Dialogue with Antonio Negri: A Few Thoughts on the Lecture “Metropolis as a Post-Industrial Factory”

Abstract

On November 27 and 29, 2014, Prof. WANG Hui, the Director of Tsinghua Institute for Advanced Study in Humanities and Social Sciences in Beijing, invited Prof. Antonio Negri, one of Italy's most leading Marxist philosophers and activists, to give a series of lectures. I was invited by Prof. WANG Hui to offer comments and reflections on one of Prof. Antonio Negri’s lectures, titled “The Metropolis as Post-Industrial Factory”. New Bloom published this article in Chinese based on the transcripts of the above lecture. It was translated into English by Ngai Pun. Acknowledgement: I was invited by Christian Fuchs, the editor of tripleC, to publish this Dialogue as a memorial to Prof. Antonio Negri, who passed away on 16 December 2023 at the age of 90.

Keywords

• antonio negri
• multitude
• class
• empire
• post-industrialism
• immaterial labour
• china's political economy
• post-fordist capitalism