ABSTRACT
Antonio Negri's and Paulo Virno's work thus needs to be confronted with its absences and errors. The multitude, which is meant to free us from many of the previous limitations of conceptions of class is still marked by a tendency to emphasise the experience of the global North as the experience of the entire globe. Their work on biopolitical production and post-Fordism fails to really take into account the commodity, and thus presents a limited understanding of labour. They do not grapple with how life in commodity society is life fetishised. A weakness of Negri's and Virno's work is their failure to articulate an understanding of exchange and thus the commodity-form and fetishism, and they reject the role of negation in struggle. Negri and Virno do give us radical understandings of the antagonisms within the material conditions of capitalism, a new way to think about class, and the general framework of communist politics.
