[Generation_online] More News from the gutter

Tue, 16 Oct 2001 13:52:10 -0700 (PDT)

For the online version of "National Review" take
on Empire go to:
http://www.nationalreview.com/17sep01/pj091701.shtml
-----------------------------------------------------

Evil Empire
                                                   The
Communist "hot, smart book of the moment."

                                                   By
David Pryce-Jones

September 17, 2001 issue 

Editor's Note: The full-length version of this article
appears in the September 17th

issue NR, "Evil Empire: The Communist `hot, smart book
of the moment.'"

he making of a bestseller is a

most uncertain art. It has to do with

novelty or fashion, and the

manipulation of the media. Suddenly

some book is on everyone's lips, and
                                                   we
all hurry to the stores or the

Internet for a copy. The herd instinct

rarely fails. 

                                                   And
here comes Empire. The New

York Times burbles that this is the

Next Big Idea, that it is "sending

frissons of excitement through

campuses from São Paolo to Tokyo."

Time blesses it as "the hot, smart

book of the moment." Whatever is

going on? For this is no

run-of-the-mill bestseller, but a

political manifesto laying out a new guise for
Communism, in other words

modernizing the Last Big Idea Which Did Not Come Off,
and which went
                                                   far
beyond campus excitement.

                                                   One
frisson-inducing feature of Empire is its leading
author, Antonio

Negri. Outwardly, Negri was a professor at the
University of Padua.

Secretly he was the brains behind the Red Brigades -
the Italian

equivalent of the IRA or the Baader-Meinhof Gang.

                                                   In
1978, the Red Brigades kidnapped prime minister Aldo
Moro. Just

before Moro was shot dead, someone telephoned his
distraught wife to

taunt her; the caller was identified as Negri. He was
charged with "armed

insurrection against the state," as well as 17
murders, including Moro's.

                                                   But
justice in Italy is a matter of negotiation. Negri was
imprisoned for

four years without being brought to trial. In a neat
trick, he got himself

elected to parliament in 1983, and, claiming
parliamentary immunity, was

released from prison. A day before the vote to remove
his immunity, he

fled to Paris. He returned to Italy in 1997; today,
his sole restriction is a

curfew.

                                                   His
message in Empire: Capitalism stinks, it has got to
go, and it soon

will. By breaking up the nation-state, globalization -
the new "Empire" -
                                                   is
propelling millions round the globe in search of work.
All of this is to the

good because lo! Here come lots of class-strugglers.
Just one more

shove, comrades. And how will revolution actually come
about? "We

await only the maturation of the political development
of the posse. We
                                                   do
not have any models to offer for this event."

What, no heads of state kidnapped and killed? This is
tame indeed.

Maturation is not going to send much of a frisson
through the posse. In an

unusual instance of providing something concrete, our
authors mention

Buchenwald, which they call "a symbol of the
extermination of

communists, homosexuals, Gypsies, and others." Notice
who's missing

from that list!

Empire seeks to ensure that those who won the Cold War
are given no

credit for it. Communists need to gain control of
history in order to claim

that they were right all along, and we must try the
whole experiment

again in some new form. That is what this hot, smart
book is all about.

Marx said that great events appear "the first time as
tragedy, the second
                                                   as
farce." Even at the New York Times, Time magazine, and
Harvard

University Press, you'd think they might be able to
dispense with frissons
                                                   and
spot farce for themselves. 

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