Antonio "Toni" Negri is an Italian Spinozistic-Marxist sociologist and political philosopher, best known for his co-authorship of Empire and secondarily for his work on Spinoza.
In Karl Marx's critique of political economy, commodity fetishism is the perception of certain relationships not as relationships among people, but as social relationships among things. As a form of reification, commodity fetishism transforms the intersubjective, abstract aspects of economic value into things that people believe have intrinsic value.
Michael Hardt is an American political philosopher and literary theorist. Hardt is best known for his book Empire, which was co-written with Antonio Negri. It has been praised by Slavoj Žižek as the "Communist Manifesto of the 21st Century".
Use value or value in use is a concept in classical political economy and Marxian economics. It refers to the tangible features of a commodity which can satisfy some human requirement, want or need, or which serves a useful purpose. In Karl Marx's critique of political economy, any product has a labor-value and a use-value, and if it is traded as a commodity in markets, it additionally has an exchange value, most often expressed as a money-price.
Multitudes is a French philosophical, political and artistic monthly journal founded in 2000 by Yann Moulier-Boutang. It is thematically situated in the theoretical framework of the seminal work Empire by Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt. The journal, like the book, focuses on the further elaboration of the philosophical and political thought of the Italian operaismo, but seems also to rest on Foucault, Althusser, and Deleuze's thought. It is a successor to the review Futur Antérieur edited by Jean-Marie Vincent (1934-2004) and Toni Negri, at the dep. of political science - University Vincennes Paris 8. It is a member of the Eurozine network.
Marxist feminism is a philosophical variant of feminism. Marxist feminism is focused on the ways in which women could be oppressed through systems of capitalism and the individual ownership of private property. Marx was accused of 'sex blindness'. It is believed by Marxist's that the position of a woman was taken for granted. The act of female emancipation from its current role will only happen in conjunction to revolutionary transformations. According to Marxist feminists, women's liberation can only be achieved through a radical restructuring of capitalist economies and with the transition of Communism sexual equality will prevail, in which, they contend, much of women's labour is uncompensated. Marx believed that Human nature was shaped by social environments and therefore could not be realised fully within a capitalism.
Moishe Postone was a Canadian Western Marxist historian, philosopher and political economist. He was Professor of History at the University of Chicago, where he was part of the Committee on Jewish Studies.
Multitude is a term for a group of people who cannot be classed under any other distinct category, except for their shared fact of existence. The term has a history of use reaching back to antiquity, but took on a strictly political concept when it was first used by Machiavelli and reiterated by Spinoza. The multitude is a concept of a population that has not entered into a social contract with a sovereign political body, such that individuals retain the capacity for political self-determination. A multitude typically is classified as a quantity exceeding 100. For Hobbes the multitude was a rabble that needed to enact a social contract with a monarch, thus turning them from a multitude into a people. For Machiavelli and Spinoza both, the role of the multitude vacillates between admiration and contempt. Recently the term has returned to prominence as a new model of resistance against global systems of power as described by political theorists Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri in their international best-seller Empire (2000) and expanded upon in their Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire (2004). Other theorists recently began to use the term include political thinkers associated with autonomist Marxism and its sequelae, including Sylvère Lotringer, Paolo Virno, and thinkers connected with the eponymous review Multitudes.
Communization mainly refers to a contemporary communist theory in which there is a "mixing-up of insurrectionist anarchism, the communist ultra-left, post-autonomists, anti-political currents, groups like the Invisible Committee, as well as more explicitly ‘communizing’ currents, such as Théorie Communiste. "Obviously at the heart of the word is communism and, as the shift to communization suggests, communism as a particular activity and process..." It is important to note the big differences in perception and usage. Some groups start out from an activist voluntarism, while others derive communization as an historical and social result emerging out of capital's development over the last decades. Endnotes totally distinguishes itself from the mixing of all sorts of meanings of the word communization and explicitly refers to the different reception in the Anglophone world as opposed to the original French milieu from which it emerged as a critique.
Autonomism, also known as autonomia operaia, autonomismo, autonomist Marxism, autonomous Marxism or worker authonomism, is a set of anti-authoritarian left-wing political and social movements and theories. As a theoretical system, it first emerged in Italy in the 1960s from workerist (operaismo) communism. Later, post-Marxist and anarchist tendencies became significant after influence from the Situationists, the failure of Italian far-left movements in the 1970s, and the emergence of a number of important theorists including Antonio Negri, who had contributed to the 1969 founding of Potere Operaio, as well as Mario Tronti, Paolo Virno and Franco "Bifo" Berardi.
Michael Betancourt is a critical theorist, film theorist, art and film historian, and animator. His principal published works focus on the critique of digital capitalism, motion graphics, visual music, new media art and theory, and formalist study of motion pictures.
The Origin of Capitalism is a 1999 book on history and political economy, specifically the history of capitalism, by scholar Ellen Meiksins Wood, written from the perspective of Political Marxism. It was reviewed as an "Outstanding Academic Book" by Michael Perelman.
In Marxist theory and Marxian economics, the immiseration thesis is derived from Karl Marx's analysis of economic development in capitalism, implying that the nature of capitalist production stabilizes real wages, reducing wage growth relative to total value creation in the economy, leading to worsening alienation in the workplace.
In Karl Marx's critique of political economy and subsequent Marxian analyses, the capitalist mode of production refers to the systems of organizing production and distribution within capitalist societies. Private money-making in various forms preceded the development of the capitalist mode of production as such. The capitalist mode of production proper, based on wage-labour and private ownership of the means of production and on industrial technology, began to grow rapidly in Western Europe from the Industrial Revolution, later extending to most of the world.
Classical Marxism refers to the economic, philosophical and sociological theories expounded by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels as contrasted with later developments in Marxism, especially Leninism and Marxism–Leninism.
In Marxist theory, the socialist mode of production refers to a specific historical phase of economic development and its corresponding set of social relations that emerge from capitalism in the schema of historical materialism. The Marxist definition of socialism is an economic transition. In this transiton, the sole criterion for production is use-value. Therefore, the law of value no longer directs economic activity. Marxist production for use is coordinated through conscious economic planning. Distribution of products is based on the principle of "to each according to his contribution". The social relations of socialism are characterized by the proletariat effectively controlling the means of production, either through cooperative enterprises or by public ownership or private artisanal tools and self-management. Surplus value, thus, goes to the working class and hence society as a whole.
Marxist philosophy or Marxist theory are works in philosophy that are strongly influenced by Karl Marx's materialist approach to theory, or works written by Marxists. Marxist philosophy may be broadly divided into Western Marxism, which drew out of various sources, and the official philosophy in the Soviet Union, which enforced a rigid reading of Marx called dialectical materialism, in particular during the 1930s. Marxist philosophy is not a strictly defined sub-field of philosophy, because the diverse influence of Marxist theory has extended into fields as varied as aesthetics, ethics, ontology, epistemology, theoretical psychology and philosophy of science, as well as its obvious influence on political philosophy and the philosophy of history. The key characteristics of Marxism in philosophy are its materialism and its commitment to political practice as the end goal of all thought. The theory is also about the hustles of the proletariat and their reprimand of the bourgeoisie.
The Grundrisse der Kritik der Politischen Ökonomie is a lengthy, unfinished manuscript by the German philosopher Karl Marx. The series of seven notebooks was rough-drafted by Marx, chiefly for purposes of self-clarification, during the winter of 1857-8. Left aside by Marx in 1858, it remained unpublished until 1939.
Digital labor or digital labour is a term for emergent forms of labor in Post-Fordist economies, characterized by the production of value through interaction with information and communication technologies. Digital labor takes different forms from on-demand platforms, micro-working and the creation of content for digital platforms such as social media. Digital labor describes affective and social activities within capitalist modes of production not typically recognized as work, including the increasing participation on social media websites, and the effect of social media on social patterns and communication and the collapse of work and play.
Immaterial labor is a Marxist, Autonomist framework to describe how value is produced from affective and cognitive activities, which, in various ways, are commodified in capitalist economies. The concept of immaterial labor was coined by Italian sociologist and philosopher Maurizio Lazzarato in his 1996 essay "Immaterial Labor", published as a contribution to Radical Thought in Italy and edited by Virno and Hardt. It was re-published in 1997 as: Lavoro immateriale. Forme di vita e produzione di soggettività.. Lazzarato was a participant in the Autonomia Operaia group as a student in Padua in the 1970s, and is a member of the editorial group of the journal Multitudes. Post-Marxist scholars including Franco Berardi, Antonio Negri, Michael Hardt, Judith Revel, and Paolo Virno, among others have also employed the concept.
