Abstract

Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri's Empire¹ is the most influential neo-Marxist work to emerge since the monumental political events of the late 1980's. The book belongs more precisely, to the “autonomist Marxist” tradition, which grew out of the Italian workerist movement of the 1960's. From its inception, the basic tenet of this tradition has been that working class resistance, rather than some dynamic intrinsic to capital, is primarily responsible for instigating capitalist crises, and that these crises, in turn, stimulate further capitalist development.² Thus, according to Hardt and Negri, it was in reaction to labor opposition in the 1960's and…