This book is a selection of key political and theoretical articles by Toni Negri, spanning the period of his involvement in the Italian revolutionary left since the 1960s. These writings are essential for an understanding of the political outlook of the Italian autonomist movement; a movement which developed one of the most massive and coherent challenges in Europe to the system of austerity politics and the role of the established Left within it in the 1970s. These Negri essays provided a theoretical and critical reference point for ongoing debates in the development of this new class politics of communism, based on the liberation of needs and refusal of the capitalist system of work, from its origins in the “workerism” of the 1960s to the movement of “autonomy” in the 1970s. As such they are still more than relevant to an understanding of today’s problems in a revolutionary class perspective.

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