This final volume in Antonio Negri’s new trilogy aims to clarify and develop the ‘common’ as a key concept of radical thought. Here the term is understood in a double sense: on the one hand, as a collective of production and consumption in which the domination of capital has been completely realized; on the other hand, as the cooperation of workers and citizens and their assertion of political power. The maturation of this duality was the sign of the limits of capitalism in our age; the common showed itself as the active force that recomposed production, society and life in a new experience of freedom. Today the promise of freedom seems undermined by the very institutions founded to uphold it, as the charters of western democracy seek to prioritize individualism. Negri advocates instead a free society founded on the premise that the good life is to be collectively ordered – in other words, a society that elevates the common. In his vision, giving political expression to those who work and produce is the only way of overturning totalitarian exploitation and of enabling every citizen to participate in the development of the city.  Like its companion volumes, this new collection of essays by Negri will be a valuable resource for anyone interested in radical politics and in the key social and political struggles of our time.

This final volume in Antonio Negri’s new trilogy aims to clarify and develop the ‘common’ as a key concept of radical thought. Here the term is understood in a double sense: on the one hand, as a collective of production and consumption in which the domination of capital has been completely realized; on the other hand, as the cooperation of workers and citizens and their assertion of political power. The maturation of this duality was the sign of the limits of capitalism in our age; the common showed itself as the active force that recomposed production, society and life in a new experience of freedom. Today the promise of freedom seems undermined by the very institutions founded to uphold it, as the charters of western democracy seek to prioritize individualism. Negri advocates instead a free society founded on the premise that the good life is to be collectively ordered – in other words, a society that elevates the common. In his vision, giving political expression to those who work and produce is the only way of overturning totalitarian exploitation and of enabling every citizen to participate in the development of the city.  Like its companion volumes, this new collection of essays by Negri will be a valuable resource for anyone interested in radical politics and in the key social and political struggles of our time.

Mistero Buffo, or The Comic Mysteries, is based on research into mediaeval mystery plays; The Accidental Death of an Anarchist concerns the "accidental" (or not) death of an anarchist railwork who "fell" (or was pushed) to his death from a police headquarters window in 1969; Trumpets and Raspberries is "A deeply subversive farce" (The Guardian) in which the boss of Italy's biggest car manufacturer FIAT, is mistaken for a left wing terrorist.

Long before Antonio Negri became famous around the world for his groundbreaking volume Empire, he was infamous across Europe for the incendiary writings contained in this book. Books for Burning consists of five pamphlets that Negri wrote between 1971 and 1977, which attempt to identify and draw lessons from new conditions of class struggle that emerged in the course of the 1970s. Conceived as organizational hypotheses intended for debate among the members of the political movements Workers' Power (Potere operaio) and Organized Autonomy (Autonomia organizzata), these texts were later misread and misrepresented by the Italian state in its attempt to frame Negri as responsible for the assassination of former Italian president Aldo Moro, as the leader of the Red Brigades, and as the mastermind of an armed insurrection against the state. In the more than twenty-five years since their first publication, these texts have lost none of their originality, relevance or power to shock. In a new preface, Negri demonstrates how his controversial work on empire, biopolitics and immaterial labor developed out of concepts and strategies first outlined in this book, and an editorial introduction analyzes the role these texts played in Negri's trial and in the criminalization of the Italian radical workers' movement.