[[Empire — Hardt, Michael, 1960-; Negri, Antonio, 1933- — 2000 — Cambridge, Mass__ Harvard University Press — 9780674006713 — a9bf79bce02aafa767f801a0f6c8bc30 — Anna’s Archive.pdf]]

It was therefore a surprise when in 2000 one of the leading operaismo theorists, Antonio Negri, with co-author Michael Hardt, proposed a dramatic reinterpretation of social conflict in a digital era. Their Empire (2000) suggested that a fully global capital now confronted not so much a working class as a ‘multitude’ immersed in ‘immaterial labour’ involving the communicational and affective dimensions of networked production. Attuned to the excitement of the World Wide Web, open source software, and music piracy, and echoing the earlier work of Donna Haraway (1985), who had shaken feminist techno-pessimism by insisting on radical ‘cyborg’ potentials, Hardt and Negri, rather than emphasizing capital’s cybernetic domination, declared the possibility of its digital subversion and supersession. Their work appeared just as capital experienced its first major outburst of networked resistance. Youthful alter-globalist protestors were not only taking to tear-gas drenched streets from Seattle to Genoa, but also experimenting with indie-media centres; Zapatismo in cyberspace and electronic civil disobedience. In this context, Empire, and its two subsequent volumes, Multitude (2004) and Commonwealth (2009), struck a chord. Maurizio Lazzarato (2004), Paolo Virno (2004), Andrea Fumagalli (2007) and Yves Moulier Boutang (2011), became the basis of a ‘post-operaismo’ analysis of ‘cognitive capitalism’ (Vercellone 2006) in which control of knowledge is understood as the main site for contesting capitalism and networks present an opportunity for multitude. Hardt and Negri’s work was an iconoclastic challenge to Marxism’s attachment to the class configurations of an industrial era. It met with fierce scepticism (Dean and Passavant 2003; Balakrishnan 2003; Camfield 2007). Critics found ‘multitude’ frustratingly vague. ‘Immaterial labour’ seemed to deny the persistence of hard, corporeal, and all too material toil. The image of a ‘smooth’ global Empire airbrushed jagged gulfs between planetary North and South. Enthusiasm for the radical potentialities of networks skipped too quickly over the dull, disciplinary actualities of information work. Hardt and Negri were accused of ‘downgrading the negative’ (Noys 2010: 125) in a way that uncannily mirrored capital’s own digital prophets. Cyber-Proletariat p.10-11