A bold new book has seized the academic left in a crushing embrace, sending shivers up and down its affective corporeity, making it feel like a young girl once again. That book is Empire, and it is a masterpiece that makes The Communist Manifesto seem like a call to revolution.

This bold new work identifies a radical shift in the concepts that form the philosophical basis of modern politics, concepts such as soft money, zaftig interns, issue-oriented focus groups, and dimpled chads. Authors Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri link this philosophical transformation to cultural and economic changes in postmodern society, a sort of post-postmodern society--to new forms of post-racial racism, new post-conceptual conceptions of identity and difference, and new post-methodological methods of creating networks of communication and control.

This monumental tome basically combines a kevorkian notion of the global market as post-history (in this sense akin to Fukuyama's eschatological convulsions) with a foucauldian and deleuzian notion of biochemical-politics. In this sense it crosses the road of a Sloterdijk, who also poses the question of coming techniques (in a veritable panegyric to coitus interruptus!) of the production of the human species. (Query: Why did the Sloterdijk cross the road? Answer: To pull the slatternly Mrs. Sloterdijk out of the pub across the street.) By identifying the new advances of technology and the division of labor that provide the phenomenological underpinning of the globalization of the market and the corresponding de-centered structure of fractalized sovereignty (in this sense regurgitating down the décolletage of the global elite) with a deep structure of power located within the hive-like multitude's intellectual, psycho-sexual, and affective corporeity, it seeks to identify the indestructible sources of resistance and constitution that frame our future.

The thought here, as is obvious, is that the rule of capital may seem secure, the structure of capital horizontally and vertically cross-combinatant, the workers' movements weak and somewhat watery, and dinnertime a distant prospect. Still history may hold a surprise or two in store. Things may look bad, but hope springs eternal. The history of the Left, the Boston Red Sox of political systems, may be a litany of defeats, but one day the curse of the Bambino will be lifted, Bill Buckner avenged, Saccho and Vanzetti vindicated, Alec Baldwin made to seem prescient. Alger Hiss will get to smack Whittaker Chambers in the head with a bean ball. Carl Yastremski's honest proletarian demeanor will rise ascendant over that damned Mariah-Carey-dating Derek Jeter.

The authors' deft dialectical maneuvers force us to confront the question: What good would it do to instantiate a socialist revolution if multinational corporations and international lending institutions violated porous real or virtual borders, like capitalist cockroaches creeping back into a deloused apartment from adjacent infested domiciles? What if they had a socialist revolution and nobody came?

Hardt and Negri's book is distinguished by their faith in causes others consider to be lost. Well, not really. Rather, they contend that it is in revolutionary struggles' apparent defeats that the seeds of future victory are sown. From the seeds of future victory the fruits of Socialist Utopia are harvested and made into a nice proletarian tart, with just a bit of a tang to it. Hardt and Negri's slogan is optimism of the intellect, pessimism of the will, meliorism of the Geist, and flatulism of the pen. "Don't," the authors rebelliously cry out, "vocalize an imperative speech act, directed at us, that is temporally subsequent to the commencement of the prandial undertakings to which it refers." All the conditions are ripe, they claim, for liberation, or at least a very satisfying meal. As the authors put it: "The Left's continual defeats over the last several decades have got the capitalists right where we want them: so cocky that their seizure of the workers' surplus has opened a breach in the citadel of exploitation large enough to ride a tide of insurgent subjectivity through."

The conclusion that Hardt and Negri draw, and this, somewhat surprisingly, is the main point of their book, is that contemporary globalization (which they term Empire, and this, in a move of rhetorical synchronicity, is the title of their book!), though it certainly introduces new forms of capitalist command and exploitation, is heartily to be welcomed because it also means there are ton of neat new ethnic restaurants in their neighborhoods. Empire is capital's latest concession to the force of insurgent subjectivity. Though as always, until the present time, and on occasion, this concession has been provided on capital's own terms (10% down and prime plus 5% annual interest), it contains the seeds of another globalization, the counter-Empire of global communism. (Whose terms are, "I'll gladly pay you Tuesday for a hamburger today.") There should be no nostalgia for the decline of the traditional working class, so cut out the caterwauling, OK? The political subjectivity that emerges within this phase of history is the most perorated and most fundamental political subject of all: like the blue-haired lady pushing her social security check into a slot machine about to come up all cherries, the multitude is about to come into its own.

After reading Empire, one cannot escape the impression that if this book were not yet written, it would be yet to be written, if it were not invented, and were not to be invented, than it would have to be created: the radical transformation inherent in the dialectical movement toward the global mind is a strong attractor that cannot be bipolarized by a downward-spiraling Mandelbrot set of false consciousness. The message emerging from the Polya urn is clear: the graph of the worker's triumph runs in a straight line from the origin. (What's a Polya urn? Under the oppressor's thumb, about $12.50 an hour, but after the revolution, things will be far different, comrade!) The inevitability of a new global order, a new post-logical logic and post-structuralist structure of government, shortly a new form of post-sovereign sovereignty, proceeding apace through the guts of a beggar, hand in hand with the capitalist weasel 'round the mulberry bush that is his ultimate doom, signals a new dawn on the primrose path of affective corporeity.

The authors have wisely positioned the book as a Wuthering Heights for the 21^st century (and a joke book for the 22^nd, ensuring a continuing flow of royalties). It is easy to recognize the contemporary economic, cultural, athletic, culinary, and legal transformations taking place across the globe, but difficult to make a quick buck off of them. This book shows us the way, proving that even two bloviating Marxist academics can fast talk their way to global success.

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Ed.: Here's how the publisher, Harvard University Press, describes the book
(no joke) and here's the work itself in PDF.