>Most of what is changed is simply Negri rejecting his earlier
>doctrinaire communism. If you've been following post-modern Marxism
>at all--like Negri without co-author, Deleuze and Guattari or
>Baudrilllard--you'll find little of anything new or important in
>Empire. That Empire has been successfully marketed to the book of
>the month club crowd, however, IS SIGNIFICANT.
Gopal Balakrishnan felicitously writes that "_Empire_ can be read as the _Lexus and Olive Tree_ of the Far Left" (_New Left Review_ 5, September-October 2000, at <http://www.newleftreview.net/NLR23909.shtml>), a celebration of Americanism that, unlike Thomas Friedman's, refuses to recognize the U.S. government's political and military hegemony that makes the Empire what it is. Therein lies the key to its marketing success (a success for a book by a university press, that is). Thus _Empire_ does disservice to leftists, in that it avoids the reality of America's imperial powers from which such liberal and conservative writers for The Empire as Thomas Friedman, Paul Johnson, William Pfaff, Martin Wolf, etc. do not shy away. -- Yoshie
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