Negri’s Intellectual Trajectory
Antonio Negri’s political philosophy is concerned not only with how the capitalist order functions, but with the social forces it must bring under control in order to sustain itself. For this reason, his starting point is neither the institutions of capital, the juridical structure of the state, nor the objective laws of the system of production. Negri begins his analysis from the productive capacity of labour, social struggles, and collective powers that exceed existing relations. Capital is conceived less as a productive subject in itself than as a relation of command that organises, measures, and appropriates the value created by living labour.
This approach is connected with the Operaismo tradition that developed in Italy during the 1960s. Against explanations of capitalist transformations solely through capital’s technological and economic decisions, Operaismo foregrounds the effects of workers’ struggles in changing the organisation of production. Workers’ struggles against the pace of work, wage systems, and factory discipline compel capital to reorganise production. Although in Negri’s later work the factory worker gives way to a broader field of social production, this fundamental orientation remains: capitalist command is a response to the activity of productive subjects.
Negri’s readings of Marx and Spinoza constitute the two principal sources of this intellectual trajectory. Marx Beyond Marx foregrounds the antagonism between living labour and capital; The Savage Anomaly and Subversive Spinoza emphasise the immanent power of the multitude. His works on Subversive Politics and constituent power address the political form of this productive capacity, while Empire, Multitude, and Labor of Dionysus, written with Michael Hardt, consider the global transformation of production and sovereignty.
Marx Beyond Marx: Beginning Not from Capital but from Living Labour
Negri’s Marx Beyond Marx consists of lectures he delivered on Marx’s Grundrisse, written in 1857–1858. Negri does not regard the Grundrisse merely as a preparatory work for Capital; he approaches it as an independent theoretical field in which the problems of crisis, class struggle, social cooperation, and communism can be followed more explicitly. The fundamental distinction here is between dead labour, accumulated in objects and machines, and living labour, active within the production process. Machinery, technology, money, and fixed capital are materialised forms of past labour; yet the power that produces new value and new social relations is the present activity of living human beings.
Living labour in Negri does not mean merely physical force expended in exchange for wages. It includes the capacities to create, cooperate, produce knowledge, develop communication, and generate new social needs. Capital incorporates this power into the production process; through working time, the division of labour, and technology, it binds it to its own movement of valorisation. Yet living labour can never be entirely reduced to a fixed component of capital. The worker’s activity within the production process remains a power that capital needs but can never completely possess.
Class struggle is therefore not a social consequence that arises only after a previously established economic structure. It is the internal antagonism that constitutes and continually transforms the capital relation. The opposition between labour and capital is not limited to a dispute over how income is distributed after production has taken place; it concerns whose purposes production serves and within which social relations it is carried out. Negri’s reading of Marx constructs capitalism not as a closed system developing automatically according to its own laws, but as a conflictual process between capital’s attempts to control living labour and labour’s movements of escape from that control.
The Social Factory and Biopolitical Production
In industrial capitalism, the factory is the principal space in which labour-power is directly supervised and working time is measured. Yet as production spreads into knowledge, communication, services, education, care, and cultural relations, the boundary between factory and society weakens. The concept of the social factory, which Negri inherits from the Operaismo tradition, expresses the incorporation not only of the workplace but of broad areas of social life into the capitalist process of valorisation.
Hardt and Negri later approach this transformation through the concept of biopolitical production. The object of production is no longer limited to material goods; knowledge, affects, forms of communication, social relations, and ways of life are also produced. Care labour produces bonds between people; education produces knowledge and capacities; digital labour produces content, data, and communication networks; cultural production shapes forms of perception and desire. The term “immaterial labour” does not mean that physical labour or industrial production has disappeared. It describes the increasing tendency for the production of knowledge, language, relations, and affects to become decisive in organising other forms of labour. Hardt and Negri particularly emphasise that this production generates social networks, forms of commonality, and relations of life.
Within such an order, the distinction between working time and life-time also becomes blurred. Human beings may participate in the production of economic value not only during hours spent at the workplace, but while communicating, learning, providing care, and participating in digital networks. Capital’s command therefore expands from direct supervision in the factory toward broader instruments such as debt, markets, algorithms, performance measurement, and permanent availability. As production becomes socialised, exploitation also becomes a form of appropriation of the products of social cooperation.
Spinoza: Potentia, Potestas, and the Power of the Multitude
Negri’s reading of Spinoza gives an ontological and political foundation to his concept of living labour derived from Marx. In The Savage Anomaly, Spinoza is interpreted as a philosopher who thinks being not as a closed totality ordered by a transcendent will or external purpose, but as immanent productive power. Being does not obey a predetermined order; it acts within its own relations and produces new forms.
Within this framework, Negri gives particular importance to the distinction between potentia and potestas. Potentia is the active power of beings to act, establish relations, and produce together. Potestas is this power fixed within institutions, juridical forms, and structures of sovereignty. Potentia designates productive and constituent capacity; potestas designates constituted power that governs, represents, or restricts this capacity. In Negri’s interpretation of Spinoza, political order does not derive its power from an independent source; it depends upon the common power of the multitude and preserves its existence only insofar as it can organise this power within particular institutional forms.
