Lan Jiang: Antonio Negri and His Encounter with the Times
On December 15, 2023, the Italian Marxist theorist and thinker Antonio Negri completed the final leg of his life’s journey. Having left behind a boundless intellectual legacy for our era, he passed away. Although he remained, for the vast majority of his time, a thinker of the twentieth century, his thoughts and soul are today wandering through the skies of digital society, helping humanity look beyond the unrestricted digital links and algorithmic controls created by the spectral intelligence of digitalization to find hope for the future.
Operaismo and General Intellect Workers, within the concrete labor of production, form a kind of invisible immaterial production. This is not a quantifiable wage, but rather an integration of mutual affect, language, and behavior. In this sense, the worker is already, in fact, subordinate to the general intellect.
Italian Operaismo [1] (Workerism) was born in the 1960s, a time when a group of Italian left-wing and Marxist intellectuals—notably Raniero Panzieri, a philosophy professor at the University of Messina in Sicily—sought to find new practical sites for left-wing political struggle. A cohort of young students and intellectuals with Marxist aspirations quickly gathered around Panzieri, including the young Antonio Negri. These intellectuals and students issued a powerful call: they argued that the struggle against capitalism must mobilize the working class at the most advanced frontiers, fighting capitalists and the authorities within the factories. This was the embryonic form of Operaismo. The achievement of this group’s activities was the publication of a "red journal" which they named Quaderni Rossi (Red Notebooks). After a long period of preparation, the first issue of Quaderni Rossi was finally published in September 1961. They sought to use a new Marxist theory to name the intellectual impact brought by the journal; the slogan they proposed was "working-class struggle within the capitalist factory," and thus they called this new thought Operaismo.
Initially, the soul of Operaismo was undoubtedly Panzieri. In his special contribution to Quaderni Rossi, "The Capitalist Use of Machinery," he argued that with the development of capitalist industrial technology, large-scale machine industry had actually made workers subordinate to the movement of machines. In this article, Panzieri consciously utilized two concepts from Marx’s Grundrisse (the 1857–1858 Economic Manuscripts): formal subsumption and real subsumption [2] (some also translate these as formal and real incorporation). In his view, in Italian industrial production at the time, the relationship between workers and machines had changed from formal subsumption to real subsumption. That is to say, the labor organization of the workers and the operation of the machines formed a tacit relationship that was, to a certain extent, independent of the capitalist’s control. Consequently, once one mastered the machinery—not in terms of ownership, but in terms of use and operation—one possessed the power to counter the capitalist. This power became the concept Negri would later heavily rely upon: the general intellect.
It can be said that Panzieri’s influence on the young Negri was immense. Although Panzieri did not leave behind many texts, his thought—and especially his leadership in founding Quaderni Rossi—thoroughly won over intellectuals like Negri, Tronti, and Alquati. In fact, shortly after the founding of the journal, Professor Panzieri passed away in 1964, and the task of theoretical creation was swiftly passed into the hands of a new generation of intellectuals like Negri. Negri and other Operaismo intellectuals would often gather to read Marx’s manuscripts, particularly the section on "Fixed Capital and the Development of the Productive Forces of Society" in the Grundrisse, which they called the "Fragment on Machines." In reading this section, Negri drew a vast number of conceptual ideas from Marx’s words. In particular, the concepts he frequently used in works such as Empire, Multitude, and Commonwealth can essentially be traced back to his early readings of the "Fragment on Machines."
For instance, both he and Panzieri believed that the tacit cooperative relationships of language, affect, and thought formed by workers in the factory actually constituted another kind of immaterial production, alongside material machine production. These immaterial productions are the parts the capitalist cannot see. Together with the material products produced by machines that the capitalist can see, they constitute capitalist production. These invisible forces constitute the unique power of the working class: the "general intellect." It is precisely this "general intellect" that gives the formal and real subsumption Marx discussed regarding the creation of surplus value a very positive meaning. That is, workers are not only highly dependent on the capitalist’s relations of production in terms of the employment relationship and wage labor, but also form a real subsumption. That is to say, what the capitalist fails to see is that workers, in concrete productive labor, form an invisible immaterial production. What is produced by this immaterial production is not a quantifiable wage, but an integration of mutual affect, language, and behavior. Every worker is a part of this general intellect produced by immaterial labor. In this sense, the worker is already actually subordinate to the general intellect, rather than merely formally subordinate to the capitalist’s wage-labor relationship.
