The Theory of Autonomy

Abstract

Marxist materialism and post-structuralist philosophy offer alternatives to the rationalism Habermas proposes. But marxist materialism, while it provides a philosophic basis for economic and political democracy that seems marginalized by the rationalist perspective, easily lapses into a metaphysics of substance and of subjectivity that would be dismantled from the post-structuralist perspective. And post-structuralism, while it provides a valuable perspective on the enabling and positive power of indeterminacy and difference, is caught politically between a radical reformism that prescribes work from within existing institutions and a philosophic utopianism that denies to the oppressed access to necessary instruments of struggle — ideals of identity most importantly. I will consider the politics of post-structuralism in the next chapter. Here I will discuss the evolution of a thinker, Antonio Negri, whose theory of autonomy connects a democratic revolutionary political model to a materialist philosophy and whose work offers one of the most sustained meditations on the necessity of democratic organization to marxist politics in the contemporary experience.