Antonio Negris Spinoza

An ontological fundament for the Marxist political theory

Leen Spruit While this article is being written, a lawsuit is starting in Rome against 71 persons, accused of having played an important role in 10 years of so-called red terrorism in Italy. The trial begins nearly four years after the arrest on April 7th 1979 of the most important suspects, among them: Antonio Negri. For him, the arrest meant the temporary end of his continuously radicalizing political and theoretical career: from militant christian-democrat to socialist in the 1960s, from 1968-activist to political and theoretical leader of Autonomia Operaia (laborers-autonomy, the Italian autonomists movement). More than one year ago, Negri wrote in prison Lanomalia selvaggia. Saggio su potere e potenza in Baruch Spinoza (The savage anomaly. Essay on power and potential in Baruch Spinoza). What pushes a left-radical theoretician as Negri to Spinoza? Negri became popular in the 60s and 70s as a left theoretician with studies about Kant, Descartes, Hegel and German philosophy of the 19th and 20th centuries. In those publications, he analyzed the formational process of the bourgeois ideology and the creation of the bourgeois State. In the introduction of The savage ideology, Negri pretends to be interested in another question, namely the definition of a new rationality, or: theoretical alternatives for a revolution in actu. According to Negri, Spinoza shows us, as a materialist and atheistic philosopher, that radical alternatives are offered by the history of metaphysics. Spinoza builds a notmystificated form of democracy by understanding the protagonism of the masses as the fundament of social and political transformation (according to Negri). Struck by what he thinks to be the revolutionary freshness of Spinozas thought, Negri wants to consider Spinoza as anticipated critique on Hegel and therefore as post-dialectical philosophy. Yet, Negri is not the first left philosopher having busied himself with Spinoza. Althusser integrated in his ideology-theory elements of Spinozas imagination theory. In Hegel ou Spinoza (Paris, 1979), Pierre Macherey calls for a reading of Spinoza after Hegel, but not through Hegel; Spinoza could be considered as an anticipated resistance to Hegel. With Negri, we are confrontated, in my view, with a radicalization in extremis of the, in very prudent terms expressed, conclusion of Machereys study. In Lanomalia, Negri tries to obtain something like a metaphysical fundament in Spinozian fashion for the Marxist political theory. Through an extremely anachronistic and annexating interpretation, he wants Spinozas metaphysics to function as an anti-dialectical correction on Marxs political theory. By abolishing the dialectics between labor and capital, the path is freed to some kind of monism of the labor movement: the antagonistic driving force of the proletariat as the sole factor in the proces of social transformation. That I find Negris analysis and conclusions doubtful, and even objectionable, does not mean that it should be archived as fast as possible. Negri should be considered as a very important exponent of the revolt that characterized the capitalistic West from 1968 on, and that, in Italy, before it was cut off in the blood of Moro and his bodyguard, manifestated itself in different ways, among which Autonomia Operaia. It is not in the least place, because of a feeling of affinity with the progressive movement in Europe (from 1968 on), that I consider of importance the research thats being made about the different aspects of theory building within that movement. The practical bankruptcy and theoretical fiasco of extreme variants like Negris and Autonomia Operaias does not diminish the relevance of such a research. Because we hugely underestimated the power of the state and of the

social reproduction, Autonomia Operaia is practically crushed between state and Red Brigade and it stranded theorically in a vacuum of abstract slogans and inwards closed narcissism. While Autonomia Operaia in Italy is nearly dead and only serves as recruitment service for the Red Brigades, in the Netherlands we notice the rise of a similar movement: Im not thinking of the Militant Autonomen Front, but rather of e.g. the kraakbeweging (the squatting movement), where there is still no serious theory building compared to Italy. Negri pretends in The savage anomaly to conduct a philosophical debate, but in my view it is in the end rather a political debate, in which he after all gives not much more than a secondary role to Spinoza. What Negri in my view in an unsound way borrows from Spinoza does only serve as illustrations for his own political theory. In this article I shall try to explain how his use of Spinoza makes his already problematic position even more problematic. To make things clear, I want to start with a rsum of Negris activities and publications of the last years; thereafter I shall try to explain the core of his Spinoza-interpretation, and finally a critical evaluation follows. [I.] II. In Lanomalia, Negri wants to show that Spinozas metaphysics mark a break in the history of the bourgeois philosophy. According to Negri, the bourgeois philosophy marginalizes the contradictions between the production forces and the production relations by a hypostasis of the proportions between the antagonistic forces. Spinoza marks a break in this tradition of bourgeois mystification: his metaphysics make it, according to Negri, impossible to reduce the development of the production forces to any order. On the contary: the functions of authority and order are created in the inside of society which is inextricably connected to the development of the production forces. Thanks to a strange interpretation of Spinoza, Negri succeeds in finding in Spinoza the things he himself always pretended: the natural antagonism in society constructs the concrete historicity of the social. It does not bother him that, to obtain this result, he needed to socialize Spinozas notion of substance. With Spinoza, substance is a metaphysical category: the substance does not only refer to the reality as totality, but also to its internal structure and productivity. The substance, i.e. God, produces from eternity in infinite ways everything, without getting out of the effects however. By moving the substance notion to the social reality, Negri makes of it a political-theoretical notion. He also thinks to have found in the philosophy of Spinoza a metaphysical fundament to his own political theory. With this melting together of metaphysics and politics, Negri thinks to have caught 2 flies in 1 take, while, in my view, he missed 2 times, and makes his own position even more misty. I shall return tot his later. The core of Negris Spinoza interpretation lies in his explanation of the relationship potestas potentia (power potential ; in Dutch: macht vermogen). The problem of the relationship between the power and the ability of God or between the effective and the potential productivity of the substance. Negri interprets it as follows. In Ethica I, 35-36, Spinoza makes the distinction between potestas and potentia, and with an evident polemical purpose: to anticipate on those who would suppose a disproportion between something that is possible out of the essence of God and the actual reality. In a next step (Ethica III-IV en Tractatus Politicus), the