6. Immanence, Multitude and Empire

This chapter surveys the philosophical and theoretical foundations of Antonio Negri’s postoperaist conceptualisation of a crisis in the law of value. Central to this is Negri’s turn from Marx to Spinoza. The chapter begins by outlining the shift from operaismo to postoperaismo in Negri’s work and the wider tradition. It then considers how, in the development of thinking around the social factory and real subsumption comes a shift from the refusal of work to its celebration as an expression of the constituent power of the ‘multitude’. The chapter then assays Negri’s rejection of dialectics, contradiction, abstraction and mediation for the Spinozist immanence of ‘Empire’. This, the chapter suggests, forecloses the capacity to grasp the negativity and antagonism central to the critique of political economy.