The “bad teacher”, the cattivo maestro, as the current Italian Minister of Culture, Gennaro Sangiuliano, and a part of Italy, far from his aura as a global thinker, remembered him again yesterday, is dead. The influential philosopher Toni Negri has died at the age of 90 in Paris, where he had lived in exile since the mid-eighties. Before returning to Italy in 1997 to finish serving a 12-year sentence for subversive association and moral responsibility in a robbery that ended with the death of a carabinieri in 1974. All during the Italian years of lead, of which the professor was a protagonist due to the influence of his ideas and in which he was falsely even accused of being morally responsible for the murder of Aldo Moro and an ideologue of the Red Brigades.

Negri managed, in an unusual way, to become a symbol of the anti-capitalist struggles of the 20th century and those of the beginning of the 21st. First, along the lines of May 1968 and Marxist thought after Stalin’s death, he founded in Italy in the sixties and seventies – with its economic boom and its new Fordist megafactories presided over by the working class – groups such as Potere Operaio and Autonomia Operaia, which advocated a libertarian, anti-authoritarian Marxism in the face of state bureaucracy and power. A thought that advocated horizontality and autonomy, for social movements that involve the population in the struggles that affect them as a lever for change.

The theoretical basis was that the working class and its struggles have determined the development of capitalism, which reacts to these with successive restructurings, for example, with more technology. Therefore, it was the class that could carry out the changes. Negri and many others accompanied the workers to the factories of the Po plain, lived with them, examined the internal power relations to see where they could rebel. But with automation and tertiarization, with the progressive dissolution of the old working class in society as a whole, into a multitude of precarious, temporary and unemployed workers, weak and isolated, including students, Negri observes a new subject of change: the ‘social worker, who can become strong with the same techniques as the previous one in the face of the extension of the logic of capital to the entire social factory that produces our lives. The professor sees a possible confrontation against the State, the parties, the unions. And he does not reject violence.

Born in Padua in 1933, his father, an anti-fascist, died when he was two years old, and it was his mother, a teacher, who guided him in his studies as a way to achieve freedom. His older brother, Enrico, enlisted at the age of 16 in the brigades of the Saló Republic of Mussolini’s acacalles and died in combat. He soon became involved in social and political life, first from Catholic action movements, then in the Italian Socialist Party.

In 1967, at the age of 34, he obtained the chair of Political Philosophy in Padua. It will be the forerunner of turbulent years in Italy, with demonstrations, urban guerrilla warfare, extrajudicial executions, attacks and kidnappings that will end with the process of April 7, 1979, in which hundreds of Autonomia Operaia militants are arrested accused of armed insurrection against the State. Negri spent four years in pre-trial detention and, elected deputy by Marco Pannella’s Radical Party in 1983, regained his freedom and escaped to France, where he was protected by the Mitterrand doctrine. The most serious charges were dropped, but he ended up being sentenced to 30 years, 12 after appealing.

In 1997 he returns to finish his sentence. And in prison he writes Empire (2002), with Michael Hardt, the bible of anti-globalization movements. A book in which he asserted that in the world of the global market and global production networks state sovereignty had given way to a new order without center or boundaries that suspended history to present itself as eternal and capable of governing all social life . An enormous power of oppression in which he saw new forms of liberation in the creative forces of the multitude that supported the empire, who had to lead new struggles and invent new forms of democracy.