Twenty-five years ago, Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri published Empire,1Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000). Published in Spanish: Imperio (Barcelona: Paidós, 2002). All references to Empire here cite the original English-language version. a book that provoked an intense intellectual debate. Had the age of imperialism come to an end? Was “globalization” an irreversible and implacable reality reshaping the capitalist world? Would we no longer see wars between great imperialist powers, or anti-imperialist wars? The truth is that, at the time, these theses garnered enormous support, although there were also those who questioned them early on.2Juan Chingo and Gustavo Dunga, “Empire or Imperialism? A Debate with ‘The Long Twentieth Century’ by Giovanni Arrighi and ‘Empire’ by Toni Negri and Michael Hardt,” Revista Estrategia Internacional 17 (Fall 2001); Christian Castillo; “Communism without Transition?” Estrategia Internacional 17 (Fall 2001); Nestor Kohan, “El imperio de Hardt & Negri: más allá de modas, ondas y furores,” Clacso, 2003. Twenty years later, the authors published an essay in New Left Review revising several aspects of their argument in response to more turbulent times on the world stage.
Returning to those reflections today allows us to gauge what has changed since the book’s publication while delving deeper into some Marxist debates on imperialism. This is an urgent task, because the menace of imperialism has returned; indeed, it’s back with a vengeance.
From Imperialism to Empire?
Negri and Hardt held that, after multiple processes of “decolonization” in the third world, after the fall of the USSR, and as a consequence of an “irresistible and irreversible globalization of economic and cultural exchanges,” “Empire” was materializing. This would be a “new order, a new logic and command structure — in short, a new form of sovereignty” that is decentralized and fluid.
In contrast to imperialism, Empire establishes no territorial center of power and does not rely on fixed boundaries or barriers. It is a decentered and deterritorializing apparatus of rule that progressively incorporates the entire global realm within its open, expanding frontiers. Empire manages hybrid identities, flexible hierarchies, and plural exchanges through modulating networks of command. The distinct national colors of the imperialist map of the world have merged and blended in the imperial global rainbow.3Hardt and Negri, Empire, xii–xiii.
The authors believed they saw at the dawn of the 21st century a more “uniform” world whose inequalities had been “smoothed out” through new processes of differentiation and homogenization: “We continually find the First World in the Third, the Third in the First, and the Second almost nowhere at all.” Contrary to those who at that time emphasized the strengthening of American geopolitical power, Hardt and Negri argued that neither the United States nor any other nation-state could constitute the center of an imperialist project: “Imperialism is over. No nation will be world leader in the way modern European nations were.”4Hardt and Negri, Empire, xiii, xiv.
Empire was to be a new global sovereignty, a government over the whole of the “civilized world.” With no limits to its reign, it presented itself as an order that “suspends history.” In this way, the neoliberal rhetoric of the end of history colored theses on the new imperial order.
Negri and Hardt had the merit of refreshing the idea of totality in the face of theories dominated by fragmentation, the local, and the particular. Another outstanding aspect of their work was the reintroduction of the debate on communism for broader audiences, albeit in an abstract and immaterial way. The authors argued against postmodern theories, putting forward the idea that modernity should not be understood “as uniform and homogeneous, but rather as constituted by at least two distinct and conflicting traditions.” The first, which began in the Renaissance, had its revolutionary milestone in the work of Spinoza with “the discovery of immanence” (the forces of this world). The second would in reality be “a Thermidor” marked by the attempt to control the utopian forces of the first “through the construction and mediation of dualisms,” to arrive “finally at the concept of modern sovereignty as a provisional solution.”5Hardt and Negri, Empire, 140. A central thesis of the book was that this modern sovereignty (nation-state) is in crisis and is increasingly losing ground to Empire.
From that angle, there was no reason to fall into nostalgia for traditional forms of nation-state sovereignty. If the new order contained enormous forces of destruction and oppression, it simultaneously opened up new possibilities for liberation. Because if Empire existed only by relying on (capturing, controlling, parasitizing) the strength of the multitude, the creative forces of that multitude could reorganize themselves to build a counter-Empire based on a new internationalism.
