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.