From: concrete-AT-netcom.com (Bradley Mayer)
Subject: Re: Negri's Marxism
Date: Fri, 16 Feb 1996 01:03:19 -0800 (PST)


End of msg from M. Strom:

>I respect Negri immensely. He is one of the few academics who are
>actually activists and not armchair revolutionaries. However, I think
>that at the end of the day, his stance is petit bourgeois. It has a
>'abolish work' stance, rather than 'abolish the wages system' which was
>Marx's slogan. The difference is profound.
>
>Any bites?

Here's a small nibble. Your observations on Negri show a lot of common sense.
My experience with Negri was contained in _Labor of Dionysus_, a sort of 
partial anthology of his writings from the 70's to the 90's, organized 
around the theme of the "critique of the State-Form". I had picked up the 
book with some high hopes, only to have them dashed against an almost 
inpenetrable maze of less than usefull theoreticisms. One simple idea 
lies behind it all: that the reproduction of the wage relation is 
lies increasingly at the foundation of the modern bourgeois state - 
agreeable enough.  Unfortunately, as one progresses through the book, the 
corrosive effects of "postmodern-think" are all to evident in Negri (and 
his co-author, Michael Hardt). Has there ever been a more pernicious 
poison unleashed upon the human brain as that of postmodern ideology? I 
think it may, in fact, be a kind of virus...

Negri is no doubt an honest revolutionary, but his theory combined with 
autonomism smack too much of quasi-Hegalian "immanentism".

			-Brad Mayer


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