Have Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri 
Rewritten the Communist Manifesto
For the Twenty-First Century? 
 
Slavoj Zizek
 
Capitalism is not just a historical epoch among
others. In a way, the once fashionable and now
half-forgotten Francis Fukuyama was right: global
capital is "the end of history." A certain excess
which was, as it were, kept under check in previous
history, perceived as a localizable perversion, as an
excess, a deviation, is in capitalism elevated into
the very principle of social life, in the speculative
movement of money begetting more money, of a system
which can survive only by constantly revolutionizing
its own conditions-that is to say, in which the thing
can survive only as its own excess, constantly
exceeding its own "normal" constraints. And, perhaps
it is only today, in global capitalism in its
"postindustrial", digitalized form, that, to put it in
Hegelian terms, really existing capitalism is reaching
the level of its notion: perhaps, one should follow
again Marx's old, antievolutionist motto (incidentally
taken verbatim from Hegel) that the anatomy of man
provides the key for the anatomy of the monkey-that
is, in order to deploy the inherent, notional
structure of a social formation, one must start with
its most developed form.
 
Marx located the elementary capitalist antagonism in
the opposition between use-value and exchange value: 
in capitalism, the potentials of this opposition are
fully realized, the domain of exchange-value acquires
autonomy, is transferred into the specter of
self-propelling speculative capital which needs the
productive capacities and needs of actual people only
as its dispensable temporal embodiment. Marx derived
the very notion of economic crisis from this gap:  a
crisis occurs when reality catches up with the
illusory, self-generating mirage of money begetting
more money-this speculative madness can not go on
indefinitely; it has to explode in ever stronger
crises. The ultimate root of the crisis is for him,
the gap between use-value and exchange-value: the
logic of exchange-value follows its own path, its own
mad dance, irrespective of the real needs of real
people. It may appear that this analysis is more than
actual today when the tension between the real
universe and the real is reaching almost palpably
unbearable proportions: on the one hand, we have
crazy, solipsistic speculations about futures,
mergers, and so on, following their own inherent
logic; on the other hand, reality is catching up I the
guise of ecological catastrophes, poverty, Third World
diseases in collapse of social life, mad cow disease.
 
This is why cyber-capitalists can appear as the
paradigmatic capitalists today; this is why Bill Gates
can dream of cyberspace as providing the frame for
what he calls "frictionless capitalism." What we have
here is an ideological short circuit between the two
versions of the gap between reality and virtuality:
the gap between real production and and the virtual,
spectral domain of Capital, and the gap between
experiential reality and the virtual reality of
cyberspace. It effectively seems that the gap between
my fascinating screen persona and the miserable flesh
that is "me" off-screen translates into immediate
experience the gap between the Real of the
speculative circulation of capital and the drab
reality of impoverished masses. However is this (this
recourse to "reality" which will sooner or later catch
up with the virtual game) really the only way to
operationalize a critique of capitalism? What if the
problem of capitalism is not this solipsistic mad
dance but precisely the opposite: that it continues to
disavow its gap with "reality", that it presents
itself as serving real needs of real people? The
originality of Marx is that he played on both cards
simultaneously: the origin of capitalist crises is the
gap between use- and exchange-value, and capitalism
constrains the free deployment of productivity.
 
What all this means is that the urgent task of the
economic analysis today is, again, to repeat Marx's
critique of political economy, without succeeding on
to the temptation of the ideologies of
"postindustrial" societies. It is my hypothesis that
the key change concerns the status of private
property: the ultimate element of power and control is
no longer the last link in the chain of investments,
the firm or individual who "really owns" the means of
production. The ideal capitalist today functions in a
in a wholly different way: investing borrowed money,
"really owning" nothing-even indebted, but nonetheless
controlling things. A corporation is owned by another
corporation, who is again borrowing money from banks,
who may ultimately manipulate money owned by ordinary
people like ourselves. With Bill Gates, "private
property in the means of production" becomes
meaningless, at least in the standard meaning of the
word. The paradox of this virtualization of
capitalism is ultimately the same as that of the
electron in elementary particle physics. The mass of
each element in our reality is composed of its mass at
rest plus the surplus provided by the acceleration of
its movement; however, an electron's mass at rest is
zero, its mass consisting only of the surplus
generated by the acceleration of its movement, as if
we are dealing with a nothing which acquires some
deceptive substance only by magically spinning itself
into an excess of itself. Does today's virtual
capitalist not function in a homologous way: his "net
value" at zero, he directly operates just with the
surplus borrowing from the future.
 