At this point, the multitude is not merely a collection of individuals contingently placed alongside one another. It is a collective power increased as different bodies, capacities, and forms of life establish common relations. It does not need to become a single identity in order to act together. The singularities composing the multitude can preserve their differences while developing a shared capacity for production and decision-making. The fundamental political possibility Negri derives from Spinoza is that the many can act in common without being reduced to unity by a sovereign.
Empire: The New Structure of Sovereignty
In Hardt and Negri’s Empire, political power is approached through a structure of global sovereignty different from the classical model of imperialism. Imperialism is associated with powerful nation-states expanding beyond their borders, establishing colonies, and dividing the territories of the world into rival spheres of power. Empire, however, does not mean the domination of the world by a single state. It is a decentralised structure of command that brings together nation-states, international institutions, corporations, financial networks, juridical regulations, communication systems, and military powers on different levels.
Empire is therefore neither a world state nor a homogeneous space in which all borders have disappeared. In their later assessments, Hardt and Negri continue to define the concept as a hybrid form of governance intertwined with global networks of production but neither centralised nor unified. Borders may multiply rather than disappear; national states may take on different functions within the global order rather than becoming ineffective. The purpose of the concept is not to claim that every conflict in world politics has ended, but to indicate that these conflicts increasingly take place within global networks that national sovereignty alone cannot explain.
Empire is not a superstructure separate from the sphere of production. As social cooperation becomes globalised, the juridical and economic networks regulating this cooperation develop within the same process. Rather than completely stopping circulation, Empire classifies it; while opening fields of movement for capital, knowledge, and certain forms of labour, it produces new borders for migrants, precarious workers, and populations subjected to control.
Multitude: A Political Subject That Cannot Be Reduced to a Single People
Multitude is the name of productive and political subjectivity within the order of Empire. Hardt and Negri distinguish this concept from the people, the mass, and the homogeneous conception of class. In the tradition of sovereignty, the people requires different individuals to be unified under a single will. The mass refers to a passive aggregate in which differences become indistinguishable. The multitude, by contrast, consists of singularities irreducible to one another; its unity arises not from common identity, but from relations established through production and struggle.
The concept of multitude does not deny the existence of the working class. It requires the composition of class to be reconsidered within the changing structure of production. Paid and unpaid labour, industrial and care labour, regular and precarious work, migrant labour, and communicative production are different parts of the same field of social valorisation. In Hardt and Negri’s later formulations, the problem is how plurality can make political decisions and act in a lasting way. Difference alone does not constitute political power; the multitude must produce common forms of organisation.
This commonality is not already given. Language, knowledge, social relations, natural resources, and capacities for cooperation are both the products and conditions of production. In Negri’s thought, the common is not simply a third type of object situated between private and state property; it is a field of relations continually reproduced within social cooperation. The multitude is not a passive community that merely uses this common field, but the active power that produces it.
Constituent Power: Beyond Constituted Power
Negri’s concept of constituent power is the political counterpart of living labour and the multitude. Constituent power is not limited to a temporary juridical authority that drafts a new constitution and withdraws once its task has been completed. It is a continuous democratic capacity that produces new political forms, rights, and social relations beyond existing institutions.
Against it stands constituted power, which fixes the products of constituent movement within law, the state, and constitutional order. Throughout modern political history, revolutionary powers have created new orders, but this power has subsequently been restricted by institutions of representation and centralised sovereignty. In Negri’s Subversive Politics and his works on constituent power, the fundamental tension lies between the productive movement of democratic innovation and the institutionalisation that confines this movement within a particular form of the state. At the centre of Insurgencies is likewise this conflict between the revolutionary innovative capacity of constituent power and the fixed authority of constituted power.
Constituent power is not merely the capacity to destroy existing power. It is the capacity to create new forms of cooperation, common institutions, and processes of decision-making. Revolution in Negri therefore cannot be reduced to a single moment in which the centre of the state is seized. It is connected with social producers beginning to govern their own relations, becoming autonomous from the command of capital, and establishing common forms of life. Constituent power is the political movement of potentia; it is the capacity of living labour to produce new institutions.
Conclusion
Antonio Negri’s thought can be organised around three fundamental movements. Living labour is the productive power that capital controls but does not itself create. Multitude is the form of common action among the different singularities that carry this power. Constituent power is the capacity of the multitude to exceed the limits of the existing political order and produce new institutions and relations of life.
These concepts are not independent of one another. Living labour in Negri’s reading of Marx joins with potentia in his interpretation of Spinoza; the social plurality of productive power becomes a political subject through the concept of multitude; the multitude’s lasting capacity for innovation finds its political form in constituent power. Empire, in turn, is the order of sovereignty that attempts to govern this capacity on a global scale and extract value from it.
Negri’s fundamental proposition is that social order is not produced solely by power constituted from above. Law, capital, and the state owe their existence to the collective activity they attempt to govern. Political possibility is located at the same point: the multitude that carries the power of production and cooperation is not merely a resistance standing against constituted order, but the material source of another social order.