In other words, Negri immaterialized Panzieri’s "real subsumption of workers to machine production." We must see not only the physical bodies of workers patrolling back and forth in machine production, but also that these bodies are already actually subordinate to a larger collective. This collective is a force not controlled by the capitalist; it is the capital all workers can use to resist capitalist control. Once united, they can resist capitalist relations through "exodus"—a struggle strategy Negri discussed repeatedly. The logical foundation upon which this strategy stands originates in the "general intellect" and "immaterial labor" of the Operaismo movement.
Empire and the Network Era For Negri and Hardt, the multitude is not a heap of loose sand or Le Bon’s "crowd." The reason the multitude has power is precisely that they are a whole linked through networks and platforms—a multitude united by technology.
Clearly, by the 1990s, the Operaismo movement was gradually waning. There were many reasons for this decline, including the end of the Cold War and the rise of neoliberal ideology, which made it impossible to organize worker movements in factories. Another reason was that developed Western capitalist countries gradually transferred labor-intensive industries to the Third World. The phenomena of inhumane exploitation and oppression of the working class described in classical Marxist works had basically disappeared in major Western countries. Meanwhile, the tragic scenes of sweatshops in Asia, Africa, and Latin America, and African miners working in conditions akin to ancient slavery, could not be directly presented to intellectuals living in comfortable and affluent developed countries. Their critique of capitalism became more of a superficial, "scratching-an-itch-through-one’s-boot" [3] critique from the perspectives of consumption and spectacle, or space and culture.
In the view of Negri and others, however, a major reason for the decline of the working class was that the capitalist mode of production underwent a fundamental change in the 1980s and 90s. The original Fordist production in factories gradually gave way to more flexible post-Fordist production. Thus, capitalist production no longer required all workers to gather in a common space, but instead used new technologies like communication networks to extend the tentacles of production into every sphere of society. Industrial workers were gradually replaced by white-collar employees in towering office buildings. Although these employees remained subordinate to the relations of production of capitalist society, their concrete conditions of production and life had vastly improved. Furthermore, the definition of their "work" required revision. For example, receiving a call from a boss outside of the eight-hour workday demanding that an employee revise a report or PPT on their home computer is something a white-collar employee who needs to support a family cannot refuse. Although his body is not in the office, his home equipment—and even the laptop and phone he carries while on vacation—become tools of production under contemporary communication technology. Once the sphere of production expands from the factory to the realm of urban life, the early strategy of organizing worker movements solely within factory spaces is bound to be phased out. Intellectuals once associated with Operaismo or left-wing movements, such as Negri, Tronti, Bobbio, and Cacciari, had to change their strategies, forcing them to abandon the factory-centric current of Operaismo.
However, regarding how to shape a new Marxist or left-wing resistance theory, Negri developed serious disagreements with his former comrades, such as Tronti and Cacciari. For Tronti and others, they accepted the proposals of Habermas and others regarding the public sphere and the theory of communicative action, advocating for dialogue and negotiation as a way for today's left-wing intellectuals to occupy public space. But the price of doing so was that the concepts and theories once cherished by this group of Italian Marxist intellectuals were essentially abandoned. Negri, Virno, and Lazzarato were clearly unwilling to embrace neoliberalized left-wing political philosophy like Tronti. They sought to continue the concepts originating from Marx—general intellect, immaterial production, and real subsumption—within capitalist space, though the forms would certainly need to change. This is perhaps why Negri titled a collection of his essays from that period From the Factory to the Metropolis. Indeed, the real subsumption and general intellect originally discussed by Operaismo were immaterial general intellects formed by large-scale mechanized industrial production in the factory. But under post-Fordist relations of production, workers have become office white-collars; through phones, laptops, and network devices, they are generated into a networked whole. In this sense, the original general intellect, once confined to machine-centered factories, has now extended through internet links to every corner of the capitalist metropolis, constituting all white-collar workers and personnel using these devices into a networked whole.
