Negri was accused in the late 1970s of being the mastermind of the left-wing urban guerrilla organization Red Brigades (Brigate Rosse or BR),[5] which was involved in the May 1978 kidnapping and murder of former Italian prime minister Aldo Moro.

Negri fled to France where, protected by the Mitterrand doctrine, he taught at the Paris VIII (Vincennes) and the Collège international de philosophie, along with Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, and Gilles Deleuze.

[9] He began his career as a militant in the 1950s with the activist Roman Catholic youth organization Gioventú Italiana di Azione Cattolica (GIAC).

[4][11] In the early 1960s, Negri joined the editorial group of Quaderni Rossi, a journal that represented the intellectual rebirth of Marxism in Italy outside the realm of the Communist party.

[13] In 1969, together with Oreste Scalzone and Franco Piperno, Negri was one of the founders of the group Potere Operaio (Workers' Power) and the operaismo (lit.

[13] On 16 March 1978, Aldo Moro, the party leader of Christian Democracy and the former Italian prime minister, was kidnapped in Rome by the Red Brigades.

While a number of people who knew Negri at the time identified him as the probable author of the call, the caller was later revealed to be Valerio Morucci.

[11] Padova's Public Prosecutor Pietro Calogero accused them of being involved in the political wing of the Red Brigades, and thus behind left-wing terrorism in Italy.

Negri was charged with a number of offences, including leadership of the Red Brigades, masterminding the 1978 kidnapping and murder of the President of the Christian Democratic Party Aldo Moro, and plotting to overthrow the government.

[16] At the time, Negri was a political science professor at the University of Padua and visiting lecturer at Paris' École Normale Supérieure.

[18][19] On the other hand in the late 1980s Italian President Francesco Cossiga described Antonio Negri as "a psychopath" who "poisoned the minds of an entire generation of Italy's youth.

[4] In France, Negri began teaching at the Paris VIII (Vincennes),[4] and also at the Collège international de philosophie founded by Jacques Derrida.

Written together with Michael Hardt, the authors ask themselves in this book, "How is it, then, that labour, with all its life-affirming potential, has become the means of capitalist discipline, exploitation, and domination in modern society?"

Critiquing liberal and socialist notions of labor and institutional reform from a radical democratic perspective, Hardt and Negri challenge the state-form itself.

[31] This book, written solely by Negri, "explores the drama of modern revolutions-from Machiavelli's Florence and Harrington's England to the American, French, and Russian revolutions-and puts forward a new notion of how power and action must be understood if we are to achieve a radically democratic future.

Multitude remains, the authors insist, despite its ubiquitous subject matter and its almost casual tone, a book of philosophy which aims to shape a conceptual ground for a political process of democratization rather than present an answer to the question 'what to do?'

[37] In 2009 Negri completed the book Commonwealth, the final in a trilogy that began in 2000 with Empire and continued with Multitude in 2004, co-authored with Michael Hardt.

"[42] Harvey also notes that "Revolutionary thought, Hardt and Negri argue, must find a way to contest capitalism and 'the republic of property.'

He also published an article with Hardt in Foreign Affairs in October 2011 stating "The Encampment in Lower Manhattan Speaks to a Failure of Representation.

[46] The book provides a series of reflections on the nature of contemporary capitalism and social movements, drawing together the concepts and ideas explored previously in their Empire 'trilogy' such as the common, the multitude, and globalisation.

It also provides analyses of events that occurred in the years since Commonwealth was published in 2009, such as the rise of right-wing populism, Occupy Wall Street, the automation of work, and the digital economy.

Writing for Critical Inquiry, Kyle Perry argues that the central claim of the book is that "advocates for a truly democratic world must no longer refuse the demands of leading, strategizing, decision making, and institution building that can otherwise remain variously secondary, absent, or anathema amid left, liberatory, and progressive causes.

[49] In this first volume, Negri aims to show "how the thinking of Marx and Foucault were brought together to create an original theoretical synthesis – particularly in the context of Italy from May '68 onwards."

[51] In this third volume, Negri "examines how Spinoza's thought constitutes a radical break with past ideas and an essential tool for envisaging a form of politics beyond capitalism."

This first volume is titled Marx in Movement: Operaismo in Context, and seeks to provide an account and examination of the history of Italian Autonomist (or 'Autonomist Marxist') thought, particularly in terms of Negri's theoretical development of the concept of the 'social worker' as an attempt to update Marxism in light of the changes since the factory-based industrial labour of Marx's time.