Zitate von Antonio Negri

„The legacy of modernity is a legacy of fratricidal wars, devastating "development," cruel "civilization," and previously unimagined violence. Erich Auerbach once wrote that tragedy is the only genre that can properly claim realism in Western literature, and perhaps this is true precisely because of the tragedy Western modernity has imposed on the world.“

—  Antonio Negri, buch Empire

„The contradictory conceptual couple, identity and difference, is not the adequate framework for understanding the organization of the multitude. Instead we are a multiplicity of singular forms of life and at the same time share a common global existence. The anthropology of the multitude is an anthropology of singularity and commonality.“

—  Antonio Negri, buch Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire

„[The] fact of being within capital and sustaining capital is what defines the proletariat as a class.“

—  Antonio Negri, buch Empire

„Material production - the production, for example, or cars, televisions, clothing, and food - creates the means of social life. … Immaterial production, by contrast, including the production of ideas, knowledges, communication, cooperation, and affective relations, tends to create not the means of social life but social life itself.“

—  Antonio Negri, buch Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire

„Contemporary capitalist production is characterized by a series of passages that name different faces of the same shift: from the hegemony of industrial labor to that of immaterial labor, from Fordism to post-Fordism, and from the modern to the postmodern.“

—  Antonio Negri, buch Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire

„A specter haunts the world and it is the specter of migration.“

—  Antonio Negri, buch Empire

„affective labor is biopolitical production in that it directly produces social relationships and forms of life. … When affective production becomes part of waged labor it can be experienced as extremely alienating: I am selling my ability to make human relationships, something extremely intimate, at the command of the client and the boss.“

—  Antonio Negri, buch Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire

„Reality and history, however, are not dialectical, and no idealist rhetorical gymnastics can make them conform to the dialect.“

—  Antonio Negri, buch Empire

„In the same way that the figure of the peasant tends to disappear, so too does the figure of the industrial worker, the service industry worker and all other separate categories.“

—  Antonio Negri, buch Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire

„We have to construct the figure of a new David, the multitude as champion of asymmetrical combat, immaterial workers who became a new kind of combatants, cosmopolitan bricoleurs of resistance and cooperation.“

—  Antonio Negri, buch Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire

„the hegemony of immaterial labor does, though, tend to change the conditions of work. Consider, for example, the transformation of the working day in the immaterial paradigm, that is the increasingly indefinite division between work time and leisure time. In the industrial paradigm workers produced almost exlusively during the hours in the factory. When production is aimed at solving a problem, however, or creating and idea or a relationship, work time tends to expand to entire time of life. And idea or image comes to you not only in the office but also in the shower or in your dreams.“

—  Antonio Negri, buch Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire

„Even when labor is subjugated by capital it always necessarily maintains its own autonomy, and this ever more clearly true today with respect to the new immaterial, cooperative and collaborative forms of labor. This relationship is not isolated to the economic terrain but, as we will argue later, spills over into the biopolitical terrain of society as a hole, including military conflicts. In any case, we should recognize here that even in asymmetrical conflicts victory in terms of complete domination is not possible. All that can be achieved is a provisional and limited maintenance of control and order that must constantly be policed and preserved. Counterinsurgency is a full-time job.“

—  Antonio Negri, buch Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire

„[Michel Foucault] argues, prison resembles the factory, which resembles the school, which resembles the barracks, which resembles the hospital and so forth. They all share a common form that Foucault links to the disciplinary paradigm. Today, by contrast, we see network everywhere we look.“

—  Antonio Negri, buch Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire

„We share bodies with two eyes, ten fingers, ten toes; we share life on this earth; we share capitalist regimes of production and exploitation; we share common dreams of a better future.“

—  Antonio Negri, buch Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire

„In the contemporary economy, however, and with the labor relations of post-Fordism, mobility increasingly defines the labor market as a whole, and all categories are tending toward the condition of mobility and cultural mixture common to the migrant. **133“

—  Antonio Negri, buch Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire

„All wars today tend to be netwars.“

—  Antonio Negri, buch Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire

„the question to ask, in other, is not "What is the multitude?" but rather "What can the multitude become?" … common condition, of course, does not mean sameness or unity, but it does require that no differences of nature or kind divide the multitude.“

—  Antonio Negri, buch Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire

„The contemporary scene of labor and production, we will explain, is being transformed under the hegemony of immaterial labor, that is, labor that produces immaterial products, suchs as information, knoledges, ideas, images, relationships, and affects. This does not mean that there is no more industrial working class whose calloused hands toil with machines or that there ae no more agricultural workers who till the soil. It does not even mean that the numbers of such workers have decreased globally. In fact, workers involved primarily in immaterial production are a small minority of the gloval whole. What it means, rather, is that the qualities and characteristics of immaterial production are tending to transform the other forms of labor and indeed society as a whole. Some of these new characteristics are decidedly unwelcome. When our ideas and affects, or emotions, are put to work, for insance, and when they thus become subject in a way to the command of the boss, we often experience new and intense forms of violation or alienation. Furthermore, the contractual and material conditions of immaterial labor that tend to spread to the entire labor market are making the position of labor in general more precarious. The is one tendency, for example, in various forms of immaterial labor to blur the distinction between work time and nonwork time, extending the working day indefinietly to fill all of life, and another tendency for immaterial labor to function without stable long-term contracts, and thus to adopt the precarious position of becoming flexible (to accomplish several tasks) and mobile (to move continually among locations). […] The production of ideas, knowledges, and affects, for example, does not merely create means by which society is formed and maintained; such immaterial labor also directly produces social relationships. […] immaterial labor tends to take the social form of network based on communication.“

—  Antonio Negri, buch Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire

„Multitude is a class concept. … Class is determined by class struggle. There are, of course, in infinite number of ways that humans can be grouped into classes - hair color, blood type, and so forth - but the classes that matter are those defined by the lines of collective struggle. Race is just as much a political concept as economic class is in this regard. … Class is a political concept, in short, in that a class is and can only be a collectivity that stuggles in common.“

—  Antonio Negri, buch Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire