David Broder’s paper on Empire by Michael Hardt and Toni Negri begins with a legitimate irritation. Today, the alterglobalisation movement has been pushed into a strange historical limbo: recent enough that many of its participants remain politically active yet already treated as though it belonged to an irretrievable world before smartphones, social media, the financial crash, China’s rise as a challenge to the US superpower, mass migrations, the climate emergency and the new world war. Seattle, Prague, Genoa and the World Social Forums often appear as the political equivalent of an old photograph: a youthful, colourful, hopeful crowd that believed another world was possible before history taught otherwise. Broder is right to resist that condescension.
That movement was neither politically irrelevant nor immature or naïve. On the contrary, it was untimely in a different sense: it anticipated key aspects of the future. Its militant repertoires, organisational networks and political imaginaries deeply shaped the anti-war mobilisations of the 2000s, the protest cycles after 2008, Occupy, the Indignados, the Arab revolutions, and progressive experiments in Latin America and Southern Europe. That is also why it was met with lethal repression.
But Broder finally reproduces another, more consequential form of condescension. He wants to preserve the alterglobalisation movement as a moment of courage, internationalism and democratic exuberance while treating the political theory most closely associated with that movement – articulated by Toni Negri and Michael Hardt’s book Empire – as a philosophical artefact of its confusion.
This is a familiar operation. First, one recognises that the alterglobalisation movement was unusually ambitious: it confronted the WTO, IMF, World Bank, G8, debt regimes, corporate power and neoliberal globalisation at a scale that few subsequent left-wing movements have matched. Then one explains away the theory that sought to grasp this scale: Empire becomes a symptom of ‘horizontalist’ innocence, postmodern weakness, or the delusion that globalisation had overcome states, war, imperialism, and class conflict. The result is a politics of nostalgia without consequences. Instead of being analysed as historical phenomenon, the alterglobalist mobilisations of Genoa in July 2001 are retained as an emotional reference point, while Negri and Hardt’s Empire is discarded as an intellectual accident, mainly driven by academic opportunism.
In our view, this dismissal points to a more uncomfortable problem: it forces us to confront a set of difficult, and still open, strategic questions. What kind of class politics is possible once capitalist production, command, war, communication, and social reproduction operate on an intricated, interconnected, heterogeneous and highly contradictory global terrain that can no longer be adequately understood through the nation-state or the industrial workplace alone? How can we build a class politics that takes the intersectionality of oppressions and practices of liberation as its foundational standpoint, rather than stigmatising difference as the product of liberalism and identity politics? Ultimately, how can we build a revolutionary politics beyond twentieth-century Marxist nostalgia?
Caricaturing Empire
Broder’s account is not so much a reading of Empire as an exercise in intellectual caricature and ideological dismissal. Nor is this gesture entirely new: it is deeply rooted in a certain tradition of the Left that has long dismissed revolutionary theorisation as ‘spontaneism’ or ‘subjectivism’ – a tradition particularly influential within the official Italian Communist Party, which, by the late 1970s, ultimately chose to close ranks against Negri, his collaborators, and the political experience of Autonomia Operaia (Workers’ Autonomy), of which he was one of the most prominent intellectual expressions, contributing to a climate of political repression, mass incarceration, and cultural and academic ostracism.
Broder describes Empire as ‘more a work that expounded a philosophical system against past Marxisms than one materially analysing developments in capitalism’ and dismisses its account of ‘contradiction and hybrid structures’ as ‘get-out clauses’. Implicit throughout his article is an opposition between Empire and interstate conflicts, as though Hardt and Negri’s argument depended on states no longer mattering. His verdict that this makes the book less useful for understanding ‘the actually existing twenty-first century’ is therefore premature: pointing to the persistence of states and their rivalries is not yet and explanation of their contemporary forms. The materialist question is precisely how national coercion, interstate rivalry and state support for domestic firms interact with transnational production, finance and technological infrastructures. Empire’s answers can be challenged without dismissing the conceptual problem they address.
