This article examines Hardt and Negri's Empire in the context of the radical tradition of Italian Marxism from which it developed. It discusses the influence of previously untranslated writings by Marx on the Italian New Left, and the way this prompted a new political analysis which, in studying the interpenetration of capital and labour, treated capital as the dependent variable in the class struggle. The essay considers how faithfully this analysis is sustained in Negri's later work, and suggests that the inconsistencies apparent in Empire derive in part from the continuing influence of Marx's prescient but ambiguous text: the so-called ‘Fragment on machines’.
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