In Praise of a Dinosaur: Toni Negri

On January 3, 2024, during Toni Negri’s funeral at Père Lachaise Cemetery in Paris, the philosopher Judith Revel—his partner for the last thirty years of his life—delivered one of the most moving speeches of the day. Her words struck me deeply: “[Toni] hated looking backward in his life. Perhaps for this reason, he was never a Benjaminian. He preferred, instead, to pose in the present the question of the coherence of his life.”1

(Looking) Back to the Future

What does it mean that Toni hated looking backward? Does it mean he wasn’t interested in the past? That his concerns were entirely focused on the future? In fact, it was rare to hear him speak about his own militant life, despite the fact that his anecdotes and experiences could have inspired anyone involved in militant politics. I met him for the first time in the early 2000s, just after he came back to Italy after his years of exile in France. He returned to a new generation of militants who were forty or fifty years younger than him. It would have been easy for him to captivate us with stories and memories of the struggles of the sixties and seventies, yet I never heard him idealize the past. His interest was always in present struggles, in the actions that could be organized in the immediate future.

The problem that fueled his political and intellectual energy was never deferred to some distant horizon. It was always about the conditions of exploitation where one lived—often in one’s own workplace. One of the great lessons of the workerist tradition is that one never struggles on behalf of someone else: the best form of solidarity is to struggle from one’s own perspective. Rather than positioning himself as a teacher, Negri’s priority was to listen and learn from the struggles of today and from the new practices of resistance.

For all these reasons, the last thing one would expect is that Negri, in the final years of his life, would engage with the genre of autobiography. After all, aren’t autobiographies a quintessentially reactionary genre? A genre where collective historical processes are reduced to the idiosyncratic psychological traits of an individual? Where one is drawn toward the past and turns away from the future? Often, autobiographies aim to take control of the author’s own narrative, eliminating all the uncomfortable or problematic parts of life in order to present a sanitized, narcissism-proof version of oneself.

And yet, Negri’s final major project was a nearly two-thousand-page volume recounting his life—a trilogy, with only the first volume, Story of a Communist, recently translated into English by Ed Emery for ERIS. The narrative spans his childhood in the thirties, through World War II, his brilliant academic career in the sixties (he was the youngest full professor in Italy at the time), the struggles of 1968, the autonomia groups of the seventies, the trials, prison, exile in Paris … all the way to the new movements of the 2000s and the global success of the books he coauthored with Michael Hardt.

Writing an autobiography might seem like surrendering to one of the dominant moods of the left in recent decades: melancholy, nostalgia for past struggles, a tendency to look backward rather than forward. Negri would have called it a “sad passion.” The left today seems afflicted by an inability to imagine a future and envision concrete, politically viable emancipatory projects. Isn’t that why Mark Fisher has become such a point of reference for so many young people on the left in recent years? Because Fisher not only theorized this inability to think concretely about transforming the present but also bore witness to it through his own tragic suicide.

So why did someone who spent his life refusing to indulge in his own past, and who was always interested in present political and social movements, write nearly two thousand pages about his past? A few dozen pages of the first volume are enough to make it clear that, if this is indeed an autobiography, it is a very peculiar one.

First, in terms of writing style: the narrative constantly shifts between the first-person singular, the third-person singular, and the first-person plural. Sometimes even on the same page the “I” turns into “we,” only to be replaced again by “Toni,” as if the protagonist were placing himself on the same level as the comrades he describes. Moreover, the protagonist of this autobiography—unlike in many autobiographies—remains an impenetrable figure as the narration evolves and as the individual is gradually replaced by the collective. There is nothing in the psychological traits of his childhood that explains the choices Negri would later make as an adult. There is no introspection to suggest that, when the first person is combined with other individualities, it might account for the collective political events of the sixties and seventies, which form the core of the book. The collective, in this account, is never the sum of different individuals.

There is no exceptional character whose intrinsic qualities led him to become a leader of a collective mass process. If anything, the opposite is true: it was 1968 that made Toni, not the other way around. It was the singularity of the event that shaped the individual. The contingent, unpredictable, and in some ways inscrutable encounter of a group of comrades, militants, and friends—along with specific social and historical conditions prepared and sedimented by previous struggles—transformed otherwise ordinary biographies (and all biographies are, in a sense, ordinary) into something exceptional.

So, there is no surrender to autobiographical passion or the fetishization of the past. Instead, the narrative affirms how individuality always arrives last—only after everything has already taken place. Because the true protagonist of this book—at least of this first volume—is the unique event that was ’68. After all, wasn’t it Toni Negri who always theorized that class struggle comes first, while capitalist development follows? Isn’t it social conflict that always precedes any legal or institutional order? Isn’t constituent power the inexhaustible and uncontainable source of all constituted power? The lesson of this book is that the same is also true of individuality: it emerges only as the consequence of a singularity that is always historical and collective (or perhaps transindividual).

