Notes for Antonio Negri The Politics of Subversion: A Manifesto for the Twenty-First Century


Key concepts: socialized worker.


Related theorists: .


Preface to the new edition

Socialized worker the new composition of the working class.

(ix-x) The ‘socialized worker’ was nobody’s child and no one would acknowledge his or her name. . . . I myself had already understood some twenty years earlier that the composition of the working class was changing, the period of the ‘mass worker’ was ending, and an increasingly intangible and cooperative socialized workforce was being gradually formed. For this I was detested and despised by the opportunist and dogmatic leaders of the communist parties, who then let bourgeois judges throw me in jail for ten years. Socialist bureaucrats hate anyone who studies, works, incites the masses and lives among the multitude, and because of this hatred they are capable of exploiting the established powers to destroy the truth. . . . Marx tells us on every page of Capital that every law of development and the class struggle is tendential. . . . Armed with this method, it was impossible not to see the social transformation of work, and the minority understood the significance of the tendency towards the socialized worker. It meant that there was more exploitation, even more exploitation (because mental labor and social cooperation have been added to physical labor), but at the same time there is a greater chance of revolution.


Negri, Antonio. The Politics of Subversion: A Manifesto for the Twenty-First Century. Trans. James Newell. Malden, MA: Polity Press, 2005. Print.