Broder goes further, claiming that that book ‘never engaged with the demands or expectations of the subaltern’ and that the industrial working class appears ‘only as a dying actor’. Here, a contested attempt to rethink the composition of the exploited is recast as indifference to their demands, while the displacement of industrial workers from an exclusive political centrality is mistaken for their disappearance. Nor does questioning the adequacy of national sovereignty as a horizon of emancipation amount to dismissing rights won within the state (a conclusion Broder himself introduces with the revealing qualification ‘it would seem’).
To clarify what is at stake: Empire does not claim that nation-states, US power, war, exploitation, colonial violence, or hierarchy have disappeared. Nor does it identify the United States with a single, all-encompassing imperial sovereignty. It does not present the multitude as an already unified political subject (although this is precisely where some of the book’s major weaknesses emerge), or protest networks as substitutes for rooted organisation and a strategy of post-capitalist transition.
The actual argument is both more complex and – considerably more intriguing. For Hardt and Negri, ‘Empire’ is neither the political domination of a single nation-state (e.g., the US) nor the integrated system of global governance led by the UN, NATO, and the WTO. Empire, rather, is the contemporary form of capitalist rule. Following the collapse of the Soviet bloc and the crisis of the Non-Aligned Movement, and under pressure from international proletarian struggles of the 1960s and 1970s, capital has become fully global, transforming (which does not mean ‘abolishing’) the old global division of labour between an industrialised and dominant North and an underdeveloped and subaltern South. Thus, the ‘world market’ (Weltmarkt) that Marx had already identified as an inherent tendency of capitalist development in the Grundrisse and Capital has finally become a concrete reality.
This is why national sovereignty, far from disappearing, has entered a crisis. Capital accumulation, financialisation, technological development, production, and the transnational circulation of labour, data, and commodities increasingly exceed the institutional scale of the modern nation-state. States have not vanished; rather, they have been rearticulated within a broader architecture of domination. They continue to exercise coercion – even in its most violent and genocidal forms – provide legal frameworks, regulate labour markets, manage borders, redistribute income, police social conflict, and wage war. But the nation-state no longer constitutes the sole, or necessarily even the primary, political scale through which global capitalism is organised.
The point is not that states have ceased to matter. The point is that national power and imperialism now operate within a globalised and interdependent social terrain that they cannot fully control, but from which they cannot simply withdraw. Anyone who thinks this has been refuted because states still exist or because some of them have been taken over by the Far Right has misunderstood the claim. States also survived the transition from competitive to monopoly capitalism; factories survived the transition from Fordism to post-Fordism. Historical transformation does not occur through disappearance alone. It occurs through the accumulation and articulation of different functions, scales, powers and socio-economic relations.
Empire thus identifies not a stateless world, but a hybrid global constitution of contemporary capitalism, one that other thinkers (including Sandro Mezzadra and Brett Neilson in their collaborative work) are now productively investigating with new critical tools. It describes a layered structure in which powerful states coexist and interact with transnational corporations, international financial institutions, legal regimes, military structures, humanitarian organisations, and global networks of production and communication. Yet this order is also repeatedly challenged from below by national, regional, and transnational assemblages of social movements – as the recent Global Sumud Flotilla illustrates – and by unexpected mass uprisings: from Occupy, the Indignados, the Greek resistance to austerity, and the Arab revolutions of 2011, through Ni Una Menos and the global women’s movement against patriarchy and the revolts that swept France, Chile, Colombia, Iraq, and Lebanon between 2018 and 2020, to the new protest waves that erupted in Nepal, Madagascar, and Morocco in 2025, and, in fall 2026, across Europe.