The theses of Empire absolutized various elements of reality, but without taking note of their profound contradictions. On the one hand, they highlighted the creative power of the masses in history (the multitude), a power that is captured by capital and in the face of which capital reorganizes or restructures itself. But that power was overvalued, failing to take into account that multiple mediations (social, political, cultural) prevent it from unfolding. As Juan Chingo pointed out, “To argue that the ‘terms and nature of capitalist restructuring’ were a direct result of this accumulation of struggles without taking into account the concrete result of these struggles is to glorify the class struggle itself.”6Chingo and Dunga, “Empire or Imperialism?” This led to an embellishment of the neoliberal period, without taking into account the defeats inflicted on the movement of the masses that gave rise to it. Hardt and Negri avoided the question of political mediations (not only the state as such, but also its “extensions” in civil society) and the role they play in containing the movement of the masses.
In turn, in the idea of imperialism’s transformation into Empire, the authors presented other tendencies unilaterally. The growing internationalization of capital is a reality. As is the more autonomous role of multinationals or financial funds on the world stage, which can even clash with the different state powers when they seek to place limits on their actions. Neither, however, is an absolute dynamic. On the contrary, the contradiction between the increasing internationalization of capital and the limits of nation-states continues to generate enormous crises. In both cases, Hardt and Negri’s denial of dialectics led to a simplistic analysis of capitalist tendencies, one that ignored their complexity and contradictions.
In February 2020, Negri and Hardt published “Empire, Twenty Years After” as a kind of review of what had happened in those two decades. They argued that, when Empire was published, “the economic and cultural processes of globalization occupied center stage: all could see that some kind of new world order was emerging.” Whereas, 20 years later, “commentators across the political spectrum are conducting its postmortem.”
Indeed, reality seemed to have stubbornly denied Hardt and Negri’s thesis. Even before the pandemic, the multiple fractures of the “Imperial order” were emerging on all sides, triggered by the 2008 economic crisis and a long recession. These became evident at a geopolitical level, for example, in the catastrophic wars and imperialist interventions in the Middle East. At the same time, multiple crises of liberal democracies, political polarization, the resurgence of racism and “sovereign-ism” deepened — a period also marked by several cycles of class struggle. (Hardt and Negri will take note of this, as we shall see in a moment.) And all this, without considering what would come immediately afterward, with the pandemic, the energy and inflation crises, the war in Ukraine, the genocide in Palestine, and a new scenario of escalating warfare in the Middle East.
Even so, Hardt and Negri refused to recognize that the basis of their thesis was wrong. They argued instead that just as capitalism runs from crisis to crisis, the same can be said of the Empire, or “global structures”:
Despite such prognostications, both wishful and anguished, globalization is not dead or even in decline, but simply less easily legible. It is true that the global order and the accompanying structures of global command are everywhere in crisis, but today’s various crises do not, paradoxically, prevent the continuing rule of the global structures.
Of course, if the new “normality” of the imperial order was one of crises everywhere, Hardt and Negri seemed to be offering a rhetorical device to avoid recognizing the actuality of the imperialist epoch (an epoch of wars, crises and revolutions, as Lenin defined it at the time). Now, our objective here is not to show how wrong Hardt and Negri were. Instead, we find it more interesting to ask ourselves on what basis they built the illusions of a harmonious globalization that “suspended history.” This will allow us to take note of some key processes that need to be considered in order to theorize imperialism today, which cannot simply be a repetition of the theories developed by Lenin, Trotsky, Luxemburg, and other Marxists at the beginning of the 20th century.
Neoliberalism, Empire and Unequal Development
The background to Negri and Hardt’s Empire had two major dimensions. On the one hand, the unparalleled expansion of the sphere of capital, both in breadth and depth. On the other, the deployment of American hegemony in the post–Cold War period in such an unchallenged way and for such a long period that it seemed to have no center.
Regarding the first point, the neoliberal boom saw an unprecedented leap in the internationalization of capital. Although this had always been the trend in the imperialist era, now capitalist accumulation reached practically every corner of the planet, moving with the speed and fluidity of financial capital, the extension of value chains, and the processes of “de-localization.” In this sense, what Hardt and Negri pointed out was true: capital introduced the “First World” into the “Third World” on a greater scale than in the past. These processes also led to a greater worldwide interconnection of labor, both through increased migratory flows (the “Third World” moving toward the “First World”) and through the processes of the “global arbitration” of labor (which capital takes advantage of to put downward pressure on the working conditions of the labor force throughout the world). In turn, the accumulation of capital colonized spheres or areas of production and reproduction that were outside its direct command, and did so through the massive privatization of public sectors and the transformation of reproductive work into wage labor, among other sectors.
