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Capital—the book's secular Satan—can be found everywhere, of course, but nowhere is it more concentrated than in the United States of America. No nation is more overtly materialistic than the U.S., with the most expansive definition of private property possible ("the pursuit of happiness") penned into its very foundational document; not as compromise, like the Magna Carta, but as right. Hardt and Negri, though they go back and forth on this point, view the U.S. as a new Rome or, worse, "a cluster of new Romes" with the firepower, the financial interests, the influence and the ideology to impose its view of the world on any nation or people who would dare to buck the tide of globalization.
Empire acknowledges a debt to St. Augustine's concept of two cities for its effect of the authors' thinking. They view the anti-globalization movement as challenging the new Empire in roughly the same fashion as the Bishop of Hippo and the church he spoke for put the lie to Rome's claims of grandeur. Christianity, in Hardt and Negri's reading, introduced a "subjectivity"—another conflicting standard—that eventually undermined Rome's very rationale. However: "[unlike Augustine] our pilgrimage on earth. … remains absolutely immanent. … From this perspective the Industrial Workers of the world is the great Augustinian project of modern times." Heaven isn't part of the equation.
In order to combat globalization, they order "the multitude" to resist. Analyzing the cultural tumult of the 1970s, in which millions of people the world over—workers, obviously, but also feminists, managers, environmentalists and a deluge of divorcees—forced real changes in work practices, laws and wages, they argue that Capital can again be forced to accommodate Labor.
Here the Augustinian/anarchic streak shows through. It isn't only work that has been corrupted by the Original Sin of property: Everything, from attitudes to reproduction to love has been controlled and corrupted by it. The authors not only call for a return to something like the riotous strikes at the turn of the 20th Century, and any other uncoordinated attacks on globalization that the audience can conceive (e.g., the Seattle WTO riots of 1999), they also preach a new hedonism dressed up as asceticism. "The will to be against," they say
really needs a body that is completely incapable of submitting to command. It needs a body that is incapable of adopting to family life, to factory discipline, to the regulations of a traditional sex life, and so forth. (If you find your body refusing these "normal" modes of life, don't despair—realize your gift!)
For a manifesto, Empire comes short on policy proposals—beyond "revolt!" In the end, Hardt and Negri work themselves into a good lather over such pie-in-the-sky-ideas as global citizenship and a guaranteed worldwide income that isn't tethered to production. The penultimate section admits that "We do not have any models to offer for [the Revolution]. Only the multitude through its practical experimentation will offer the models and determine when and how the possible becomes real."
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