Hi, this is against everyone with Connor Abib.

A weekly podcast featuring my conversations with countercultural figures and presenting complex,

philosophical, spiritual, and political ideas in an engaging and accessible way.

Friends, back in 2000, 20 years ago now, the philosophers, political theorists and

activist Michael Hart and Antonio Negri published the philosophers, political theorists and activist Michael Hart and Antonio

Negri published the book, Empire. It came out to fanfare, shock, intense responses,

and it named the nexus of power currents and nodes across the earth that form the net

of neoliberalism, of capitalism.

It couldn't just be described as a problem of states or corporations or even just economies anymore.

It was empire.

And that meant that we needed new ways to understand it and new ways of resisting and creating

in the face of it. Their follow-up books

fleshed out different aspects of their arguments, which to my mind only strengthened them,

the books multitude, Commonwealth, and most recently Assembly. I remember having arguments about

empire with Marxists back when it came out 20 years ago,

who thought the books were too ontological, like they were making too many reality claims,

or they were saying that they discouraged activism because Hart and Negri were showing how all these factors came together to create empire,

but also to create resistance movements.

And they thought, the people who critique the book, thought, well, that's just saying that these resistant movements will just sort of florest, they'll just show up, no one needs to do anything.

And yet, to me, at the time and still, their analysis seemed absolutely correct and correct in the diagnosis of the problem and in their later books how to solve and

confront the problems that were before us. And, you know,

in no way did they express, as far as I was concerned, a shallow reliance on the spontaneous

...