Contrary to what Negri and Hardt thought, this “globalizing” or “universalizing” deployment of capital on a new scale did not lead to the “uniformity” of the capitalist world, much less a smoothing out of its contrasts. Rather, they increased the processes of uneven and combined development — which were characteristic of imperialism — in new forms. These processes were already in the making when Negri and Hardt wrote Empire, and they accelerated extraordinarily in the following years. We could point to several examples. In Latin America, while there was a growing “Westernization” of societies (urbanization, the salarization of rural sectors, the creation of new middle sectors and new industrial poles), these processes were strongly conditioned — and continue to be — by dependence on financial capital, the dictates of organizations such as the IMF and the World Bank, the interests of multinationals, etc. As a result, new dynamics were consolidated simultaneously — of indebtedness, privatization, extractivism, the reprimarization of economies, the creation of new pockets of poverty around cities, rising job insecurity, etc.
But perhaps where this combined and unequal dynamic was most noticeable was in those regions abruptly reincorporated within the sphere of capital valorization, such as Russia, eastern Europe, and China. Capitalist restoration introduced dizzying transformations in what had been workers’ states, profoundly deformed and degenerated by bureaucratic dictatorships. In fact, there is perhaps no comparable historical example of such an accelerated transformation of a contemporary society as in the case of China. The introduction of the “First World” into the “Second” or “Third World” accelerated processes of capitalist accumulation that were enormously uneven on an internal scale — migrations of millions of people, developments of new poles of industrialization, investments of foreign capital, etc. Moreover, it helped launch China as a new, emerging capitalist power on the global stage, with an increasingly imperialist dynamic. That was crucial in deepening the crisis of U.S. hegemony and in destabilizing, in multiple ways, the Imperial order that Hardt and Negri thought they had glimpsed 20 years earlier. China, then, is for the most part conspicuously absent in the pages of Empire.
Currently, the revisionist challenge from powers such as Russia and China shows the crisis of the “American” global order. The war in Ukraine, along with the situation in Syria (with the fall of Bashar al-Assad), the war in the Middle East, political crises of different governments in Latin America and in the Sahel — all these are overdetermined by this increasingly antagonistic dynamic on the world stage. Trump’s return to the White House is an expression of the ongoing crisis, as well as an accelerating and destabilizing element.
At the same time, we may ask ourselves, To what extent can Trump’s “America First” promises be carried through to the end in the world of “globalization” in crisis? His threat to impose generalized tariffs clashes with the persistence of the internationalization of value chains and capital flows, even if there have been partial reversals. What would happen to the world economy if Trump “keeps” his promise of 100 percent tariffs? And, on the other hand, how would large U.S. multinationals benefit from such a plan? What new confrontations would be opened up? All these are elements of enormous uncertainty.
In this sense, Hardt and Negri perceived the force of the process — in some ways irreversible — of capital’s internationalization. That is to say, it will be impossible to disentangle its knots, or, at least, it cannot be done peacefully. But they confused this with the dissolution of the clashes and confrontations between states. They thus repeated the same mistake as Kautsky in 1914, believing that the “trustification” of capital would lead to a similar “trustification” of state relations, forming an “ultra-imperialism.” (Other authors today assert the same thing; we argue with them here.)
Actually, everything indicates that the tendencies that Hardt and Negri thought would lead to the dissolution of imperialism in the Empire were, in reality, reinforcing it, preparing new and more catastrophic contradictions and disputes between powers. From the period of its extreme “globalization” emerges a reinforced imperialism, or, to use Hardt and Negri’s terms, a “prime” imperialism.
From the Multitude to “Class Prime”
In their 2020 article, Hardt and Negri also adjusted their definition of the emancipatory subject that, according to their well-known thesis, had given rise to the Empire: the multitude. They write, “Yet to theorize multiplicity, or even to recognize existing multiplicity, is not enough — especially if by multiplicity one means simply fracturing and separation. To be politically effective, organization is required.” This leads them to ask, “How can a multiplicity decide and act politically?”
By way of answer, they proposed returning to the conception of class, but “a class now conceived differently,” with the aim of exploring how the multitude “can act politically.” This would be “conception of class that refers not only to the working class but is itself a multiplicity, a political formation that makes good on the gains of the multitude.” They pointed out that, although the class became a multitude, the multitude had reconfigured itself back into a class, though an intersectional class, a “prime” class (with an additional value), following the formula of C-M-C’.