The Singularity of ’68

What makes the singularity of the Italian ’68 so unique? And why is this singularity the true protagonist of this biography, beyond any individual? “There was a European ’68,” Negri writes, “just as there was an American ’60s. But the Italian experience was something different: an exotic and flourishing tree within that European forest, a tree that grew to be gigantic. The real Italian ’68 probably took place in ’77, at a time when, in the rest of Europe, ’68 seemed to have ended.”2

The images we associate with ’68 are tied to a student and countercultural imaginary: Berkeley in ’64 and the Free Speech Movement, the DNC protest in August ’68, and the revolt of May ’68 in Paris. The so-called New Left of the sixties—for better or worse—is usually remembered as a movement of activists who, in reaction to the era’s liberal establishment, campaigned for freer lifestyles across a broad range of social issues (drug experimentation, new sexual freedoms, new cultural forms), allegedly distancing themselves from the purely economic concerns of the Marxist tradition of the 1930s. However, there’s much to be said about how this image is not only Western-centric but also, in fact, misleading. Outside of Europe or the United States, ’68 was also about anti-colonial movements; in Japan it was a generational revolt that profoundly challenged the generation that had fought WWII; and in Eastern Europe it was a series of revolts that, for the first time, challenged state socialism. But like all commonplaces, the image of the countercultural ’68 performatively produced effects in reality, and continues to do so.

The story of the Italian ’68 was indeed a different one, impossible to reduce to a purely generational movement. As Negri says, it lasted roughly a decade, from 1968 to 1977—or perhaps even longer. This Marxist heresy, of which Negri was a part, began in the early sixties and ended only with the devastating defeat of the working class at Fiat in 1980 (marked by a traumatic reactive demonstration of white-collar workers organized by management, which carried the same political significance in Italy as the PETCO strike did in the United States).

First and foremost, for geopolitical reasons, Italy was a peculiar country in Europe at that time. It had by far the strongest communist party in the West, which also governed many local municipalities and entire regions. By the mid-seventies, the Italian Communist Party (PCI) had essentially the same number of votes as the governing party of the postwar period, the conservative Christian Democrats. In 1984, it even managed, in a single historic election, to become the leading party nationwide. To the east, Italy bordered the Eastern bloc country that was the most democratic-socialist and the most open toward Western Europe—Yugoslavia. Internally, however, Italy was profoundly divided economically: some regions had highly advanced and technologically modern industrial systems, while others remained scandalously backward and agricultural (one of the most striking social phenomena of postwar Italy was internal migration). In short, Italy was a country at the threshold between East and West—between Western Europe and the socialist East—and internally divided between the North and the Global South. It was precisely because of this peculiar condition that, starting in the immediate postwar period, Italy played host to many US and NATO military bases, even more than Germany.

This is why the PCI, despite being one of the main heirs of the resistance that liberated Italy from fascism and Nazism, adopted a very reassuring attitude toward the Atlantic alliance and the US presence, continually confirming Italy’s position among the countries of the Western bloc and its acceptance of liberal democracy as a definitive political system. Italy was also geographically close to several Mediterranean countries that, in their attempts to organize communist revolutions, ended up opening the doors to the reaction of fascist forces (Spain, Portugal, and Greece). In a country full of US military bases, and under the constant threat of a reactionary push if the PCI pursued a revolutionary strategy (in 1969, a military coup d’état was planned by the Italian secret services and the CIA; it was halted just one day before its implementation), it is perhaps understandable that Palmiro Togliatti, the secretary of the PCI, would pursue a reformist strategy of progressive democratic consolidation and industrial development, even in the most backward areas.

However, the price that the PCI ultimately paid for abandoning any revolutionary project was very high. It meant embracing a strategy of class alliance for national development. Here lie the roots of the idea of the “national popular” that became a kind of rhetorical religiosity of the subaltern classes. But here also lie the roots of the idea of the PCI as a stronghold of liberal democracy and a republican constitution.

Negri recounts how a generation of communist militants—on the margins or completely outside the PCI (he himself came from a Catholic background before joining the Socialist Party in the fifties)—emerged from this profound crisis of Italian communism. This crisis, however, also characterized Stalinism (with which the PCI was inevitably involved, like all Western communist parties), beginning in 1956 with the 20th Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (where Stalin’s crimes were first partially revealed) and continuing with the Hungarian uprising of the same year and the Prague Spring of ’68.

According to Negri, this crisis gave rise to a different way of being communist, no longer revolving around being a member of a mass party—what would later be called “the autonomy of the political.” It was expressed through political organizing within the factories of Italy’s booming economy—hence less in the agricultural South than in the industrialized North: Milan, Turin, Venice, Marghera, but also Emilia, Tuscany, and to some extent even Rome. In fact, while pursuing a strategy of national unity, the PCI had almost completely abandoned its presence in the factories in the fifties, failing to understand the profound transformations that Italian capitalism was undergoing and, especially, their incredible political potential.

