stevphen writes:

The document below was drafted in response to an article by Keith Windschuttle last week in _The Australian_. The text of this article can be found online).

If you'd like to sign the document below, contact Jon Roffe at overground@imap.cc

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“Civilised values” indeed. What we actually find in Keith Windschuttle’s article, “Tutorials in Terrorism,” (The Australian, March 16 2005*) is a thin polemical canvas thrown over a series of gross simplifications, factual omissions and pre-emptive judgements in relation to the life and work of Italian philosopher Antonio Negri.

“And who’s Negri?” Windschuttle asks? A good question, although not one that is well-answered in his article. We are presented with the portrait of a conniving, cowardly sadist with political delusions. To counter this caricature, is it enough to recall that Negri on many occasions publicly opposed the activities of the Red Brigade and other terrorist groups, the groups that Windschuttle accuses Negri of associating with? Is it enough to recall that operaismo, the political tendency of which Negri was a founder, considered the collective refusal to work as the great tool of the working class, and not elitist attempts at political coups? Is it enough to recall that Negri, who returned voluntarily to Italy and thus to imprisonment, was involved in a program in the prison to assist the mentally ill that had been displaced since the closing of psychiatric hospitals in Italy?

Windschuttle’s version of the sordid trials that followed Negri’s arrest on April 7 1979 is a very loose account, and at times proceeds by exaggeration and generalisation rather than by outlining the facts and context of the case. He was indeed charged with being the head of a widespread terrorist network, and then held in prison for four years before coming to trial, thanks to certain measures put in place by the incumbent government. Amnesty International condemned the lack of procedure evident in the arrests and trials which Negri among others was subject to.

The central accusation motivating the arrest was that Negri had himself murdered Aldo Moro, then Italian prime minister. What he fails to note is that this charge was dropped 12 months after Negri’s arrest, due to a lack of evidence. Negri was also charged, Windschuttle rightly states, with the murders of 17 other people. However, a cursory examination of the context would once again reveal an important fact: that these charges were applicable to Negri only as the result of a law that was passed allowing any of those arrested to be charged with the crimes of the others associated with them. It was therefore what was called ‘moral responsibility’ for these 17 murders that Negri was accused of, as a result of this law, and not anything to do with “armed insurrection against the state.”

As Windschuttle goes on to state, Negri was released from prison after having been elected to the Radical Party. Windschuttle calls it the “Marxist-led Radical Party,” a statement that reveals most overtly that he does not understand certain basic facts about the Italian political context, then or now. The Radical Party was born in the 1950’s when it split off from the conservative Liberal Party, an orientation still attested to by their decision to support Silvio Berlusconi’s coalition in the most recent Italian elections. A Berlusconi, let us recall, who was first elected on the platform of the failure of communism. In fact, the mandate of the Radical Party is in fact to be something like a ‘non-party party’ concerned above all with particular political issues rather than any kind of sectarian approach – hardly the profile befitting a group of renegade Marxists.

In Windschuttle’s words, what came next was Negri’s escape from Italy: “Claiming parliamentary immunity, he was temporarily released and used his freedom to escape to France.” In fact, far from fleeing as soon as he could, Negri began an active parliamentary life, arguing strongly against the human rights abuses being perpetrated by the Italian government, and in favour of the rights of political prisoners. However, a few months later, the parliamentary priviledge that allowed Negri to leave prison in order to fill an elected position was revoked by the Chamber of Deputies. It was at this point that Negri fled to France, and was protected from extradition by the French government of François Mitterand. While living in France, Negri used his freedom-in-exile not to organise new terrorist activities, or to engender violent political struggles – as one might perhaps expect if he was such a person – but to write and to teach at the Université de Paris VIII (Saint Denis) and later at the new Collège International de Philosophie.

I have not yet said anything about Negri’s own theoretical work, which – unless we can imagine someone capable of perpetrating lie after lie through a long and productive career – is literal proof of his innocence. Any casual examination of his books and articles reveals that Negri’s political thought moves in the opposite direction to the secretive political aims of the Red Brigades, and towards collective processes of self-organisation as the basis of a new society.

To say that Negri’s book Empire (2000: Harvard University Press, New York), written with Michael Hardt (Associate Professor of Literature, Duke University) had such an impact “on the campus” because of Negri’s association with terrorism is a strange suggestion, one which seems difficult to consider anything but unbiased rhetoric (at the best). The final words of this book, following words of praise for St Francis of Assisi and the life of the poor, invoke the “extraordinary lightness and joy of being a communist,” a sentiment that it would be hard to reconcile with the ruthless and nihilistic violence of terrorism.

The reason for Negri’s return to Italy is likewise mistaken by Windschuttle, who paints the portrait of a plea-bargaining opportunist. Negri’s return was, as I have said, voluntary: for him, the time had come to move past the gridlock that governed the “Years of Lead”, and since – particularly given the growth of the EU and the changes in Italian society itself. Furthermore, however, it was Negri’s explicit intention to once again contribute to politics and social life in Italy. Rather than renouncing the public sphere, or attacking it (which is a greater part of the activity of terrorism), he decided to return and contribute in his own remarkably joyful and energetic way. Let us note finally one more inaccuracy in Windschuttle’s piece : he is no longer in prison, and he is no longer under house arrest. He currently lives in Venice.

For a scholar whose most well-known positions are based upon criticising the factual validity of other members of the academy, Windschuttle’s discussion of Antonio Negri displays very few of the traditional intellectual virtues that he purports to championing.

*available at
http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/common/story_ page/0,5744,12556881%255E7583,00.html"