That text of Negri's was posted to the Bhaskar list (on which I mostly lurk lazily). Here is my response to it on that list.
Carrol -------- Original Message -------- Subject: Re: BHA: [fwd] Negri: Towards an Ontology of the Multitude Date: Wed, 13 Nov 2002 11:42:09 -0600 From: Carrol Cox <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Jan Straathof wrote: > > "Towards an Ontological Definition of the Multitude" > by Antonio Negri > > [clip] > > The class concept of multitude must be > regarded differently from the concept of > working class. The concept of the working > class is a limited one both from the point of > view of production (since it essentially > includes industrial workers), and from that > of social cooperation (given that it > comprises only a small quantity of the > workers who operate in the complex of > social production). I can probably at times read as many as 200 + pages a day. To read the minimum number of books and articles I would like to (need to read) I'd have to read probably 1000 pages or so a day. Hence I need to be reasonably selective in what I read. (Whatever one's reading speed and amount of time for reading might be, there is still so much essential reading to be done that no one can keep up, so the present argument has a fairly general applicability.) Negri starts out with an utterly mechanical definition of the working class. (The definition is useless both for political purposes and as a point of departure for historical understanding.) And he seems to ground his core concept of "multitude" on the rejection of this banal strawman. I can't imagine a discourse starting out so badly fits into the kind of reading situation I described in my first paragraph. (I have read _Empire_, three times, carefully -- and it was all a waste of time.) Negri is conducting a filibuster. His books are useful only in filling time better occupied with much other activity. Carrol