Antonio Negri Verso, London, 2005, 336pp. ISBN: 1 844 6703 41.

This book brings together a number of Antonio Negri's controversial essays from the 1970s. The title of this book is somewhat misleading, as the essays collected here are not primarily about either democracy or civil war. Rather, they attempt to derive a strategy for social transformation (conceived in orthodox Marxist terms) from an analysis of economic changes in what might be called the transition to postmodern capitalism. The texts (along with others by the likes of Raniero Panzieri and Sergio Bologna) served as the theoretical underpinnings for autonomia, a Marxist current heavily involved in the social upheavals in 1970s Italy. Not for the faint-hearted either theoretically or politically, these essays offer an uncompromisingly radical (if at times somewhat Leninist) political perspective enmeshed within an erudite and conceptually dense discourse of continental philosophy and theoretical Marxism.

One major strength of these essays is that they recognize and theorize tendencies in contemporary capitalism ahead of their time. The descriptions of the functioning of capitalism are in many ways profound, even prophetic; Negri discusses changes in the world economy which it took the rest of academia another 20 years to recognize — as for instance when he writes of the rise of transnational corporations and the resultant crisis of the nation-state (pp. 24, 166–167). Negri attempts to draw a political perspective from such changes, arguing that capitalism is becoming increasingly violent and irrational because of the collapse of the functioning of the law of value. In place of this law, capitalism falls back on ‘command’, in which the state plays a ‘monstrous role as the technical organ of domination’ (p. 5). Paradoxically, this increasingly powerful state does not become autonomous, but rather, is fused ever more closely into capitalist social production. The state and civil society are fused in the form of social production, the illusion of equality is lost even as an illusion, and the state loses its autonomy and becomes a direct and conscious agent of capitalist domination and despotism (pp. 208–209).

Against this social domination, Negri counterposes working-class self-activity in the forms of sabotage, refusal of work, self-valorization, and appropriation. Class self-valorization is about refusing capitalist recomposition by insisting on one's separateness from it; ‘I am other — as is the movement of that collective practice within which I am included. I belong to the other workers’ movement…I have the sense of having situated myself at the extreme limit of meaning in a political class debate’ (p. 237). Although the scarcity of empirical materials belies the theory's rootedness in the industrial sociology of its day, it is clear that Negri is establishing a theory of the micropolitics of everyday life as a form of class struggle. Everyday resistance in the workplace is conceived as a form of direct struggle against capitalist command, ‘an antagonistic reappropriation of the productive forces’ which opens up the possibility of communism (pp. 152–153). The construction of autonomous spaces and non-capitalist types of valorization are also crucial. There is a danger, however, that capitalist command will suppress these resistances, leading to a need for an organization (a ‘party’, though not in the classic sense) which has a role of ‘rupturing capitalist restructuring, command, and stabilization’ (p. 156), and defending the frontiers of self-valorization (p. 276).

Though politically inspiring and full of insights, and though often far more radical in their political implications than Negri's more recent work, these essays are not without substantial weaknesses. Firstly, while Negri rightly emphasizes the politicality of everyday acts of refusal, he exaggerates the extent to which these are informed by a conscious opposition to capitalism as a whole, and thus underestimates the forces of ideological recuperation. Secondly, he tends to exaggerate the importance of the moment of rupture in political action, ignoring the importance of ambiguities and catachresis as ways of constructing the possibility of subjective escape. Thirdly, Negri avoids difficult questions about post-revolutionary society, placing an unfounded reliance on the supposed ontological destiny of the working-class and sometimes slipping into a contradictory insistence on the post-revolutionary continuation of existing practices that is barely disguised beneath Hegelian prose. Fourth, the focus of the texts is very narrow, yet the theoretical aspiration is broad. Negri effectively theorizes changes in Italian, and maybe western, capitalism, but his attempts at theoretical totalization render certain of his conclusions Eurocentric and incomplete. These problems do not, however, affect the fundamental significance of these texts, which is in the insistence on autonomy and social transformation in response to domination, an insistence that is as vital today as when the texts were written.