> but there is no way anyone can justify calling postwar Japan and
> S.Korea "socialist", as there was little public ownership of the means of
> production in either case (unlike say the UK, prior to the 1980s).
I'm not sure why you think Hardt & Negri are anti-socialist; I'd argue they're calling for an Information Age reinvention of socialism. But socialism isn't the same thing as state ownership. Japan's keiretsu (and to a lesser extent, South Korea's chaebol) did indeed practice a covert, sneaky socialism, in the sense that they privileged market share, an egalitarian distribution of income and industrial skills over short-term profitability.
-- DRR