Antonio Negri, Your Past Is Calling

In the Independent, Johann Hari paints a devastating portrait of Antonio Negri, the old-tyme Italian communist, former prisoner, co-author of the anti-globalization bibles Empire and Multitude, and insistent white wine drinker:

None of the world's real problems—from poverty to tyranny to climate change—are discussed in Negri's work, except to claim that the poor are "more alive", and the citizens of liberal democracies are living under the "real tyranny", and… oh, I give up. It's not just that this preacher of Empire has no clothes; he is living in an intellectual nudist colony. There are some important anti-globalisation writers, such as Monbiot and Joseph Stiglitz. But Negri is trying to keep alive a patient—Marxism—whose heart stopped beating long ago.

So, this is where revolutionary Marxism comes to die. It has been reduced to an obscure parlour game for ageing bourgeois nostalgics, played out a few feet from Buckingham Palace by an old terrorist who needs us to forget.

Whole thing here. And read Reason's caustic review of Empire here.