He died on 16 December 2023. A militant-intellectual: Negri’s life could have filled two at least.  Academe, exile, election to parliament, and prison marked his life. Negri’s writings on Marx and Spinoza (the latter he wrote in prison) are decisive. His co-written texts with Michael Hardt were an effort to theorize movements against global capitalism that crystalized at the end of the twentieth century. But, for me, it was his elaboration of “operaismo” (workerism) and later “autonomia” (autonomy) that proved crucial for my own humble efforts in theory. Negri helped me see how the capitalist division between manual and mental labor structures so much of what we imagine to be the theory/praxis divide. Negri’s workerist/autonomist orientation was founded on the axiom of the intelligence of working-class peoples. It values not only the intelligence immanent to production but also the intelligent desire to exit the life of capitalist production itself. Negri (and others) played a decisive role in formalizing the theory of work “refusal.” Against Stalinian producitivism, Negri seized on the desire of so many of the working-class to do something other than waged work. Refusal also says “yes” to other forms of labor: care, artistic creativity, scientific inquiry. It says “no” to a world where the immense potential of human labor is reduced to an impoverished choice between various forms of value production. So-called “laziness,” by these lights, is entirely justified. And it can be politically mobilized as Negri knew. Whereas a strike interrupts production; refusal refuses any form of production on capitalist terms. Faced with immanent ecological collapse, this form of refusal is ever more salient. Value production offers no exit. Electric car factories on the moon will not save us. Degrowth movements still have much to learn from this politics of refusal. And all of us have much to learn from Negri’s life; a life committed to the joy of class struggle and the struggle for thought adequate to it.

Article by Comrade ML.