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From the Factory to the World. The Global Marxism of Antonio Negri

Buy hardcover (Brill)
Published Jun 2026

Elia Zaru

Author: Elia Zaru
From the Factory to the World offers a landmark historical and theoretical reconstruction of Antonio Negri’s political thought, from Italian Operaismo in the 1960s and 1970s to his global influence via Empire (2000), and up to his death in 2023. The book highlights Negri’s epistemic continuity, showing how he extended the core tenets of Operaismo – such as the working class’s autonomy and Tronti’s “Copernican revolution” – beyond the Fordist factory into a “global Marxism” for the present. Employing a methodology at the intersection of the history of political thought and intellectual history, it elucidates Negri’s ideas and innovations, engages major critiques, and distinguishes his approach from Western Marxism, post-Marxism, and neo-Marxism, assessing its contributions to critical theory and social movements.

Biographical Note

Elia Zaru, Ph.D. (2021), Scuola Normale Superiore, is a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Milan. His research focuses on modern and contemporary political thought, particularly constitutionalism, republicanism, Marxism, and the history of concepts of modernity, sovereignty, and globalization.

Readership

This book is for scholars engaged in political theory and the history of political thought, Marxism, Italian operaismo, critical theory, continental philosophy, Italian political history, and social movements activists.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments

Introduction

1 Where It All Began (1959–1967)
1 What Is Operaismo?
2 The Dawn: Quaderni Rossi
3 The Peak: Classe Operaia
4 The Future: Post-Operaismo?

2 Negri’s Operaismo (1967–1979)
1 Mass Worker and Social Worker
2 A Marxist Theory of the State
3 Critique and Clinic of the State
4 Negri’s Communism

3 Prison Time (1979–1983)
1 Marx with Spinoza
2 A Communist Theory of Time
3 Dialectic and Subjectivity
4 In Praise of the Absence of Memory

4 Exile (1983–1997)
1 The Ontology of Subversion
2 Revolutionary Roads
3 Back to the Future

5 From the Factory to the World (1997–2023)
1 Empire and Imperialism
2 Biopolitical Production and Immaterial Labour
3 Multitude and Class

6 The Global Marxism of Antonio Negri: Conclusion
1 Epistemic Continuity, Conjunctural Discontinuity
2 Western Marxism, Post-Marxism, Neo-Marxism and Global Marxism
3 The Communist’s Laughter

Bibliography
Index