Empire’s Historical Limits
The past quarter-century, far from consigning Empire to the antiquities of the belle époque of the 1990s, has made Hardt and Negri’s central argument harder to ignore, even as it has challenged important aspects of its original framework. Key features of what they call the ‘Empire’ appear to have been borne out by recent transformations in contemporary capitalism. The protectionist turn of US trade and industrial policy is combined with the persistence of a global monetary and financial architecture centred on the dollar, while national regimes of austerity remain deeply embedded in transnational financial constraints. Supply chains connect workers across continents, while corporate power, trade agreements, logistical systems, and investor protections constrain the scope of domestic policy. Migration is governed through a proliferation of borders that no longer simply coincide with national frontiers, but operate as dispersed mechanisms of sorting, detention, exclusion, and differential inclusion. Recent policies of mass deportation function as regimes of terror directed at the most vulnerable segments of the working class, while coexisting with the mass recruitment of precarious and undocumented migrant labour; yet migratory displacements, migrant self-organisation, and networks of solidarity continue to challenge, circumvent, and cross these borders. Wars are waged by states, of course, but through digital infrastructures, private contractors, surveillance technologies, satellite systems, sanctions regimes, and the weaponisation of social media and algorithmic governance. Finally, and most importantly, the vast accumulation of data generated by the tracking of globalised digital interactions and online cooperation has provided the material basis for generative AI, allowing forms of collective knowledge on an unprecedented scale to be captured and appropriated by the technocapitalist oligarchy, while potentially creating the technical conditions for global ecological planning and the reduction of the working day. It is precisely this contradictory tendency – the private capitalist appropriation of increasingly socialised knowledge, set against its potential to liberate human time through automation –that Negri and the tradition of operaismo had long explored through Marx’s concept of the ‘General Intellect.’
Taking Empire’s diagnosis seriously, however, also means recognising its historical limits. Completed in 1997, at the apparent height of neoliberal hegemony in the world market, the book tended to privilege one side of the dialectical process of globalisation that it was critically theorising: the production of a ‘smooth’ global space was emphasised over its persistent ‘striations’ – or, to use Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s lexicon, ‘deterritorialisation’ over ‘reterritorialisation.’ In this respect, Empire bears the mark of the historical conjuncture in which it was conceived: the relatively brief period of the Washington Consensus, when NATO-led international policing operations in the former Yugoslavia during the Balkan wars were ideologically justified as the new paradigm of the ‘just war.’ Empire, therefore, paid little attention to the possibility of renewed interimperialist rivalries that occupy the scene today.
Yet such rivalries can be understood within its framework, while also enriching and complicating it. The return of geopolitical confrontation – from the ‘vaccine diplomacy’ of the Covid-19 pandemic to the regionalisation of specific supply chains, growing challenges to dollar hegemony, and the so-called ‘Donroe Doctrine’ over the ‘Western Hemisphere’ – does not necessarily signal the ‘end of globalisation’ and a simple restoration of competing national capitalisms. The war in Ukraine and Israel’s genocidal war in Western Asia, for instance, have unfolded through struggles over energy sites, supply chains, financial and monetary networks, sanctions regimes, and even submarine pipelines, while recent US interventions in Latin America are inseparable from the deployment of algorithmic technologies and AI. In this sense, renewed forms of imperialism are increasingly waged within and through the infrastructures of global capital, rather than against or outside them.
It is no accident that Hardt and Negri themselves partly revised the diagnosis of Empire in Multitude (2004), and then again in a long article published in 2019. Confronted with the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, they presented the George W. Bush administration’s project as a ‘failed coup d’état’ within Empire: an attempt by the US to transform its privileged position within the emerging global capitalist order into unilateral command over it. The significance of this correction must not be underestimated. The wars of the early 2000s showed more clearly than Empire had anticipated that the constitution of a global capitalist space did not eliminate the possibility of competing models of governance, unilateral foreign policies, or imperialist war. In 2019, Hardt and Negri returned to this tension by describing the two ‘spheres’ of capitalist globalisation as increasingly ‘out of sync:’ the planetary networks of production, distribution, communication and social reproduction had become increasingly interconnected, while the political, juridical and military functions of global governance were increasingly unable to provide them with a stable institutional framework.
Theoretical relevance and open problems
Broder’s reduction of Empire is particularly striking because it ignores the intellectual problem that the book addressed. Empire was published in 2000, but had been completed in 1997, before the mass contestation of the WTO summit in Seattle in 1999. Its authors did not invent ‘the movement of movements’. They tried, instead, to conceptualise the historical world from which that movement emerged. The 1990s were not simply a decade of neoliberal triumph. They were also a decade of intellectual disorientation on the Left, when Marxist views were under enormous pressure and almost lost any right to exist. At the time, a large part of the political and academic world announced that class, revolution and systemic alternatives had become obsolete. Francis Fukuyama’s ‘end of history’ gave this triumphalism its canonical form. Liberal democracy and market capitalism, in his account, had emerged as the final horizon of political development. The future would no longer be shaped by fundamental ideological conflict. It would be a process of extension, modernisation and administration: more liberal institutions, more market integration, more capitalist globalisation. Samuel Huntington’s ‘clash of civilisations’ was less optimistic but no less hostile to a materialist account of world politics. Where Fukuyama saw the end of conflict in liberal convergence, Huntington replaced class and ideology with civilisational identity. The world was to be read through immutable cultural blocs: the West, Islam, Hinduism, Confucianism and so on.
