[I'm cc'ing this to Michael Hardt since the debate is somehow related to his ideas]
Well, I would imagine that what you do is you 'push capitalism's promises'. For instance, the Zapatistas strategy of globalising a local conflict in Chiapas through injecting their struggle into an international network of support and discussion heavily depends on the ability of activists in to bridge the enforced divisions which are fundamental to imperalism. To be more concrete - Empire promises a global village, but we know that the way the Mexican state is acting (supporting para-military death squads) is quite unlike any action that the 'main movers' of Empire claim to suport. Showing how the Mexican state is part of the same whole of Empire which the US is part of directs a critique at the whole thing - the ability to hold together the whole - to show the totality - to the whole world (using a combination of innovative uses of high tech - the Internet - low tech - walking village to village - and damn good understanding of communication/PR) is what made the Zapatista rebellion different to a lot of what has gone before.
Similar dialectical movements can be traced in things like development of Intelectual property law - in the midst of this supposed massive explosion in individual creative power (which the New Economy and new media technologies are meant to usher in) you have a contradiction - on the one hand, the ability of people to swap creative products - stories, emails, computer programmes, pictures, even videos - over the Internet. On the other hand, you have an intellectual property stranglehold which will increase capital's grip on every channel - through copy protection on everything from DVDs to computer hard disks. The result will be that you won't be able to record a programme from TV onto DVD unless the programme's broadcasters let you. You can use the new Mac DVD writer to write out your videos to DVD - but only for a max of 1 hour, and the DVD you write won't be a 'master quality' one, usuable to distribute your own movies. Etc etc - not quite as dramatic as Mexican repression of peasants in Chiapas, but you have the same 2 sides coin of Empire - and again by defending the one side - the liberation of creativity - you can show up the whole. (You should read some of the EFF or FSF comments on recent intellectual property fights - they sound downright communist!)
This isn't, as Carrol suggests, taking the good and rejecting the bad. Rather, you grab what Empire gives you - after all, Empire promises much - and when, as inevitably happens, the promise starts being emptied of all meaning, you've got another place to point at the relations of capital, and how they destroy human promise. You point at the relations of capital and cry: 'They have to be burst asunder, they will be burst asunder.'
This is all pretty standard Marxism - Trotsky idea of a transitional programme is talking the same language. Where Negri and co. - and other 'autonomists' - differ from orthodox Marxism is that they see the refusal of the relations of capital as happening constantly - the capital relation constantly needs to be re-imposed. The working class is, in Tronti's phrase, a 'tribe of moles' who keep burrowing away under the seemingly smooth surface of capitalism. The vision of revolution is rather an explosion of capital from the inside, not a 'overthrow' of capital from the 'outside position' of a socialist/ communist/whatever party. In my mind this corresponds roughly to the period in the 1980s when the Apartheid regime was facing a situation of spreading, mass ungoverneability - as opposed to the period when the Apartheid state was being replaced by the 'democratic' state (a transition which immobilised real 'peoples power').
Finally, Negri's fascination with Foucault, and post-structuralism is (and Spinoza), I think, related to his attempts to understand what a 'counter-power' to capitalist rule means. I don't know much about it, but one distinction that he makes is between constitutional power - a power which resides in fetishised relations, seemingly 'outside' concrete humanity (characteristic of both the bourgeois democracies and the various 'workers states' or 'poeple's states') - and 'constitutive power'.
Of course, there is considerable debate amongst 'autonomists' on the topics which Negri and co. are grappling with - some tend to see Negri's movement as 'too Foucauldian' and lacking a dialectical edge. I certainly am not read up enough on all the various players (and consider that a lot of the debate in this field happens in languages other than English - e.g. Italian, German and French) to do justice to the subtleties of the current arguments.
Peter -- Peter van Heusden <pvh at egenetics.com> NOTE: I do not speak for my employer, Electric Genetics "Criticism has torn up the imaginary flowers from the chain not so that man shall wear the unadorned, bleak chain but so that he will shake off the chain and pluck the living flower." - Karl Marx, 1844 OpenPGP: 1024D/0517502B : DE5B 6EAA 28AC 57F7 58EF 9295 6A26 6A92 0517 502B