At this point, Hardt and Negri returned to the work of authors such as Achille Mbembe and Christine Delphy, with the concepts of “racial class” and “sexual class,” to highlight the idea that it was necessary to “grasp the effects of subjection created by relations of domination, not only with respect to capital but also with respect to white supremacy and patriarchy.”
Hardt and Negri thus took note of the criticisms of the concept of the multitude, a “phantasmagorical” concept, without body or concreteness. And they also took note of the changes in the processes of the class struggle. While in Empire they argued that there would be no more “cycles of class struggle” (but “events” that erupt and do not spread, that are not comparable to each other, that share nothing in common), 20 years later they had no choice but to recognize that the class struggle has returned — something that was evident from the Arab springs to the Spanish indignados, the Chilean revolt, and the strikes in France.
At this point, for Negri and Hardt, the multitude becomes a class, because “[t]he notion of ‘multitudinous class’ or ‘intersectional class’ that we seek requires a further step: an internal articulation of these different subjectivities — working class, racial class, sex class — in struggle.”
And they pointed out, as a criticism of intersectional theories,
Intersectional analyses commonly address the need for articulation between the subordinated subjectivities in terms of solidarity and coalition. Often this repeats an additive strategy: working-class plus feminist plus antiracist plus lgbtq struggle, plus … In other words, even when intersectional analysis refuses additive notions of identity, an additive logic can still govern activist imaginaries. One weakness of this approach is that the bonds of solidarity are external. What is needed are internal bonds of solidarity — that is, a different mode of articulation, going beyond standard conceptions of coalition.
What would this “different mode of articulation” be, according to Hardt and Negri? On this point, they theoretically take up Rosa Luxemburg’s reflections on the solidarity that sectors of the German labor movement expressed with the Russian working class during the revolution of 1905. The Polish revolutionary had questioned whether this solidarity should be considered an act of exteriority. She pointed out, instead, that German socialists and workers should recognize in the Russian revolution “a chapter of their own social and political history.”
Hardt and Negri bring the argument up to date, taking up Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor’s criticism of “anti-racist activists in the United States who do not also focus on class domination,” considering that the American working class “is female, immigrant, Black, white, Latino/a and more … [such that] immigration issues, gender issues and antiracisms are working-class issues.” On this point, Hardt and Negri’s criticism of “coalition politics,” which appears so frequently in intersectional theories, is quite accurate (we have written about this issue in other articles). At the same time, their proposal to return to class as a “mode of articulation” is very suggestive. If, however, the multitude is an elusive, incorporeal, and not very solid subject to overcome, a stage of mere resistance, then the authors’ proposal of a new “class prime” does not assume that this articulation requires a political strategy of class and socialism. Failing to do so allows other strategies, those of other classes, to occupy the scene and capture the “power” of the masses in struggle.
As Christian Castillo has pointed out, there has been a shift to a moment of strong political illusion, marked by Ernesto Laclau’s theses on left-wing populism, in contrast to the earlier theses of Hardt and Negri, with their “social illusion” (as in the anti-globalization struggles or in phenomena such as the Spanish 15-M movement). The reality is that Negri himself (like many currents coming from the autonomist space) became enthusiastic about the “populist articulation,” from Chavism and Evo Morales in Latin America to Syriza and Podemos in Europe. These experiences, far from developing a “new internationalism” or advancing an “exodus” from the nation-state and capitalism, acted as leftist release valves for capital’s recomposition. The result has been the survival of liberal democracies in crisis and the phenomena of asymmetric polarization, with the right hardening its discourse and its policies against the working class, women, and youth.
Twenty-five years after Empire, with Trump’s provocative statements about the annexation of Greenland and the Panama Canal, we are facing “imperialism reloaded.” The new, extreme right-wingers are attempting to capture the power of the masses in a reactionary way, against which the logic of the lesser evil is totally impotent. Hardt and Negri asked, “How can a multiplicity decide and act politically?” But the question is, How can it decide and act politically in an independent way? That is to say, how can it achieve “the articulation of a social and political force capable of carrying it forward without being held back by the forms of institutionalization that the capitalist state seeks to impose”?7Interview with Matías Maiello: “From Mobilization to Revolution, a Book to Think About the Socialist Perspective in the 21st Century.” This question is more relevant than ever. Against the logic of war and the permanent plundering of imperialism, we must build political organizations rooted in a socialist and internationalist strategy.
Originally published in Spanish on January 18, 2025 in Ideas de Izquierda.