Books for Burning: Between Civil War and Democracy in 1970s Italy

Front Cover
Verso, Oct 17, 2005 - History - 299 pages
Long before Antonio Negri became famous around the world for his groundbreaking volume Empire, he was infamous across Europe for the incendiary writings contained in this book. Books for Burning consists of five pamphlets that Negri wrote between 1971 and 1977, which attempt to identify and draw lessons from new conditions of class struggle that emerged in the course of the 1970s.

Conceived as organizational hypotheses intended for debate among the members of the political movements Workers’ Power (Potere operaio) and Organized Autonomy (Autonomia organizzata), these texts were later misread and misrepresented by the Italian state in its attempt to frame Negri as responsible for the assassination of former Italian president Aldo Moro, as the leader of the Red Brigades, and as the mastermind of an armed insurrection against the state. In the more than twenty-five years since their first publication, these texts have lost none of their originality, relevance or power to shock.

In a new preface, Negri demonstrates how his controversial work on empire, biopolitics and immaterial labor developed out of concepts and strategies first outlined in this book, and an editorial introduction analyzes the role these texts played in Negri’s trial and in the criminalization of the Italian radical workers’ movement.
 

Contents

Books for Burning
ix
Editorial Acknowledgements and Translators Note
xxix
and Prefatory Note to the English Translation
l
The Subjectivists and
11
Preliminary Interventions on Some Objections
26
Workers Party Against Work 1973
51
WorkingClass Political Composition and Armed
73
Toward a Discussion of
118
The Crisis on the International Level
164
More on This Issue The Subject of Workers Inquiry
172
Toward a Critique of the Material Constitution 1977
180
The Formal Conditions of the Process of Antagonism
189
Toward a Critique of the Antagonisms in
207
The Process of Class SelfValorization and the
215
On the Marxist Method
231
And the Proletarians Storm Heaven
280

Capitals Command and the New Composition
127
The Hypothesis of the Historic Compromise
135
General Prospect of the Revolutionary Passage
157

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About the author (2005)

Antonio Negri has taught philosophy and political science at the Universities of Padua and Paris; he has also been a political prisoner in Italy and a political refugee in France. He is the author of over thirty books, including Political Descartes, Marx Beyond Marx, The Savage Anomaly, The Politics of Subversion, Insurgencies, Subversive Spinoza, and Time for Revolution, and, in collaboration with Michael Hardt, Labor of Dionysus, Empire and Multitude. He currently lives in Paris and Venice. Timothy S. Murphy is associate professor of English at the University of Oklahoma. He is the translator of Antonio Negri’s Subversive Spinoza and co-editor of Resistance in Practice: The Philosophy of Antonio Negri.

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