Michael Hardt Interview: Conversations with History; Institute of International Studies, UC Berkeley
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When did you meet Antonio Negri, and when did your collaboration begin?
In a way it was -- at least in retrospect I tell myself this story, I think it's more or less true -- that I was frustrated with the whole paradigm of U.S. young people working in Central America. I felt like it wasn't our political struggle, it was theirs. We were merely observers. We were mostly in the way. And it really didn't relate to our politics.
Their struggle, you mean?
Yes. It seemed to me that reading about, especially, Italian political movements in the seventies (this was in the mid-eighties now) but the seventies seemed to relate. Reading Tony Negri's work was part of this whole political and intellectual milieu. It was partly by that hope or inspiration that I thought meeting -- and even working with him, even like being a student of his, although I didn't turn out to be a student of his -- I thought that would be a way of addressing these political and intellectual concerns, making them match up. The Italian struggles seemed to have more to do with us in the U.S. than the Salvadorans' did, however inspirational the Salvadorans were.
Why is that? Was it because they were addressing these radical political questions in the context of the modernization of the Italian economy in modern life, that they were a latecomer to this new wave of modernization that was affecting Europe?
Yes, I suppose so. The Italian social problems and possibilities of political activity had a lot more to do with us than the Salvadorans did. I remember posing ... there was a close friend who had come north, a Guatemalan who had been in the mountains for several years with the guerillas and had come with the underground railroad to Seattle, where I was at the time, and I was telling him my frustrations. He said, "Look, you have mountains here. Just go to the mountains. That's what we do, we go to the mountains." I thought, "Okay ... " We had mountains around Seattle, but that wasn't what was ...
It's a metaphor, actually. We go to the mountains with mountain bikes, right?
Right. There wasn't a way of making a comparable question. Even Italy in the seventies was actually quite a different social atmosphere that couldn't be replicated, but it was much closer [to U.S. culture]. There were urban struggles that had to do not only with the questions of transformation of labor, gender struggles, unemployment. It was much closer to the possibilities of struggle in the U.S., and that's something that seemed to me worth pursuing, or it seemed to me an open avenue. So that's why I sought out Tony. In fact, I translated a book of his in order to meet him, because he at the time was not exactly clandestine, but was very difficult to meet, actually.
Can you give us a nutshell profile, the short version of who he is? I can say, initially, that he was a political theorist, but also an activist; an intellectual leader of the Autonomy movement in Italy, and very much involved in thinking about radical politics in Italy. But is there something else that you would add to that that's not apparent?
Sure. Let me try to give the short of it. It's sort of a Hollywood-like story. I hope that I get it all right, too.
He was a leader in student/worker movements in the sixties in Italy, in the sixties through the seventies. A first of a group that was, in fact, quite centralized for the late sixties/early seventies, called Potere Operaio, Workers' Power. That transformed into a very loose-knit network of organizations called, as you said, Autonomy, or Workers Autonomy, through the mid-seventies. These were also the same years when, parallel to these non-terrorist groups that he was involved in (but groups, nonetheless, in which violence occurred at demonstrations, etc.), various terrorist groups also arose in Italy, first of all, the Red Brigades, but various other groups too. By the end of the seventies, after Aldo Mora was murdered by the Red Brigades, there were in place emergency laws in Italy to ... well, from the perspective of the state, to combat terrorism, but it was a very broad net for reigning in all forces of the left. You might think of it as the same approach of counter-terrorism in Southeast Asia, that if you take away the water the fish will die, that kind of thing. So, Tony was part of the water. That's the way I think about it.
He was arrested in 1979 under these emergency laws whereby he could be held for two years without being charged and four years without coming to trial. So during these first two years, there were all kinds of reports in the media. Magistrates said all kinds of things, with which he was never charged. But the most dramatic of those was that he was responsible for Aldo Moro's killing, the secret leader of the Red Brigades, and, in fact, the mastermind of all terrorism in Europe. You can imagine all kinds of amplification.
He was never tried for that, and it was quite clear that he was never involved in the Red Brigades. The judge and everyone were quite clear about that when he finally came to trial, roughly four years after. He was tried under these strange laws that are a bit like RICO, I suppose. They called them more or responsibility in Italy, which is that if you can prove someone is the leaders of a group, he or she can be held responsible for everything committed by members of that group. So the judges tried to prove that he was the leader of this loose-knit network called Autonomia, based on his writings -- a very strange trial, dragging out his books, erudite books and some inflammatory pamphlets, too.
While he was being tried he was elected to parliament by the Radical Party, and they protested against these 2,000 people [being held] in prison under these emergency laws. You might be getting dizzy already with all of this. He's elected to parliament, but under the Italian law you couldn't hold a member of parliament in jail for a political crime; he had to be released. After two months, the parliament votes to rescind his immunity, at which time he escapes on a sailboat to France. He goes to Elba first. It's all very dramatic. And France, the Mitterrand government at the time, refuses to recognize the extradition request from Italy, and so he spent fourteen years in exile in France, convicted in absentia while he was gone. I met him in France a couple years after he arrived.
And to finish you story -- we're going to go back to your collaboration in a minute -- he ultimately returned to Italy, and was given a sentence. He's presently under a kind of a house arrest, is that right?
He's now, actually, even finished that. He returned in 1997, did two years fixed in prison, two years of work release -- out at day/in at night, two years of house arrest -- and, now, finally, he's gotten his complete release with passport and everything. Happy end of story.
Next page: Collaboration with Negri
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