An information society is a society or subculture where the usage, creation, distribution, manipulation and integration of information is a significant activity. Its main drivers are information and communication technologies, which have resulted in rapid growth of a variety of forms of information. Proponents of this theory posit that these technologies are impacting most important forms of social organization, including education, economy, health, government, warfare, and levels of democracy. The people who are able to partake in this form of society are sometimes called either computer users or even digital citizens, defined by K. Mossberger as “Those who use the Internet regularly and effectively”. This is one of many dozen internet terms that have been identified to suggest that humans are entering a new and different phase of society.
Postmodernity is the economic or cultural state or condition of society which is said to exist after modernity. Some schools of thought hold that modernity ended in the late 20th century – in the 1980s or early 1990s – and that it was replaced by postmodernity, and still others would extend modernity to cover the developments denoted by postmodernity. The idea of the postmodern condition is sometimes characterized as a culture stripped of its capacity to function in any linear or autonomous state like regressive isolationism, as opposed to the progressive mind state of modernism.
Antonio Negri was an Italian political philosopher known as one of the most prominent theorists of autonomism, as well as for his co-authorship of Empire with Michael Hardt. Born in Padua, Italy, Negri became a professor of political philosophy at the University of Padua, where he taught state and constitutional theory. Negri founded the Potere Operaio group in 1969 and was a leading member of Autonomia Operaia, and published highly influential books, including Empire and Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire, urging "revolutionary consciousness."
Giorgio Agamben is an Italian philosopher best known for his work investigating the concepts of the state of exception, form-of-life and homo sacer. The concept of biopolitics informs many of his writings.
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.
Empire is a book by post-Marxist philosophers Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri. Written in the mid-1990s, it was published in 2000 and quickly sold beyond its expectations as an academic work.
Multitude is a philosophical term for a group of people not classed under any other distinct category, except for their shared fact of existence. It has an ancient textual and philosophical history. Niccolò Machiavelli notably used it, and both Thomas Hobbes and Baruch Spinoza deployed it more technically in philosophy and in engaging with their respective historical or intellectual contexts. Later philosophers and theorists revived it, often explicitly from Spinoza. In the work of Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, among others, it became a radically democratic or revolutionary concept whereby individuals stand against institutions.
Potere Operaio was a radical left-wing Italian political group, active between 1967 and 1973. It should not be confused with "Potere Operaio Pisano" which was one of the components of a competing revolutionary group, Lotta Continua. Among the group's leaders were Antonio ('Toni') Negri, Nanni Balestrini, Franco Piperno, Oreste Scalzone and Valerio Morucci, who led its clandestine armed wing. It was part of the "workerist" movement (operaismo), leading to the later development of the Autonomist movement.
In critical theory, deterritorialization is the process by which a social relation, called a territory, has its current organization and context altered, mutated or destroyed. The components then constitute a new territory, which is the process of reterritorialization.
Autonomism, also known as Autonomist Marxism, is an anti-capitalist social movement and Marxist-based theoretical current that first emerged in Italy in the 1960s from workerism. 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.
Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire is a book by autonomous Marxist philosophers Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt that was published in 2004. It is the second installment of a "trilogy", also comprising Empire (2000) and Commonwealth (2009).
Affective labor is work carried out that is intended to produce or modify emotional experiences in people. This is in contrast to emotional labor, which is intended to produce or modify one's own emotional experiences. Coming out of Autonomist feminist critiques of marginalized and so-called "invisible" labor, it has been the focus of critical discussions by, e.g., Antonio Negri, Michael Hardt, Juan Martin Prada, and Michael Betancourt.
Posthegemony or post-hegemony is a period or a situation in which hegemony is no longer said to function as the organizing principle of a national or post-national social order, or of the relationships between and amongst nation states within the global order. The concept has different meanings within the fields of political theory, cultural studies, and international relations.
Non-simultaneity or nonsynchronism is a concept in the writings of Ernst Bloch which denotes the time lag, or uneven temporal development, produced in the social sphere by the processes of capitalist modernization and/or the incomplete nature of those processes. The term, especially in the phrase "the simultaneity of the non-simultaneous", has been used subsequently in predominantly Marxist theories of modernity, world-systems, postmodernity and globalization.
The global citizens movement is a constellation of organized and overlapping citizens' groups seeking to foster global solidarity in policy and consciousness. The term is often used synonymously with the anti-globalization movement or the global justice movement.
A. Kiarina Kordela is a Greek-American philosopher and critical theorist. She is a professor of German Studies and founding director of the Critical Theory Program at Macalester College in Saint Paul, MN.
Post-Marxism is a perspective in critical social theory which radically reinterprets Marxism, countering its association with economism, historical determinism, anti-humanism, and class reductionism, whilst remaining committed to the construction of socialism. Most notably, Post-Marxists are anti-essentialist, rejecting the primacy of class struggle, and instead focus on building radical democracy. Post-Marxism can be considered a synthesis of post-structuralist frameworks and neo-Marxist analysis, in response to the decline of the New Left after the protests of 1968. In a broader sense, post-Marxism can refer to Marxists or Marxian-adjacent theories which break with the old worker's movements and socialist states entirely, in a similar sense to post-Leftism, and accept that the era of mass revolution premised on the Fordist worker is potentially over.
Immaterial labor is a framework with origins in Marxist-based political economy, particularly Autonomist political philosophy, to describe how value is produced from affective and cognitive activities, which, in various ways, are commodified in capitalist economies.
Theories of imperialism are a range of theoretical approaches to understanding the expansion of capitalism into new areas, the unequal development of different countries, and economic systems that may lead to the dominance of some countries over others. These theories are considered distinct from other uses of the word imperialism which refer to the general tendency for empires throughout history to seek power and territorial expansion. The theory of imperialism is often associated with Marxist economics, but many theories were developed by non-Marxists. Most theories of imperialism, with the notable exception of ultra-imperialism, hold that imperialist exploitation leads to warfare, colonization, and international inequality.
The following outline is provided as an overview of and topical guide to Marxism:
