Your politics causes the multitude to be co-opted by fascism without unproductive expenditure of sacred energies that’s 1ac towsend—proven by Negri being an Anarchist Christian who loves Nazism and also might have caused a borderline civil war in Italy in the ‘80s.

The anarchist flavor of Empire is conveyed most strikingly by its romanticization of violence. Although by now everyone knows that there are terrorists in this world, there are no terrorists in Hardt and Negri’s book. There are only people who are called terrorists, “a crude conception and terminological reduction that is rooted in a police mentality.” Terms such as “ethnic terrorists” and “drug mafias” appear within quotation marks, as if no serious revolutionary could believe that there were such things. “Totalitarianism” is another pure construct, simply an invention of cold war ideology, that has been used to “denounce the destruction of the democratic sphere.” Certainly the term has little to do with actual life in the Soviet Union, which Hardt and Negri describe as “a society criss-crossed by extremely strong instances of creativity and freedom.”

Negri, when not in prison, has been a political philosopher, and he is the author of numerous books, manifestos, and theses on subjects ranging from Spinoza’s metaphysics to the nature of insurgency under contemporary capitalism. In nearly all this work, as in Empire, he invariably associates violence with states in the exercise of their power, never with opposition groups and their tactics. For the latter, any action, no matter how insurrectionary, is justified. For the former, any action, no matter how peaceful, is terrorism in disguise.

From this warped perspective, all states are equally bad and all movements of opposition are equally good. Only the working of such a myopia can help the reader to understand why the authors of Empire are incapable of mustering any rigorous historical or moral consciousness of Nazism and its policy of Jewish extermination. In their view Nazism is capitalism, and that is the end of the story. Nazi Germany, Hardt and Negri write, far from a unique excursion into human evil, “is the ideal type of the transformation of modern sovereignty into national sovereignty and of its articulation into capitalist form.”

Since Nazism is merely normal capitalism—this point of view was once associated with the Frankfurt School, and it survives almost nowhere outside the pages of this book—there is no reason to single out the Nazis or their sympathizers for crimes against humanity. Astonishingly, Hardt and Negri are worse than neutral in their discussion of the Nazi period: they actually heap praise on the ordinary Germans who supported the regime. The obedience of these citizens is called “exemplary” in this book. The authors also celebrate “their military and civil valor in the service of the nation,” before moving on to identify the victims whom they valorously helped to send to Buchenwald as “communists, homosexuals, Gypsies [the Roma], and others,” the latter, presumably, being the Jews (whom Hardt and Negri reserve for Auschwitz).

I am not making this up. Lest anyone consider these apologetics for Nazism a misreading of my own—how can good leftists, after all, engage in a downplaying of the Holocaust?—Hardt and Negri twice acknowledge that they are completely fed up with the whole question of totalitarianism. It is certainly much less interesting to them than the depredations of Empire. The phenomenon of totalitarianism, they write, has already been described “with great fanfare” by “many (in fact too many) authors”; and then they announce, in the one sustained passage in their book devoted to Hitler and his regime, that, despite their efforts to write a book aiming to discuss everything, they plan to “leave this story to other scholars and to the disgrace of history.”

It is one thing to put quotation marks around a word such as “terrorist” and to be so morally obtuse to the most violent regimes of the twentieth century. It is another thing entirely for Antonio Negri to do so. For the question of whether Negri was himself a violence-prone terrorist is still open. In April 1979, Negri, who was then a professor at the University of Padua, was arrested and charged with armed insurrection. He was not convicted on the most serious charges, which amounted to the accusation that, as the leader of the Red Brigades, he was responsible for the assassination of Christian Democratic politician Aldo Moro; but he was found guilty of lesser charges and sentenced to preventive detention. (Among other things, the judge in the case quoted from a letter written by Negri in which he said that “without weapons, the mass struggle doesn’t exist.”)

Determined not to go to jail, Negri won a seat in parliament, which gave him immunity; but the Italian Chamber of Deputies stripped him of it, and he fled to France in 1983. In 1997, he voluntarily returned to Italy and was incarcerated. He took this action, he said, in order to clarify the situation of other New Leftists who were in exile. He is still a prisoner, a feature of his biography that is prominently displayed by Harvard University Press on the back of Empire. So as not to detract from the dramatic flair of their author, the publishers neglect to mention that Negri is released during the day to live in his apartment in Rome with his girlfriend, spending only his nights in jail.

As is the case with so much of the violence associated with the New Left, it is difficult to know exactly what Negri did. We do know that Italy, like Germany, experienced considerable political violence in the 1960s and 1970s, and that many radical groups, distrustful of the cautious conservatism of the Community party, created ultraleftist sects such as Autonomia Operaia that either engaged directly in criminal acts or sought to justify them as a necessary stage in the destruction of capitalism. Negri, who was closely associated with these splinter groups as a member and a theorist, has had many opportunities since then to revisit his past and to reflect on whether the violence of the times was wrong. He has chosen not to do so. Instead he has argued that violence is built into all the institutions and all the practices of capitalism, as if to conclude that because society itself is so violent, one can hardly be surprised that its opponents tend in that direction as well. Empire is merely the latest of a series of books in which a completely unrepentant Negri defends himself. No wonder that efforts to win his full release from prison—efforts that will surely escalate now that Negri has received the imprimatur of America’s most prestigious academic press-have failed.

