EMPIRE by michael hardt and antonio negri

yes let's get it out in the open the rise of the welfare state had nothing to do with the labor movement there i said it

you are joking right?

read it again:

"might be cast as a response to the threat conjured up by the Soviet experience, that is, to the increasing power of (the) workers' movement"

i mean sure, do go ahead and conflate the labour movement and the soviet experience, don't let basic chronology get in your way.

or indeed the hostility of many labour movements (in, say, germany or britain) for the soviets.

Where "the Soviet experience" is understood as "the apparent success of a worker's state" I think it's hard to argue that portions of the international labor movement weren't galvanized to such a degree that they helped bring about the welfare state.

but sure, it's a bit intemperately broad if you like. it's continental shit!

<3 analytic shit more and more imo.

less creepily crypto-hegelian-stalinist.

Late to post, but here's my review of Multitude:

http://www.citypages.com/2004-10-27/books/the-empire-strikes-back/

the reality of the soviet experience didn't have much if anything to do with the "international workers' movement" of course but i'm sure it was perceived as something like that by a lot of governments at the time.

Been thinking of picking this up again, given events in the Middle East.

Anyone read the two sequels?

there was a second sequel?

dollar dollar bills yall

hope i dont have to read the first two to know what's going on

anyone read the FOURTH book? it's called ASSEMBLY and i bought it today. after i'm gonna reread empire and see what's what

also im gonna read it on the train with like a really serious face and sometimes i'll nod appreciatively and others i'll just chuckle to myself

Antonio Negri (1933-2023) pic.twitter.com/iOaa3zDSpy

— Daniel Zamora Vargas (@DanielZamoraV) December 16, 2023

blimey i was excited by this book -- y tho?

i would have to re-read it to recapture that i think

empire, i mean -- i never read any of the sequels (chapterhouse of empire, god emperor of empire)

still a solid and important book imo, 9/10ths of the critiques are from running dogs

Negri and Hardt wrote a followup essay in NLR in 2019 that’s well worth reading and quite jargon free

https://newleftreview.org/issues/ii120/articles/empire-twenty-years-on

that's a nice read, thanks for sharing

Yup. Thanks, that's some read.

Thinking how much of the piece I can map to the odd twitter thread over the years.

When I read Empire I struggled quite a bit. But I wonder if I would sail through it now because I've basically read a lot of Marxist discourse via tweets.