A Study On Negri’s Theory Of The Multitude

The concept of “the multitude” is the most central concept in Negri’s thought system,which is the image of modern revolutionary subject constructed by Negri in his interpretation of the global expansion trend of capitalism.Taking the multitude as a clue,other important parts in Negri’s thought system can be connected in series,such as the empire theory,the immaterial labor theory,the biopolitics and so on.The study of Negri’s theory of the multitude helps us to grasp Negri’s thought as a whole and to see the persistent efforts of Italian Autonomist Marxists to ponder the question of the revolutionary subject and to insist on the critique of capitalism in the new history conditions.The 1960s was an era of turmoil and variables,with a wave of movements in the international community.The workers’ movement of Autonomist in Italy developed in this context,giving Autonomist Marxists such as Negri a realistic opportunity to participate in the revolution and draw lessons from the revolutionary experience.However,the theory of the multitude is not a simple summary of the process of social movements,it has a deep theoretical foundation,which was constructed by Negri based on the Italian Autonomist Marxism theoretical tradition,absorbing the late Marxism,Spinoza’s philosophy and the ideas of Foucault’s power analysis.On the one hand,with the help of rich intellectual resources,Negri defined the multitude in an abstract sense,pointing out that the multitude subject has the characteristics of singularity and commonality.On the other hand,Negri placed the multitude in a realistic situation and seeked the intrinsic power of the multitude to construct society from the Machiavelli-Spinoza-Marx,a chain of radical philosophical.Based on Marx’s concept of the living labor and the general intelligence,he endowed labor subjectivity and constructs the binary opposition logic of capital and labor,and then continued this binary opposition logic under the framework of biopolitical analysis,positioning the multitude’s revolutionary subject identity from the dimensions of production and resistance.It can be seen that Negri,in constructing the connotation and reference of the concept of multitude,tries to follow the position of Marx’s historical materialism and manages to analyze it from Marx’s perspective of labor and production,showing a unique theoretical charm.But the flaws of this theory are also obvious.Negri integrated Spinoza’s idea of the multitude and Deleuze’s and Foucault’s biopolitics into the concept of the multitude.In this hybridization,Negri’s concept of the multitude takes on a complex hierarchy,by which he wants to give the concept a strong explanatory power in the context of contemporary world politics.Whereas,it is its hybridity that makes the realistic image of the concept of the multitude,that is,the revolutionary subject,points to the “revolutionary subject” with utopian color and lack of realistic power.