Episode description

Recording of a discussion last Saturday with Michael Hardt at Woodbine for a discussion of his new book The Subversive Seventies and our contemporary autonomist experiments in Queens, Atlanta, and elsewhere.

Michael Hardt is a philosopher and political theorist whose work focuses on autonomist social movements since the 1960s. In his books co-authored with Antonio Negri - Empire, Multitude, and Commonwealth - Hardt theorized the changes in capitalism and struggle taking place at the turn of the 21st century. The frameworks Hardt and Negri developed together were among the most popular and influential political theories influencing the activism of the last 25 years, helping define the movement contexts that birthed spaces like Woodbine.

In his new book, The Subversive Seventies, Hardt focuses on dozens of movement predecessors, including Black autoworkers and militants in the US, intersectional radical feminists, gay liberation revolutionaries, the Italian autonomists, and antinuclear activists. While the radicalism of the 70s is often understood as responding to the defeat of the spirit of '68, Hardt argues that these movements, by pursuing their own agendas without claiming supremacy over other struggles, developed a model of contemporary intersectionality that solidified as an antithetical pole to neoliberal globalization.

For the rest of our series about the revolutionary cultures of the 60s and 70s check out our Armed Love collection page: https://www.patreon.com/collection/87680

Song: Alfredo Bandelli - Mort Allende