in a context of decline of state institutions, sovereignty had «taken a new form, composed of a series of national and international bodies united by a single logic of power». And he added that this new structure, which he called Empire, on the one hand was aimed at “directly dominating human nature” and on the other it offered “new possibilities to the forces of liberation”. The success of Impero had brought Negri back into the spotlight: the publication and republishing of his writings had increased.
In the subsequent essay Multitudine (Rizzoli, 2004), also developed together with Hardt, the two authors attempted to define the outlines of a new progressive constituent force, capable of subverting the Empire. But the decline of the anti-global movement had also progressively reduced the attention towards Negri’s theories, despite his attempt to link up with groups such as Occupy Wall Street. Finally, it is worth mentioning the monument to himself erected by Negri with the three autobiographical volumes Storia di un Comunista, Galera ed esilio and Da Genova a futuro, published by Ponte alle Grazie in 2015 and 2018 respectively. The meticulous vindication of a political and intellectual endowed with his own obstinate coherence, but in too many ways indefensible when compared to the facts.
December 16, 2023 (modified December 16, 2023 | 09:33)
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