Antonio Negri: Trending quotes (page 3)

“Our claim is that a common political project is possible. This possibility of course will have to be verified and realized in practice. … We are capable of democracy. The challange is to organize it politically.”

Antonio Negri book Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire

226
Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire

Democracy

“in any economic system there are numerous different forms of labor that exist side by side, but there is always one figure of labor that exerts hegemony over the others. This hegemonic figure serves as a vortex that gradually transforms other figures to adopt its central qualities.”

Antonio Negri book Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire

107
Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire

“[on zapatistas] The goal has never been to defeat the state and claim sovereign authority but rather to change the world without taking power.”

Antonio Negri book Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire

85
Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire

World , Change

“All of those who are "without" - without employment, without residence, without housing - are really exluded only in part.”

Antonio Negri book Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire

(129)
Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire

Parting , Housing

“[No] effective blueprint [of a political alternative to Empire] will ever arise from a theoretical articulation such as ours.”

Antonio Negri book Empire

206
Empire

“Disobedience to authority is one of the most natural and healthy acts.”

Antonio Negri book Empire

210
Empire

Nature

“this is not to say, we repeat, that the conditions of labor and production are becoming the same throughout the world or throughout the different sectors ot the economy. The claim is rather is that many singular instances of labor processes, productive conditions, local situations, and lived experiences coexist with a "becoming common", at a different level of abstraction, of the forms of labor and the general relations of production and exchange - and that there is no contradiction between this singularity and commonality.”

Antonio Negri book Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire

114
Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire

World

“we will argue that the dominant form of contemporary production, which exerts its hegemony over the others, creates "immaterial goods" such as ideas, knowledge, forms of communication, and relationships. … what is produced in this case is not just material goods but actual social relationships and forms of life. We will call this kind of production "biopolitical" to highlight how general its products are and how directily it engages social life in its entirety.”

Antonio Negri book Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire

94
Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire

Life , Communication , Idea , Knowledge

“The so-called communism of capital, that is, its drive toward an ever more extensive socialization of labor, points ambiguously toward the communism of the multitude.”

Antonio Negri book Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire

Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire

Communication

“Just sit back and listen to some of the clamorous grievances against the contemporary global system. Our list does not pretend to be comprehensive, and the partiality of its selections will undoubtedly reveal our own blindnesses, but it should nonetheless give a sense of the range and depth of today's grievances.”

Antonio Negri book Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire

270
Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire

Sense

“It is not easy for any of us to stop measuring the world against the standard of Europe, but the concept of the multitude requires it of us. It is a challenge. Embrace it.”

Antonio Negri book Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire

Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire

World

“The capitalist call workers to the factory, for example, directing them to collaborate and communicate in production and giving them the means to do so. In the paradigm of immaterial production, in contrast, labor itself tends to produce the means of interaction, communication, and cooperation for production directly. Affective labor always directly constructs a relationship.”

Antonio Negri book Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire

147
Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire

Communication

“Empire is emerging today as the center that supports the globalization of productive networks and casts its widely inclusive net to try to envelop all power relations within its world order — and yet at the same time it deploys a powerful police function against the new barbarians and the rebellious slaves who threaten its order.”

Antonio Negri book Empire

20
Empire

Support , Time

“In faxt, the old Marxist distinctions between productive and unproductive labor, as well as that between productive and reproductive labor, which were always dubious, should now be completely thrown out.”

Antonio Negri book Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire

135
Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire

“The poor are thought to be dangerous, either morally dangerous because they are unproductive social parasites - thieves, prostitutes, drug addicts, and the like - or potentially dangerous because they are disorganized, unpredicatble, and tendentially reactionary. In fact the term lumpenproletariat (or rad proletariat) has functioned for times to demonize the poor as a whole. … The industrial reserve army is a constant threat hanging over the heads of the existing working class because, first of all, its misery serves as a terrifying example to workers of what could happen to them, and, second, the excess supply of labor it represents lowes the costs of labor and undermines workers' power against employers (by serving potentially as strike breakers, for example).”

Antonio Negri book Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire

130
Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire

Time

“what is called the flexibility of the labor market means that no job is secure. There is no longer a clear division but rather a large gray area in which all workers hover precariously between employment and unemployment. Second there is no "reserve" in the sense that no labor power is outside the process of social production. The poor, the unemployed, and the underemployed in our societies are in fact active in social production even when they do not have a waged position.”

Antonio Negri book Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire

131
Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire

Sense

“It is no coincidence that the ABM Treaty was signed midway between the delinking of the U. S. dollar from the gold standard in 1971 and the first oil crisis in 1973. These were the years not only of monetary and economic crises but also of both the beginning of the destruction of the welfare state and the shift of the hegemony of economic production from the factory to more social and immaterial sectors. One might think of these various transformations as different faces of one common phenomenon, one grand social transformation.”

Antonio Negri book Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire

39
Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire

Thinking

“When the general population no longer constitutes the armed forces, when the army is no longer the people in arms, then empires fall. Today all armies are again tending to become mercenary armies.”

Antonio Negri book Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire

49
Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire

People

“A multitude is irreducible multiplicity; the singular social differences that constitute the multitude must always be expressed and can never be flattened into sameness, unity, identity, or indifference. … the compact identities of factory workers in the dominant countries have been undermined with the rise of short-term contracts and forced mobility of new forms of work; how migration has challenged traditional notions of national identity; how familiy identity has changed and so forth.”

Antonio Negri book Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire

105
Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire

Change , Country , Indifference

“Empire is a very stimulating account of globalisation, but it is hopelessly wrong on two central issues. The state has not withered away. Strong states still exist—USA, China, Germany, etc—but the difference with the past is that there is now only one Empire and this is not the nebulous entity imagined by Cultural Studies, but a real, living organism and it has a name; the United States of America.”

Antonio Negri book Empire

Tariq Ali, How Bush Used 9/11 to Remap the World. CounterPunch, 8 July 2002.
Empire, About Empire

Imagination , Study , Strong , Past