Marx beyond Marx: Lessons on the Grundrisse

Antonio Negri Marx beyond Marx: Lessons on the Grundrisse, translated by Harry Cleaver, Michael Ryan and Maurizio Viano; edited by Jim Fleming. (Bergin and Garvey Publishers, Inc.: South Headly, Mass., 1984), 236pp. + xxxiv. $25.95.

Abstract

What is one to do with a work whose modest opening lines by the editor proclaim it to be “one of the most crucial documents in European Marxism since … well, since maybe ever”? Almost as if to reinforce this claim, the book comes padded with no fewer than three introductions, three prefaces, and a long epilogue. This alone should alert the unaware reader that the impenetrability of the text is due not to any conceptual profundity — as epigones would have it — but to an unimaginable theoretical confusion. The publisher's PR frontwoman seeks to market Negri as a “Eurocommunist theoretician” jailed for his explosive revolutionary views.

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