In Empire, Negri and Hardt recognized this change, explicitly stating: "While the mass of industrial workers... played a central role in the production of surplus value, today that role is increasingly being taken over by intellectual, immaterial, and communicative labor." Today’s general intellect, or the real subsumption of today’s immaterial labor production, is no longer the collaborative relationship of language, affect, and action formed by workers beside machines, but a global, invisible network formed entirely through the internet and communication applications. During this period, the release of the Wachowskis' The Matrix was practically the best illustration of Negri’s theory of "Empire." Although we each still possess independent bodies, our gaze has been captured by the blue light of phone or computer screens; our souls have been linked by Imperial platforms into a giant whole within the infinitely expanding data network. Today’s capitalist production is not purely the production of material goods; it also contains greater productive potential. Whether it is our likes and comments on Twitter or Facebook, or our joint efforts to defeat enemies in a game on the Steam platform, these constitute specific relations of production and produce a link and relationship of immaterial labor. Ultimately, this turns around and stands above each of us as a power of surveillance. In their later book Commonwealth, Negri and Hardt absorbed the views of Foucault and Deleuze, calling this power—established through communication and digital network technology and standing above all users—"biopower." The emergence of biopower reflects the transition of capitalism from the stage of imperialism to the stage of Empire. That is to say, the matrix created by network technology, which possesses biopower, not only stands above all people but also transcends the surveillance of the nation-state; only a tiny few truly supranational powers can harness this force.
Despite the unprecedented power of the biopolitical [4] apparatus of the capitalist Empire, bolstered by communication and network technologies, this does not imply that Negri and Hardt’s theory trends toward pessimism or anti-progressivism. Negri’s early experiences in Italy’s Fiat factories taught him that highly organized machinery, while strengthening capitalist control and surveillance, also generates a "general intellect" [5] invisible to the capitalists. Similarly, in Empire and many subsequent works, Negri repeatedly emphasizes that while communication, dissemination, and digital networks give rise to a new Empire, they simultaneously shape its antithesis: the vast masses connected by the internet and major platforms, whom they call the "multitude" (moltitudine). For Negri and Hardt, the multitude is neither a heap of loose sand nor Le Bon’s "crowd"; rather, the power of the multitude lies precisely in the fact that they are a collective linked through networks and platforms—no longer lone fighters, but a multitude unified by technology. Although many Left-wing theorists (such as Žižek) argue that Negri’s concept of the "multitude" is overly optimistic, this optimism was precisely a new spark ignited amidst the pessimistic atmosphere of the 1980s and 90s, the era of the Rise of Neoliberal ideology. As the internet and digital technology develop further, they will incorporate more of the proletariat and the "flux" into a single whole. Just as Agamben suggested that when capitalism produces its Leviathan, it inevitably generates the Leviathan’s rival, Behemoth, these two monsters from the Book of Job correspond exactly to the confrontation between "Empire" and "multitude" in Negri’s work. This new binary opposition has relit a beacon for a Western Marxism that had been mired in desolation.
Negri in the Age of Intelligence
If we are to reinvent Negri in the age of intelligence, we must begin by having the multitude reclaim mastery over "general data."
The man has passed, but life goes on for the living. Our intellectual mourning for Negri must not become a burial of his ideas. As Marx famously wrote in the Introduction to A Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right: "The weapon of criticism cannot, replace criticism of the weapon, material force must be overthrown by material force; but theory also becomes a material force as soon as it has gripped the masses." This sentence applies equally to Negri and Hardt’s theories of Empire and the multitude. In today’s highly intelligent and digitized world, we still need to read Negri and his vast sea of literature—not to memorize specific concepts or phrases, but to recreate Negri in a New Era, allowing his theory to radiate vigorous vitality once more.
