Books for Burning: Between Civil War and Democracy in 1970s Italy

by Antonio Negri, Ed Emery (Translator), Arianna Bove (Translator)

Long before Antonio Negri became famous around the world for his groundbreaking volume Empire , he was infamous across Europe for the incendiary writings contained in this book. Books for Burning consists of five pamphlets that Negri wrote between 1971 and 1977, which attempt to identify and draw lessons from new conditions of class struggle that emerged in the course of the 1970s.

Conceived as organizational hypotheses intended for debate among the members of the political movements Workers’ Power ( Potere operaio ) and Organized Autonomy ( Autonomia organizzata ), these texts were later misread and misrepresented by the Italian state in its attempt to frame Negri as responsible for the assassination of former Italian president Aldo Moro, as the leader of the Red Brigades, and as the mastermind of an armed insurrection against the state. In the more than twenty-five years since their first publication, these texts have lost none of their originality, relevance or power to shock.

In a new preface, Negri demonstrates how his controversial work on empire, biopolitics and immaterial labor developed out of concepts and strategies first outlined in this book, and an editorial introduction analyzes the role these texts played in Negri’s trial and in the criminalization of the Italian radical workers’ movement.

Genres: Politics, Philosophy

352 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1997

About the author

Antonio Negri was an Italian political philosopher known as one of the most prominent theorists of autonomism, as well as for his co-authorship of Empire with Michael Hardt and his work on the philosopher Baruch Spinoza. Born in Padua, Italy, Negri became a professor of political philosophy at the University of Padua, where he taught state and constitutional theory. Negri founded the Potere Operaio (Worker Power) group in 1969 and was a leading member of Autonomia Operaia, and published hugely influential books urging "revolutionary consciousness."
Negri was accused in the late 1970s of various charges including being the mastermind of the left-wing urban guerrilla organization Red Brigades (Brigate Rosse or BR), which was involved in the May 1978 kidnapping and murder of former Italian prime minister Aldo Moro. On 7 April 1979, he Negri was arrested and charged with a long list of crimes including the Moro murder. Most charges were dropped quickly, but in 1984 he was still sentenced (in absentia) to 30 years in prison. He was given an additional four years on the charge of being "morally responsible" for the violence of political activists in the 1960s and 1970s. The question of Negri's complicity with left-wing extremism is a controversial subject. He was indicted on a number of charges, including "association and insurrection against the state" (a charge which was later dropped), and sentenced for involvement in two murders.
Negri fled to France where, protected by the Mitterrand doctrine, he taught at the Paris VIII (Vincennes) and the Collège international de philosophie, along with Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, and Gilles Deleuze. In 1997, after a plea-bargain that reduced his prison time from 30 to 13 years, he returned to Italy to serve the end of his sentence. Many of his most influential books were published while he was behind bars. He hence lived in Venice and Paris with his partner, the French philosopher Judith Revel. He was the father of film director Anna Negri.
Like Deleuze, Negri's preoccupation with Spinoza is well known in contemporary philosophy. Along with Althusser and Deleuze, he has been one of the central figures of a French-inspired neo-Spinozism in continental philosophy of the late 20th and early 21st centuries, that was the second remarkable Spinoza revival in history, after a well-known rediscovery of Spinoza by German thinkers (especially the German Romantics and Idealists) in the late 18th and early 19th centuries.

Reviews

[Ruairí]

Interesting attempt to grapple with the implications of the 70s crises after the high point of the hot autumn. They should have taken the grundrisse off this guy though. You can see the seeds of the later post-operaist nonsense all over the main pamphlets with all the stuff about the law of value ceasing to function. He was onto something with his focus on the state’s mediating role in the crisis (that we saw all over ‘08 and ‘20) as a backstop of last resort and the subsequent ramping up of brute repression, but I think he got the theory all fucked up.

[Bradley · Rating 3 out of 5]

Definitely not full of fiery rhetoric, but controversial nonetheless. I can see why Negri could be incarcerated over these publications. He takes on the nefarious influence of 'capital' that underlies all aspects of human existence (real subsumption). If you are interested in the Grundrisse - Negri gives interesting analysis of that cannonical text from Marx. Yet, for all the rhetoric about the breadth and depth of the problems posed by Capitalism, there is very little in the way of practical strategies posed against capital. Leaving things to the working class, and postulating a perfect theory that will 'tap into the consciousness of the workers' seems to be the over-arching goal of this text. Yah, interesting, but not Negri's best work. As usual he (like most academic Marxists) seems satisfied to discuss various problems posed by capital and then hide behind the working class as the 'revolutionary subject' destined to lead us to salvation.

Yea, this whole motif is turning me into an anarchist...the whole academese of it. Yet, Negri is far less interested in academic discourses than other Marxists I have come across - he is desperately clinging to the Revolutionary legacy laid out by Marx...and to be honest, that is quite admirable - but all in all its fairly dry reading, dense in Marxist jargon without a whole lot of substantiating defintions to ease the process along.

[Dave · Rating 4 out of 5]

Thick, but informative if you want to understand italy's period of lead and the relation between industrial process and worker's organization. Also an informative piece on autonomism. If you are into an interesting reading of Marx's Grundrisse you might also like this...

[Matthew · Rating 3 out of 5]

The introduction to this book is fantastic and very helpful in laying down the context within which these texts were written and published. It's interesting how these texts were written as pamphlets, read by numerous radicals during Italy's long '68, as they can be difficult to get through, given Negri's style of writing and his ever-evolving and often contradicting ideas. Nonetheless though it is worth it, even if just so you can begin to understand Negri's thought developed during this period.

[Davide Ciro · Rating 2 out of 5]

Scritti in maniera tecnica eccessiva, linguaggio anni 70