Antonio Negri & Michael Hardt. Capitalist Control and Forms of Life. 2014

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• published: 25 Nov 2014
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http://www.egs.edu/ Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt, Italian and American philosophers and political theorists, sharing their characterization of modern and postmodern life forms under capitalist control, including a discussion of taylorism, fordism, and Adorno and Horkheimer's "Dialectic of Enlightenment." Subtopics discussed are state power, resistance, colonialism, the welfare state, marxism, automatization and the service economy. Excerpt from a larger workshop with Hardt & Negri for students of the European Graduate School EGS, Media and Communication Studies department program, Saas-Fee Switzerland, Europe 2014: Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt. Michael Hardt, Ph.D., born in Washington DC in 1960, is a political philosopher and literary theorist currently based at Duke University, North Carolina. While pursuing an undergraduate degree in engineering, Michael Hardt worked for solar energy companies in the United States and Italy. After college, in the early 1980s he became a part of the Sanctuary Movement, which helped refugees from Guatemala and El Salvador enter and stay in the United States with the aim of contesting the US funded wars. In the mid-1980s he became interested in radical Italian politics, met Antonio Negri, and began working together with him. Antonio "Toni" Negri (born 1 August 1933) is an Italian Marxist sociologist and political philosopher, best known for his co-authorship of Empire, and secondarily for his work on Spinoza. Born in Padua, he became a political philosophy professor in his hometown university. Negri founded the Potere Operaio (Worker Power) group in 1969 and was a leading member of Autonomia Operaia.[1] As one of the most popular theorists of Autonomism, he has published hugely influential books urging "revolutionary consciousness." Upon completing Empire, Hardt and Negri felt the need to further elaborate on the subject or form of an alternative. Therefore, in Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire they examine the possibilities of cooperative resistance to the new global order. Hardt and Negri decided to work upon this question by rethinking the concept of the working class which they refuse to see as a homogeneous group. They formulate the need for a political party that will have a form of a horizontal network structure without a centralized point of decision or leadership. For this, they have found the inspiration in several organizations created after the 1960s in order to defend the rights of marginalized groups such as the black power, civil rights movement, homosexual and queer organizations. Established in such a way with no centralized power, these organizations raised the question of the possibilities of multiplicity to act together. According to Hardt and Negri, the power of resistance is much stronger than what we might think and if held the right way, any tool can become one's weapon of revolution. Instead of trying to answer the question of what is to be done, they propose answering the question of what are people already doing, as a way to create a particular catalog of ideas for revolutionary practices. According to them, the main question about what democracy is today and what it could be in a global world will remain unanswered and in the realm of fantasy unless there is a subject that can fill it. Therefore, the new subject of democracy is exactly this entity they named 'multitude', and the democracy of the future can be saved only if there is a freedom to determine what are we to become. In their third part of the trilogy entitled Commonwealth, Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri offer a framework in which to restore the meaning of the many corrupted concepts of political vocabulary. They will further elaborate their previous suggestions for the social change that can be obtained by using the current forms of class oppression by joining it with the necessity to rethink the common in communism in order for this change to actually happen.