This second volume of a new three-part series of Antonio Negri's work is
focussed on the consequences of the rapid process of
deindustrialisation that has occurred across the West in recent years.
In this volume Negri investigates exactly what happens when the class
subjects of industrial capitalism are demobilised and the factories
close. Evidently capital continues to make profit, but how and where?
According to Negri, the creation of value extends beyond the factory
walls to embrace the whole of society; the 'mass worker' of
industrialism gives way to the 'socialised worker' (operaio sociale) and
the terrain of exploitation now becomes the whole of human life.
In postmodernity, the metropolis becomes the privileged arena of value
extraction. We must therefore understand the global city, with its
stratifications, its enclosures and its resistances. Old categories of
the private and the public are inadequate to describe the new matrix of
production, which is characterised rather by the 'common', the
productive space of cognitive and immaterial labour.
Today's
metropolis can be defined as a space of antagonisms between forms of
life produced, on the one hand, by finance capital (the capital that
operates around rents), and on the other by the 'cognitive proletariat'.
The central question is then how 'the common' of the latter can be
mobilised for the destruction of capitalism. In an analysis that runs
from the Italian workerism (operaismo) of the 1970s to the present day,
From the Factory to the Metropolis offers readers valuable insight into
the far-reaching impact of deindustrialisation, presenting both the
challenges and opportunities.
It will appeal to the many
interested in the continuing development of Negri's project and to
anyone interested in radical politics today.
From the Factory to the Metropolis - Antonio Negri
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£14.99