BarcelonaThe Italian thinker Toni Negri, who was a reference in the renewal of European Marxism at the end of the twentieth century and the beginning of the twenty-first century, died at the age of 90 in Paris, where he was exiled in the 1980s after being an immigrant. Linked to the murder of Aldo Moro by the Red Brigades, for which he was acquitted.
Born in Padua on August 1, 1933, to a communist father who was murdered by Benito Mussolini’s fascist regime, Negri combined intense intellectual activity with political activism.
As a young professor of political science in Padua in the 1960s, he came into contact with figures in favor of the renewal of the orthodox Italian Communist Party, with the aim of the working class being proactive against capital in order to change the relations of production. In the 1970s he joined the anti-authoritarian labor movements Potere Operaio and Autonomia Operaia to resist industrial capitalism.
In the 1970s, it was linked to the Red Brigades. Following the kidnapping and murder of Aldo Moro, former Christian Democratic Prime Minister, in 1978, Negri was imprisoned for four and a half years in pretrial detention over his alleged connection to the events, although the accusation was proven to be unfounded.
He was elected as a representative of the Radical Party in 1983, was able to get out of prison thanks to parliamentary immunity, and shortly after François Mitterrand went into exile in France. The Italian judiciary ended up convicting him and his work (which in the 1960s and 1970s advocated armed rebellion against the Italian state) to seventeen years in prison on charges of involvement in subversive movements, violent demonstrations or strikes. Mitterrand’s principle allowed him not to extradite him. However, he would return to Italy in 1997 to spend six years in prison.
In 2000, already free but politically disqualified and even a teacher, he returned to France and became one of the intellectual leaders of the alternative globalization movement and in defense of the re-establishment of the internationalist left (in 2005 he voted for the draft European constitution as explained by Europe and the Empire). Negri argued in his most famous recent book, empire (2000), known as the “Communist Manifesto for the 21st Century,” argue that nation-states have been replaced by a more diffuse force, the nation-state.empireWhich also has severe social implications arising from the globalization of markets that began in the 1960s. Then talk to crew (2004) ed crowd (2018), a trio of titles written with Michael Hardt, about the emerging new social class and the possibility of organizing outside capitalism.
Negri has been a great authority on the more progressive European left, on issues such as anti-globalization, anti-capitalism, postmodernism, neoliberalism, and democracy.
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