“I was born in Padua and live between Paris and Venice. I am a retired university professor: I have taught classes on State doctrine in Paris and Padua. I have spent several years in prison, and for a year and a half I have been completely free. I have three children, between 40 and 20 years old. I am an atheist and a communist. A political act is an act of love.” This is how Toni Negri himself described himself a few years ago in La Vanguardia’s ‘La contra’, when he traveled to Barcelona to talk about the works Imperio (Paidós) and Multitude (Debate), written with Michael Hardt.
Antonio Negri, also known as Toni Negri, philosopher, professor and reference of autonomous communism, died in Paris in the early hours of December 16, 2023 at the age of 90.
Born in Padua (Italy) on August 1, 1933, Negri dedicated his life to political action and the investigation of Marxism and communism on the margins of communism and Marxism. A life marked by World War II, by the Italian autonomous spring and the neoliberal triumph in Europe starting in the 1970s. Much of his adult life was spent at the epicenter of the latest revolutionary movements in Europe, particularly in the Italian of the 60s and 70s, later in exile in France and back to Italy at the beginning of the 21st century.
Negri’s father was one of the founders of the Italian Communist Party. During World War II, his parents sheltered partisans at home. Frightened by the bombs, Negri saw Nazis and resisters die: “And I saw my mother’s immense pity for the dead…”. All of that marked him. He wanted to study Philosophy, but his mother wanted him to be a mathematician: “If you study Philosophy, you will end up in politics!” She trembled. Pact: he studied Agronomy…, but at university he became involved in groups critical of the PC from the left. His ferocious activity as a thinker led him to prison and exile…
At the end of the 1950s, Negri participated in the creation and development of operaismo, a political theory and practice inserted in the Italian labor movement of that time, although in conflict with the Italian Communist Party. “We began to do the only thing that seemed honest to us: rebuild a class relationship, constitute a new class force,” Negri recalled in that interview. That was the great bet of operaismo, which lasted almost twenty years, two decades of high social upheaval in Italy. “Until the movement grew so much that the confrontations were already with those in power. The confrontation broke out and the power… The power won. Operaismo continued after that defeat, and this is something very important,” the philosopher acknowledged.
Negri was preventively detained on April 7, 1979, along with many other companions, accused of insurrection against the State. The detention lasted several years. Then the trials, the conviction, the electoral campaign to be elected deputy, the escape. For Negri, the sentence was 30 years, reduced to 17 in the second instance.
