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Two years ago, Harvard University Press published a book called Empire, by Michael Hardt, a professor of literature at Duke University, and Antonio Negri, an Italian political philosopher and leftist activist serving a lengthy prison term in Rome. A long, abstruse book described by the catalogue as "a new Communist Manifesto," it made for an incendiary and unlikely bestseller. OK, OK, not a bestseller in the Left Behind sense, but for a while last year—as ads for the paperback edition later proudly proclaimed—you couldn't lay a hand on a copy. Last July, The New York Times ran a glowing profile hailing the arrival of the Next Big Idea, and the buzz in the academic world has continued.
Thus an unsuspecting audience of graduate students and aspiring intellectuals found themselves committed to one of the most acutely painful reading experiences since Oprah recommended Thomas Pynchon's Mason & Dixon to her faithful multitude. After all, even most of the volume's fans, like my Marxist editor at Seattle's The Stranger, Charles Mudede, admit that Empire is "in many respects, an impossibly difficult book."
The problems go well beyond the academic tendency to make up words ("interimperialist," "reterritorialization," "globality," etc.) that creates walls, or the cascades of nigh unintelligible verbiage, or the annoying tendency to tack completely italicized, uplifting afterwords on chapters ("Once we recognize our posthuman bodies and minds, once we see ourselves for the simians and cyborgs we are, we then need to explore the VIS VIA, the creative powers that animate us as they do all of nature and actualize our potentialities."). The text has to be more pierced than read and, even then, what we find leaves us scratching our heads as to what all the fuss was about.
So why even bother to try? The answer is that—especially in the post-September 11 world—the book is invaluable as a compendium of ideas and attitudes around which what's left of the Left is trying to construct a program. The "empire" of the book's title, it turns out, is really a close synonym for another slippery term, globalization. Though Hardt and Negri begin with the assumption that after the Cold War the nation state has begun to atrophy, this emphatically "does not mean that sovereignty as such has declined" [italics theirs]. Rather,
Throughout the contemporary transformations, political controls, state functions, and regulatory mechanisms have continued to rule the realm of economic and social production and exchange. … [S]overeignty has taken on a new form, composed of a series of national and supranational organisms united under a simple logic of rule.
Here the fudging begins. The authors reject outright both the idea that global capitalism could have arisen through global give-and-take, "as if this order were a spontaneous concert orchestrated by the natural and neutral hidden hand of the market" (take that, Adam Smith), and also the "conspiracy theory of globalization," wherein The Man is conspiring to keep us all in our place. However, in practice, they lean toward the latter explanation. Using contradictory Marxist, anarchist and postmodern critiques, Hardt and Negri finger, first capital—sorry, "Capital"—and then America for bringing on "enormous oppression and destruction" in the form of wars, sub standard wages and environmental degradation.
It is not an overstatement to say that Empire, like one popular (mis)reading of St. Paul, presents money as the root of all evil. Capital takes on a dark, supernatural transcendence that in Christian theology is reserved to the devil. It is compared to "a vampire"—always seeking and corrupting new blood to sustain itself—and treated as an intelligent force, rather than as a more benign and accurate explanation: the diverse information-driven investments of millions of human beings. Rousseau, the authors say, nailed it when he blamed "the first person who wanted a piece of nature as his. … own exclusive possession and transformed it into the transcendent form of private property" for literally creating evil.
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