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By Root 841 0

and Marxism, with left-wing priests preaching social justice and Latin American-style liberation theology and various charismatic academic charlatans espousing heterodox forms of Marxism. The latter were a clerisy in disguise, albeit preaching the autonomous organisation of workers (and students) so as to supplant the leading role of the vanguard Party hitherto occupied by grey-suited Communist bureaucrats. The radical messianic type became ubiquitous throughout the universities and colleges of the Western world, a megaphone or microphone never far from their mouths, Danny ‘the Red’ Cohn-Bendit in France, Rudi Dutschke in West Germany, Tariq Ali in Britain and, in Italy, Antonio Negri. All of these men became celebrities of a sort in cultures of stunning credulity.

Negri initially exchanged his youthful Catholic fervency for the International Socialist Party, an allegiance that helped him become a full professor in politics at Padua University at the age of thirty-four, as some suspect, through the intercession of such patrons as Norberto Bobbio and Raniero Panzieri. Negri was an energetic blur of long black hair, horn-rimmed glasses, trite slogans and clenched fists. Learned investigations into the writings of the young Marx went together with crackbrained belief that the Italian government was merely the local branch of SIM - the Italian acronym for ‘the imperialist state of the multinationals’. Negri joined the editorial board of Quaderni Rossi before founding his own paper Potere Operaio, both key vehicles for the non-Communist revolutionary Marxist left. These journals became manifestos for the autonomous grouplets formed by students as they went adrift from their traditional party political moorings, for the journey from left Catholicism to Red was paralleled by disillusionment with the leadership of the major political parties and their established youth movements.

Negri was contemptuous of the immobilised paralysis of the Communist Party, which he called a red bourgeoisie with its ‘Marxist Disneyland’ in the municipal administration of Red Bologna. The Communists were the most insidious element in a gigantic system of repression, canalising and controlling the ‘violent insubordination’ that was inherent in the working class and those cunningly marginalised as criminals. In a revealing analogy, Negri claimed that the difference between PCI chief Enrico Berlinguer and a real revolutionary was like that between ‘a water pistol and a P.38’. There was no difference, Negri and his admirers argued, between liberal democracy and authoritarian or Fascist states, although he, and the terrorists he inspired, would be assiduous in claiming the rights that liberal democracy afforded, just as they made extensive use of the existing media to publicise their cause while simultaneously deriding it as a capitalistic opiate. Apart from using the term Fascism in an irresponsibly inflationary way, Negri and his like legitimised political violence. In order to legitimise it, Negri spouted a lot of claptrap, worthy of his French friends Louis Althusser, Jacques Derrida and Michel Foucault, about the structural or systemic violence inherent in capitalism, while warning such people as judges, executives, managers and policemen that they performed their duties at their own risk. The Viet Cong showed ‘how it was not at all adventurism to shoot high-level state functionaries, that it was not adventurism to assault police stations in order to procure arms and … to execute those high state authorities hated by the urban and rural proletariat’. While approving of ‘proletarian justice’, that is kangaroo courts in which self-appointed judges sentenced industrialists and politicians to death, Negri and his kind availed themselves of every stunt that his defence lawyers could dream of. But that is to anticipate. By his mid-forties Negri had become an international intellectual celebrity, invited to the Ecole Normale Supérieure by Louis Althusser, married to a successful architect, and with beautiful homes in both Milan and Padua, no disqualification