Negri in Wollongong
Toni Negri is dead. Perhaps no single intellectual has had a greater influence on my understanding of the world. He was a giant of the movement, in both theory and practice. I wanted to record here a few notes about the influence Negri had in the town of Wollongong, located in Dharawal Country on the New South Wales South Coast.
I first became involved in what we called the alter-globalisation movement in 1999, when I started as an undergraduate student at University of Wollongong. That year, the cries from the Battle of Seattle rang out through our primitive online communications networks, the email lists, websites, and bulletin boards of a milieu that crossed party and ideological lines - social democrats, human rights advocates, socialists, communists, liberals, and anarchists. A group of us in Wollongong responded to this ferment by forming a new collective, which we called Revolutionary Action, and through which we tried to chart a non-sectarian course towards an anarcho-communist theory and practice. We threw ourselves into organising locally and globally, joining with like-minded groups and a much broader cross-section of the left and social movements to shut down the World Economic Forum meeting in Melbourne in September 2000.
At that time, the hegemony of existing left currents was fraying and space was opening up for what we came to call the autonomist movement. We were inspired by the example of the workerist and autonomist currents of the Italian Hot Autumn and by similar currents in Europe and the United States, that emphasised militant direct action tactics, squatting, punk, and DIY culture, elements of rave culture and Reclaim the Streets, and which ultimately produced the alter-global wave of the 2000s. In Sydney, a group of student activists had broken away from existing socialist and non-aligned left groupings within the student movement to found the agitational group Love and Rage. It was through our relationship with these comrades that many of us first encountered Toni Negri's work. In particular, we learned about the autonomist current from Sergio Fiedler, a Chilean exile and former Trotskyist who was connected to the global theoretical movement in which Negri had already established a giant reputation. In early essays in Love and Rage's publication, in email lists, and in face-to-face discussions and presentations, we started to get to grips with Negri's work and that of the milieu from which he emerged and in which he remained a pivotal figure.
In Wollongong in 1999/2000, the social movements underwent a resurgence driven by a new class composition. The Communist Party of Australia had been a strong force in the city during much of the twentieth century. It’s splintering in the 1980s and ultimate dissolution in the early 1990s created a gap, but also opportunities. I learned my politics in the student movement, where the radical left was represented mainly by the Democratic Socialist Party/Resistance, and the environment, queer, and feminist movements maintained vibrant left cultures. The influence of Australian Communism and the desire to find an alternative given its obvious failings meant that anarchism was an attractive ideological alternative, but there was no organised anarchist presence in Wollongong at that time. What emerged on the far left of the student movement was a hybrid of socialist, communist, anarchist, feminist, and green politics that prepared me for the encounter with Negri's challenging reimagination of the communist legacy.
Building for the World Economic Forum protests in Melbourne in 2000, it was the alliance of socialist (DSP/Resistance), student, green, labour, and autonomist/anarchist tendencies that managed to build a broad front in Wollongong and take two busloads and a couple of cars down to Melbourne for these epochal confrontations outside Crown Casino. With Resistance in particular seeking to build their neo-Leninist organisation through the movement there were significant polemics (and here) over autonomism that helped all involved to gain greater clarity in a world that was rapidly changing and increasingly difficult to fit within the narrative frames of earlier political movements and philosophies.
One year later, as the terror of Islamist hijackers attacking the United States was confronted by the terror of the American war machine, the promise and the possibility that seemed so bright after s11 in 2000 was challenged by the war and repression of 9/11 2001. In response we built an anti-war movement and organised the largest demonstration in Wollongong's history as part of the global movement of refusal of that war of terror. But the domestic repression that accompanied the war drive and the increasing sense of despair that many of us experienced as the war machine rolled on over the top of our strivings for peace, left a legacy of disillusion and despair. For me personally, it was only in that context of a lull in the struggle that I began to engage more seriously in Negri's writings themselves, reading Empire and Multitude with comrades with whom I had forged strong bonds in the previous years of struggle. Negri and Hardt, with their optimistic understanding of the potential for a multitude of struggles to confront the anti-democratic tendencies unleashed by war.
Reading together was the glue that kept the autonomist tendency in Wollongong alive in the disrupted period after the peak of the anti-war movement. They connected us to one another, giving me a reason to leave the house at a time I battled intense despair, depression, and isolation. Reading Negri also kept us connected as some of us left Wollongong for shorter or longer periods, for work, study, and change in Canberra, Sydney, Nowra, Brisbane, Tokyo, and Guangzhou. They enabled us to grow our relationships outwards, as we found commonality with others who shared a passion of communist theory and wanted to read Negri with us and so the ‘us’ grew.
These readings, during a period in the mid-2000s when the best course of action for politics was often unclear, inspired all of us in different ways to develop our politics. One of us wrote a PhD thesis on Hardt and Negri's work, arguing that their strategic vision was characterised by an engagement with three main practices: democracy, peace, and love. Another wrote a thesis (later published as a book) on the broader 'perspective of autonomy', comparing and contrasting Negri's work with that of other 'autonomist' thinkers like Paulo Virno and John Holloway. One of us delved deep into the broader Italian workerist tradition, writing a thesis that articulated the limitations of Negri's post-workerist philosophy. Yet another sought to apply Negri's ideas to social struggles in Asia, ultimately producing a thesis and book on the anti-nuclear movement that drew on Negri's ideas of multitude and post-Fordist class composition.
Just as our reading connected us to one another, we also reached out through our shared understanding of Negri and of the alternative communist tradition he represented. These explorations led in different directions. In 2010 we held our first symposium, From Empire to Commonwealth at the University of Wollongong. The relationships built through this conference with autonomist and anarchist thinkers in Japan led to a further conference at Tokyo University of Foreign Studies in 2012. ‘Crisis and Commons’, connected us to autonomists in the United States and to German-speaking activist-researchers working on China. From there, some of us began networking and translating with communists in China. Nick's emphasis on the politics of love in Negri was the seed of another important development, a series of reading groups and festivals (as well as a book) that sought to explore the art, ideas, music, and politics of love that drew on Negri's deep understanding of and commitment to the great heart of the class.
In the past few years, I have not spent much time with Negri's work but I remain inspired by it and by his commitment to serious intellectual engagement combined with radical opposition to capitalism and capitalist state forms. Engagement with Negri's work does not imply agreement with everything he has said or done. Rather, Negri gives us a rich vein of stimulating ideas that arise not from dry theoretical exegesis but from a praxis that has seen him condemned to years of prison and exile but which enabled him to continue to struggle in spite of all this. As the COVID-19 pandemic swept the world, a deepening climate crisis and a resurgent fascist movement confront all serious communists with the great question: how to struggle, how to organise, and how to win, I am glad to have had Negri by my side. I may never have met him but he is a comrade still, a true example of the revolutionary intellectual, a fighter, a thinker, and a friend whose inspirational writing and example have changed the course of my life.
Vale Antonio Negri.