The conflicting interests and worldviews of owners and the working class disappeared behind a mythology of identity and destiny.
Despite their different moods, Fukuyama and Huntington shared a premise: class struggle was no longer the key to world history. For the former, liberal capitalism had resolved it; for the latter, civilisation had displaced it. What made Hardt and Negri’s intervention original was not its relation to the needs of US academia (largely ignored by its dozens of thousands of readers worldwide), but its rejection of both narratives. They accepted neither the end of history nor its replacement by a clash of civilisations. They argued, instead, that globalisation had transformed the terrain of class struggle without abolishing it. The opposition between capital and labour persisted: what changed was the scale at which the conflict took place, the forms through which proletarians were exploited, and the strategies through which they could organise politically.
Ultimately, Empire was an attempt to renew Marxism by taking the transformations of the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s seriously. The crisis of Fordism, decolonisation, the global integration of markets, the internationalisation of production, the rise of finance, computerisation, and the expansion of capitalist command across social life all required a revised conceptual map. Hardt and Negri’s wager was that Marxism should not deny the rupture in the name of continuity, but neither should it surrender continuity in the name of rupture. Capitalism had changed: exploitation had not disappeared. The working class had changed: class antagonism had not disappeared. This combination of rupture and continuity is what Broder’s account fails to see. By collapsing Empire into a caricature of postmodern optimism, he obscures the book’s actual political and intellectual operation: a materialist and critical reconstruction of capitalist globalisation – its tendencies, contradictions and ambivalences – from the standpoint of living labour and social struggles.
To conclude, let us be clear: we do not propose to canonise Empire as a holy text. But we do mean to distinguish between a serious critique of Empire – one that confronts its unresolved problems and pitfalls – and its caricature.
The book’s central weakness is not that it replaced political organisation with faith in the spontaneous revolt of the ‘multitude’, or revolutionary strategy with the expectation of an automatic transition beyond private property. Negri and Hardt’s concept of ‘multitude’ successfully challenged a narrow, historically frozen and politically unproductive image of the working class. It insisted that exploitation extended across a heterogeneous field of productive and reproductive labour. It sought to think a collective subject without reducing that subject to ‘the people’, a national body or a unitary identity.
But a ‘multitude’ is not a transformative political subject by nature. The fact that a ‘multitude’ of highly differentiated figures of labour is now exploited does not tell us how it makes decisions, coordinates its actions, develops a strategy, or confronts its internal inequalities. As new forms of fascism rise, we know that digital cooperation does not spontaneously generate a desire for change, nor is the ‘multitude’ necessarily oriented towards freedom and equality. This is where an account of political organisation becomes indispensable. The question is not whether movements should be horizontal or vertical, but how heterogeneous struggles can construct durable political agency, democratic power, and effective forms of leadership without being subordinated either to the state form or to a bureaucratic party.
To answer these questions, Empire was insufficient. But it was a striking attempt to understand a world in which the old political map no longer corresponded to the actual organisation of capital and social struggles. It maintained that class struggle persisted, but that it had to be understood anew. Today, the Left does not need to repeat Empire’s ‘mistakes’. But neither should it indulge in the fantasy that class politics can be restored by shrinking the world back to the scale of the nation, the factory, and traditional electoral politics. The alternative is neither to worship nor to condemn Empire. It is to move beyond it without retreating from the challenges it formulated.
Matteo Polleri is an activist and scholar based in Paris, and the author of Découvrir Foucault (Éditions Sociales, 2026) and Marx or Foucault: From Adversity to Heresy (Edinburgh University Press, forthcoming).
Elia Zaru is an Italian activist and scholar and the author of From the Factory to the World: The Global Marxism of Antonio Negri (Brill, 2026).
