Negri, self-valorisation and the exploration of the common

Abstract

This article establishes the continuity of ‘self-valorisation’ – the building of revolutionary subjectivity through workers’ opposition to capital and realisation of their own authentic needs – as a key concept in the work of the Italian Marxist political philosopher Antonio Negri: from his early analysis of Marxism and the Italian Operaismo movement for workers’ autonomy in the 1970s, to his recently co-authored trilogy with Michael Hardt. By reformulating Hardt and Negri's current theoretical project of the multitude in terms of what I call the exploration of the common, we can bridge the division between the technical and political aspects of contemporary class composition and understand how such pockets of workers’ resistance might be networked together. In this way, Negri's earlier theorisation of working-class organisation in 1970s Italy can help us rethink the crisis that organised and unionised labour face in the twenty-first century.