In 2016, Negri visited Nanjing University and delivered a lecture on digital capitalism to the faculty and students of the Department of Philosophy. In that lecture, he already recognized that data had become a new means of production, leading to the "critique of political economy" for the new era he depicted in Empire. On this point, Negri was correct: the internet and smartphones are linking people from every corner of the world through the continuous flow of data-traffic. Whether it is the elites of Wall Street, tourists on the beaches of the Maldives, temporary laborers in Bangladeshi garment factories, or white-collar workers staring at screens in high-rises in Tokyo’s Chuo Ward, they all share one characteristic: they are threaded together by an endless stream of data, forming a totality. These individuals are no longer independent, autonomous subjects, but an assemblage united by networks and smart technology. Negri persisted in using "general intellect" to describe this assemblage; however, this time he spoke no longer of the transition from the factory to the metropolis, but directly of a global, total "general intellect." This is produced through the biopolitical production of every individual—by integrating every person using a smartphone or computer, every logistics truck and automated machine equipped with digital sensors—into a world-wide integrated data system. Benjamin Bratton calls this "The Stack" or a "planetary-scale computation system." That is to say, Negri remained steadfast in his concepts of "immaterial labor" and the "general intellect," even though digital and intelligent society has brought about a vaster and more complex matrix, achieving the real subsumption [6] of all people and things, making every node an actual subordinate to this massive general intellect.
However, Negri subsequently misinterpreted the attribute of this planetary-scale general intellect. He believed that because this general intellect is composed of various subjects, it possesses subjectivity; therefore, all subjects constituting the general intellect possess the potential to struggle against capitalism. What Negri failed to see is that those using smartphones and computers, as well as the producers and logistics providers participating in platform networks, do not participate as "subjects." They are reified into data, subordinated as data to a planetary-scale data matrix, participating in various intelligent algorithms and hierarchical rankings, and ultimately obeying invisible underlying protocols and rules. Humans participate not so much as embodied lives, but as objectified data. In this sense, Negri’s subjective "general intellect" has turned into "general data" that is indifferent to life. Consequently, because general data is objective and cold, Negri’s strategy of "exodus" [7] cannot serve as the strategy for confronting capitalism in the age of intelligence.
Nonetheless, we see that Negri’s direction was correct. Only by possessing general data can we prevent intelligent machines and big data algorithms from becoming tools for a few capital platforms to reap enormous profits, and instead turn them into public instruments for the welfare of all. Thus, if we are to reinvent Negri in the age of intelligence, we must begin by having the multitude reclaim mastery over general data.
Negri, who left us at the age of ninety [8], lived through the era of machine automation in the 1960s and 70s, the era of communication and networks at the turn of the century, and today’s age of intelligence. With his unique wisdom and theory, he encountered the era time and again, showing us the future direction of Marxist development. He was not Don Quixote tilting at windmills with a lance, but Neo mastering the secrets of the Matrix. He hands us a red pill—a pill of the general intellect—so that we can truly see the path of the age of intelligence. The future is not a ruin, but a matrix that needs to be constructed upon the reinvention of Negri’s thought.
Life and Works
Antonio Negri (1933–2023) was an Italian Marxist philosopher and activist who graduated from and taught in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Padua.
In 1969, he founded the organization Potere Operaio (Workers' Power) and became a leading figure in the famous Autonomia Operaia (Workers' Autonomy) movement. In the 1970s, Negri was charged with several crimes, including masterminding the Left-wing terrorist group the "Red Brigades." In April 1979, he was arrested along with other leaders of the Autonomist movement. A year later, Negri was found to have no connection to the murder of Italian Prime Minister Aldo Moro, and almost all charges against the defendants were overturned for lack of evidence. However, Negri’s association with Left-wing terrorism remains a controversial issue to this day.
After going into exile in France, Negri was protected by the "Mitterrand Doctrine." He taught at the University of Vincennes (Paris VIII) and the Collège International de Philosophie alongside French philosophers Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, and Gilles Deleuze.
In 1997, after requesting that his sentence be commuted from 30 years to 13 years, Negri returned to Italy to serve his time. While in prison, Negri published some of his most influential works, becoming world-renowned for the trilogy co-authored with Michael Hardt: Empire, Multitude, and Commonwealth. Other major works include Marx Beyond Marx: Lessons on the Grundrisse, The Savage Anomaly, Subversive Spinoza, and Pipeline: Letters from Prison.
On the evening of December 15, 2023, local time, Negri passed away in Paris at the age of 90.
(The author is a Professor in the Department of Philosophy at Nanjing University)