With the memory of three thousand dead bodies destroyed beyond recognition by deadly terrorist attacks still so fresh, readers in America these days do not need to be reminded of the ugliness that violence brings in its wake. Yet Hardt and Negri evidently need such a reminder. Their book, as it comes to a close, contains an apologia for violence past and present that, in the light of recent events, ought to send a chill down every reader’s spine. Those singled out for special praise in Empire include the Industrial Workers of the World, or Wobblies, an oft-romanticized anarchosyndicalist group that Hardt and Negri manage to describe as “radical republican.” IWW militants, they write, offer a prototype of resistance to Empire. “The Wobbly constructed associations among working people from below, through continuous agitation, and while organizing them gave rise to utopian thought and revolutionary knowledge.” A similar movement today would take the form of what Hardt and Negri call a “postmodern posse.” They are attracted to this term because posse is Latin for “having power,” but it does not escape their notice that the term is also identified with the posse comitatus of Hollywood Westerns. (They neglect to mention that this is also the name of choice of some of America’s most violently inclined right-wing sects.)

The Marxist historian E. J. Hobsbawm once wrote a book called Primitive Rebels, about seemingly medieval gangs of Robin Hood—like bandits, such as the Neapolitan Camorra or the Tuscan Lazzarettists, that persisted into the nineteenth and twentieth centuries in Italy and Spain. Sometimes anarchistic, sometimes fascistic, these millenarian movements appealed not to the urban workers of capitalism, but to the displaced Lumpenproletariat. When Hardt and Negri celebrate rap groups or window-smashing anarchists, it is these bandits, who have always been viewed with great suspicion by Marxists, that they see.

To such movements of resistance, Hardt and Negri offer praise but no advice. Never has a revolutionary manifesto been so devoid of actual content as the one contained in this book. The real militant against Empire, Hardt and Negri insist, is not one “who acts on the basis of duty and discipline, who pretends that his or her actions are deducted from an ideal plan.” (The Jesuits are, somewhat bizarrely, offered as an example of such discipline, but any Marxist would read this as a rejection of a Leninist revolutionary vanguard.) No, to be a militant you must turn the biopower directed against you inside out, by exploring “the productive cooperation of mass intellectuality and affective networks, the productivity of postmodern biopolitics.” Hobsbawm wrote of the chiliastic bandits of the nineteenth century that, whatever their other differences, they shared “a fundamental vagueness about the actual way in which the new society will be brought about,” and no better description of anarchism in its postmodern form has yet been written.

The anarchism advocated in Empire does have one rather idiosyncratic feature: it is informed by Christianity. Hardt and Negri find in Christendom a precursor for Empire—not that odd a comparison if we live in a world in which chronological time no longer means anything, but an odd comparison certainly if particular historical periods are built on the events that preceded them. Once Christendom is introduced as a topic, it becomes immediately clear that the great theorist of Empire is not Marx, it is Augustine. Empire is a postmodern twist on The City of God. “In Empire,” Hardt and Negri write, echoing Augustine’s denunciation of Rome, “corruption is everywhere,” reflected in “the supreme government of Empire and its vassal administrations, the most refined and the most rotten administrative police forces, the lobbies of the ruling classes, the mafias of rising social groups, the churches and sects, the perpetuators and persecutors of scandal, the great financial conglomerates, and everyday economic transactions.” Although Hardt and Negri would never use such language, they are clearly persuaded that life under Empire is suffused with sin.

And redemption will come from the multitude, who despite their oppression under empire—or Empire—remain pure in heart. In them, one can see the emergence of the new city that will put us at one with the world. Unlike Augustine’s, of course, their city cannot be the divine one, since “the multitude today ... resides on the imperial surfaces where there is no God the Father and no transcendence.” Instead, they will create “the earthly city of the multitude,” which the authors esoterically define as “the absolute constitution of labor and cooperation.” About the practical question of how this can be done, Hardt and Negri have nothing significant to say. “The only response that we can give to these questions is that the action of the multitude becomes political primarily when it begins to confront directly and with an adequate consciousness the central repressive operations of Empire.” This, too, is a Christian conception of revolution. We cannot know how we will be saved; we must recognize that if only we have faith, a way will be found.

Empire ends not with a paean to Marx or Lenin, but with a prayer for Francis of Assisi: “To denounce the poverty of the multitude he adopted that common condition and discovered there the ontological power of a new society. The communist militant does the same, identifying in the common condition of the multitude its enormous wealth. Francis ... posed a joyous life, including all of being and nature, the animals, sister moon, brother sun, the birds of the field, the poor and exploited humans, together against the will and power of corruption.” Pierce your ears, paint your face, run angry through the streets, and you too can be a saint. It is not clear whether you will ever actually stop companies from merging or bankers from providing loans, but the glimpse that you will be vouchsafed of the heavenly city that is available to us on Earth, so long as you are sufficiently militant, is reward enough. If you do all this, you will find yourself in “a revolution that no power will control—because biopower and communism, cooperation and revolution remain together, in love, simplicity, and also innocence. This is the irrepressible lightness and joy of being communist.”