Antonio Negri, famous in the 1970s and again after 2000 as a figure of "autonomist Marxism", died on 16 December at the age of 90.
He first entered politics as a member of the Italian Socialist Party (PSI) in 1956. The PSI was then a middle-of-the-road social-democratic party, overshadowed by the stronger Italian Communist Party (PCI). It would eventually wind itself up and disappear in 1994, with its last leader, Bettino Craxi, fleeing to Tunisia to escape jail after being convicted of corruption. The PCI had wound itself up earlier, in 1991, but has some remnant now (in the Democratic Party, formed by a merger of ex-PCI people and former members of Italy's major right-wing party until the 1990s, the Christian Democrats).
The PSI, however, had some life and a left wing then. Negri was involved with the journal Quaderni Rossi, which, though originating in the PSI and reaching into the PCI, also drew on quasi-Trotskyist ideas like those of C L R James and Raya Dunayevskaya. The Italian "orthodox Trotskyists" did a lot of the work of distributing it, but fell short on the political advocacy and argument which would have built something solid from that effort.
In the late 1960s and early 1970s, a new revolutionary left exploded into life. Negri, by now a university professor, helped found a group called Potere Operaio (Workers' Power) and shape its ideas, labelled "operaismo" ("workerism").
The new revolutionary left groups, some of them many thousands strong, but all to different degrees shaded by Maoism and ultra-leftism, fell apart and declined from the mid-1970s. Sadly, very little remained, and certainly not enough to create a lasting renewed workers' party from the ruins of the PSI and PCI in the early 1990s.
Negri himself had been arrested in April 1979, on charges of involvement with kidnapping, assassination, terrorism and insurrection. He was convicted and sentenced to 30 years.
After four years he got out of jail by being elected to the Italian parliament for the left-liberal Radical Party. He fled to France, and got asylum there for the next 14 years.
In 1997 he returned to Italy to serve out his sentence, and was let off with six years in jail. From jail, in 2000, he published his most famous book, Empire, written with the American academic Michael Hardt.
Autonomism became influential in the "new anti-capitalist" circles of the early 2000s. Its often obscure doctrines now informed a range of politics, from quasi-anarchist street-fighting ultra-leftism to mainstream Green politics, shading off into left liberalism. Negri himself, now in his 70s, was not active in organised politics.
On this website:
• An overview of the "autonomist Marxism" of the early 2000s
• Trotskyism, workerism, and autonomism in Italy, the story from the 1950s to the 1970s
• A review of Storming Heaven, Steve Wright's history of autonomist Marxism in the 1970s
• See also the archive of Ed Emery, Negri's English translator