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group whose elitist, ahistorical Leninism' he had 'thoroughly criticized from the standpoint
of the mass organizations' new class composition' (Murphy, 2005: xii). (2) Negri sees
Communist reformism, in its 1970s embodiment of the Historic Compromise (a term coined
to represent the imminent coalition between the Christian Democrat Party and the Communist
Party) as capitalism's attempt to dismember the class movement by absorbing workers and
their movements into the capitalist process via the incorporation of the PCI into government.
Negri envisaged in the Historic Compromise 'a purely reactionary essence' (Negri, 1975:
147).
To oppose this scenario, Negri elaborated a strategy to subvert the social order by
creating the theory of worker self-valorization (Negri, 1977: 236) with the aim of opposing
the mainstays of capitalism, such as the ideology of work and consumerism, and paying
greater heed to the real needs and desires of the workers (Negri, 1977: 282-285). He is aware
that violence may be unavoidable in the process, and justifies it by reminding everyone of the
violence inherent in capitalism's exploitative nature. But he draws a line between violence
within a dialectic determination, and terrorism. Negri views the terrorist groups as dissipating
'the function of power, the mass character of the vanguard or the working-class specificity of
its political need'; he accuses them of being 'unable to grasp an organic relation between the
subjectivity of workers" power and the subjectivism of the use of violence' (Negri, 1973: 91).
With regard to isolated terrorist actions, he is explicit: 'It is obvious that proletarian violence
has no need to exhibit itself in an exemplary manner, nor to choose [...] exemplary
objectives' (Negri, 1977: 282). On the contrary, for his political project to succeed, Negri
considered it 'fundamental' to draw the support of factory workers to the cause (Negri, 1977:
251).
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