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Editor’s
Note: The full-length version of this article appears in the
September 17th issue NR, “Evil Empire: The Communist
‘hot, smart book of the moment.’”
 he
making of a bestseller is a most uncertain art. It has to do with
novelty or fashion, and the manipulation of the media. Suddenly
some book is on everyone's lips, and we all hurry to the stores
or the Internet for a copy. The herd instinct rarely fails.
And here comes
Empire. The New York Times burbles that this is the
Next Big Idea, that it is "sending frissons of excitement through
campuses from São Paolo to Tokyo." Time blesses
it as "the hot, smart book of the moment." Whatever is
going on? For this is no run-of-the-mill bestseller, but a political
manifesto laying out a new guise for Communism, in other words modernizing
the Last Big Idea Which Did Not Come Off, and which went far beyond
campus excitement.
One frisson-inducing
feature of Empire is its leading author, Antonio Negri. Outwardly,
Negri was a professor at the University of Padua. Secretly he was
the brains behind the Red Brigades — the Italian equivalent
of the IRA or the Baader-Meinhof Gang.
In 1978, the
Red Brigades kidnapped prime minister Aldo Moro. Just before Moro
was shot dead, someone telephoned his distraught wife to taunt her;
the caller was identified as Negri. He was charged with "armed
insurrection against the state," as well as 17 murders, including
Moro's.
But justice
in Italy is a matter of negotiation. Negri was imprisoned for four
years without being brought to trial. In a neat trick, he got himself
elected to parliament in 1983, and, claiming parliamentary immunity,
was released from prison. A day before the vote to remove his immunity,
he fled to Paris. He returned to Italy in 1997; today, his sole
restriction is a curfew.
His message
in Empire: Capitalism stinks, it has got to go, and it soon
will. By breaking up the nation-state, globalization — the
new "Empire" — is propelling millions round the globe
in search of work. All of this is to the good because lo! Here come
lots of class-strugglers. Just one more shove, comrades. And how
will revolution actually come about? "We await only the maturation
of the political development of the posse. We do not have any models
to offer for this event."
What, no heads
of state kidnapped and killed? This is tame indeed. Maturation is
not going to send much of a frisson through the posse. In an unusual
instance of providing something concrete, our authors mention Buchenwald,
which they call "a symbol of the extermination of communists,
homosexuals, Gypsies, and others." Notice who's missing from
that list!
Empire
seeks to ensure that those who won the Cold War are given no credit
for it. Communists need to gain control of history in order to claim
that they were right all along, and we must try the whole experiment
again in some new form. That is what this hot, smart book is all
about.
Marx said that
great events appear "the first time as tragedy, the second
as farce." Even at the New York Times, Time magazine,
and Harvard University Press, you'd think they might be able to
dispense with frissons and spot farce for themselves.
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