Evil Empire
The Communist “hot, smart book of the moment.”

By David Pryce-Jones
September 17, 2001 issue

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.