The ideology of progressive integration promoted by the PCI, according to the workerists, encountered a fundamental obstacle in the early sixties in the figure of the “mass worker.” This social figure highlights the limits of the Communist Party’s interclass strategy because, unlike the skilled working class, the mass worker expresses a structural inability to be integrated into the society of prosperity, the economic boom, and consumer society. This exclusion happens for both objective and subjective reasons. Objectively, the mass worker is a deskilled laborer, often an immigrant from the South, without a community safety net, and typically employed on the assembly line in repetitive and highly alienating tasks. Subjectively, this worker belongs to a generation that is uninterested in the long-term mediation offered by the historical institutions of the labor movement, such as the union and the Communist Party. It is a working class that views struggles instrumentally, with a short-term logic. “I have never forgotten,” recalls Tronti, “the lesson we learned at the factory gates, when we arrived with our pretentious leaflets, inviting workers to join the anti-capitalist struggle. The answer was always the same, coming from the hands that accepted our bits of paper. They would laugh and say: ‘What is it? Money?’”3

Yet it is precisely because of this cynicism that the mass worker has the potential to put capitalist mediation in crisis. The mass worker’s insubordinate behavior—sabotage, wildcat strikes, absenteeism—is difficult to integrate within a logic of political mediation, even as this worker plays a crucial role in the capital valorization chain (if the assembly line is attacked, the entire system must stop).4

Crisis would indeed become the other fundamental concept to which Negri would dedicate his work in the sixties, particularly in two essays focused on Keynes and the Rooseveltian New Deal.5 In these essays, Negri analyzes a process of capitalist accumulation centered on the Taylorist division of labor in production and on welfare policies aimed at sustaining demand, with the primary objective of exerting control over working-class resistance.

For Negri, the capital relation is structurally in crisis precisely because it is based on two fundamentally opposed social forces. The role of total social capital, identified in the state form, is to guarantee social peace by containing wage growth within limits that do not disrupt capitalist accumulation. This is why the insubordinate behavior of the mass worker—as well as increasing wage demands or struggles over the indirect wage (such as healthcare, housing, and even access to culture and consumption)—aims to be inherently incompatible with the proportionality of capitalist accumulation, which was safeguarded by the social-democratic policies of the PCI.

The specificity of the Italian situation made ’68 a very different event from the countercultural mood in the US or the student movement in France. It was a ’68 of students and workers united in struggle—students who did political and union organizing in the factories and workers who joined student protests and university occupations. Even though this historical sequence was built throughout the sixties through theoretical experimentation and embryonic forms of political organization, led by a series of journals that would later become legendary (Quaderni Rossi, Classe Operaia, Contropiano, Potere Operaio, Rosso), it culminated in 1973 in the occupation of Mirafiori, the headquarters of Fiat, Italy’s largest automobile factory, which at the time employed over fifty thousand workers. It is from this evental singularity that Negri’s individuality emerged—and not the other way around. This is the profound truth of this nonindividual autobiography.

Conclusions

The relationship between Toni’s biography and History—where singularity lies not on the side of the individual but on the side of history—reminded me of Le Tombeau d’Alexandre (1992), a documentary by the French director Chris Marker. The film explores the relationship between cinema and communism through the life of another individual: a seemingly marginal figure in film history, the Russian filmmaker Alexander Ivanovich Medvedkin.

Born at the start of the century, a general during the Russian civil war after the revolution, and later a filmmaker during the golden era of Soviet avant-garde cinema, Medvedkin always seemed to be present where major historical events of the twentieth century were unfolding—a bit like Toni. He was censored under Stalin in the thirties (notably due to one of his most beautiful films, Happiness), and then, paradoxically (and somewhat incredibly), became a champion of Stalinism, directing postwar parades and even producing state propaganda films in the seventies. Toward the end of his life, he withdrew into private life just as the USSR entered its final crisis in the eighties, dying only a few days before its ultimate collapse. His life, in many ways, was almost perfectly aligned with the arc of the twentieth century.

It’s not the first time someone has noted the deeply intertwined histories of communism and cinema. Yet what is striking about Le Tombeau d’Alexandre is how a historical event spanning nearly a century (from 1900 to 1917 to 1989) is condensed and allegorized in a single biography. Perhaps the enigma of the relationship between biography and history—or between individuality and singularity—is best encapsulated by Medvedkin himself. In the final interview of the film, he speaks a line that could just as easily be applied to Toni Negri: “In the history of mankind, there has never been a generation like ours. To take an example from astronomy, it’s like those ‘black stars.’ They measure only a few cubic inches, but they weigh several tons. One such ‘black hole’ could represent my life.”

An infinitesimal point, as small as a single life, yet one that manages to express the enormity and singularity of a historical event—just like ’68. It is the opposite of the melancholic “sad passion” we’ve grown so accustomed to in today’s fetishization of past struggles.

“I know what word would come to many to describe a man like you,” adds Chris Marker about Medvedkin at the end of the film: “dinosaur.”

Coincidentally, that’s exactly what an old member of the PCI said the day after Toni Negri’s passing—referring to all the militants of the Italian Red Years: he called them “dinosaurs.”

But look what happens to dinosaurs, concludes Chris Marker at the end of the film. Kids love them.