Contributions of Antonio Negri in Building the Theoretical Foundations of Autonomous Marxism

This article addresses a gap in Autonomous Marxism scholarship by reconstructing the connective logic across Antonio Negri’s three intellectual phases, characterizing the movement as a corrective and critically revisionist project—an immanent critique designed to free Marxist categories from deterministic and teleological orthodoxies. Through close textual analysis of Negri’s primary works within Italian Theory, and while carefully distinguishing his solo writings from the later Hardt–Negri collaborations, the article shows how three interconnected conceptual pillars, grounded in Marx’s Grundrisse and deepened during Negri’s carceral and exilic phase through the Spinozist distinction between potentia and potestas, form sequentially presupposing moments of a single philosophical movement: the ontological primacy of labor over capital; the social factory thesis, theorizing the extension of capitalist command across the social fabric; and self‑valorization, defined as the proletarian capacity to generate independent values and needs outside the exchange‑value regime. The article contends that Autonomous Marxism transforms the specific politico‑economic crises of postwar Italy—marked by the failure of the Historic Compromise and subsequent state repression—into a theoretically generalizable methodology adequate for a postnational horizon. Negri’s work is thus framed not as a rejection of Marxism but as its emancipation from within, retrieving constituent power against institutional closure.