This, exactly, is what Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri
are trying to do in their Empire (2000), a book that
sets as its goal, writing the Communist Manifesto for
the twenty-first century. Hardt and Negri describe
globalization as an ambiguous "deterritorialization": 
victorious global capitalism pushes into every pore of
our social lives, into the most intimate of spheres,
and installs an ever present dynamic, which no longer
is based on patriarchal or other hierarchic structures
of dominance. Instead, it causes a flowing, hybrid
identity. On the other hand, this fundamental
corrosion of all important social connections lets the
genie out of the bottle: it sets free the potentially
centrifugal forces that the capitalist system is no
longer able fully to control. It is exactly because
its global triumph that the capitalist system is more
vulnerable than ever. The old formula of Marx is
still valid: capitalism digs its own grave. Hardt and
Negri describe this process as the transition from the
nation-state to global Empire, a transnational entity
comparable to ancient Rome, in which hybrid masses of
scattered identities developed. Hardt and Negri thus
deserve much praise for enlightening us about the
contradictory nature of today's "turbocapitalism" and
attempting to identify to identify the revolutionary
potential of its dynamic. This heroic attempt sets
itself against the standard view of those on the Left
who are struggling to limit the destructive powers of
globalization and to rescue (what there is left to
rescue) the welfare state. This standard leftist view
is imbued with a profoundly conservative mistrust of
the dynamics of globalization and digitalization,
which is quite contrary o the Marxist confidence in
the powers of progress.
 
Nevertheless, one immediately gets a sense of the
boundaries to Hardt and Negri's analysis. In their
social-economic analysis, the lack of concrete insight
is concealed in the Deleuzian jargon of multitude,
deterritorialization, and so forth. No wonder that
the three "practical proposals with which the book
ends appear anticlimactic. The authors propose to
focus our political struggle on three global rights:
the rights to global citizenship, a minimal income,
and the reappropriation of the new means of production
(i.e. access to and control over education,
information and communication). It is a paradox that
Hardt and Negri, the poets of mobility, variety,
hybridization, and so on, call for three demands
formulated in the terminology of universal human
rights. The problem with these demands is that they
fluctuate between formal emptiness and impossible
radicalization. Let us take the right to global
citizenship: theoretically, this right of course
should be approved. However, if this demand is meant
to be taken more seriously than a celebratory formal
declaration in typical United Nations Style, then it
would mean the abolition of state borders; under
present conditions, such a step would trigger an
invasion of cheap labor from India, China and Africa
into the United States and Western Europe, which would
result in a populist revolt against immigrants-a
result of such violent proportions that figures like
Haider would seem models of multicultural tolerance. 
The same is valid with regard to the other two
demands: for instance, the universal (worldwide)
right to minimal income-of course, why not? But how
should one create the necessary social-economic and
ideological conditions for such a shattering
transformation?
 
This critique is not only aimed at the secondary
empirical details. The main problem with Empire is
that the book falls short in its fundamental analysis
of how (if at all) the present global, social-economic
process will create the space needed for such radical
measures: they fail to repeat, in today's conditions,
Marx's line of argumentation that the prospect of the
proletarian revolution emerges out of the inherent
antagonisms of the capitalist mode of production. In
this respect, Empire remains a pre-Marxist book. 
However, perhaps the solution is that it is not enough
to return to Marx, to repeats Marx's analysis, but we
must needs return to Lenin.
 
The first public reaction to such a motto is, of
course, an outburst of sarcastic laughter. Marx: OK,
even on Wall Street they love him today-Marx the poet
of commodities, who provided perfect descriptions of
capitalist dynamics; Marx of the cultural studies who
portrayed the alienation and reification of our daily
lives. But Lenin: no, you can't be serious! The
working-class movement, revolutionary party, and
similar zombie concepts? Doesn't Lenin stand
precisely for the failure to put Marxism into
practice, for the catastrophe that left its mark on
the entire twentieth-century's world politics, for the
Real Socialist experiment that culminated in an
economically inefficient dictatorship? In
contemporary academic politics, the idea of dealing
with Lenin is accompanied by two qualifications: yes,
why not, we live in a liberal democracy, there is
freedom of thought...however, one should treat Lenin
in an "objective critical and scientific way", not in
an attitude of nostalgic idolatry, and, furthermore,
from the perspective firmly rooted in the democratic
political order, within the horizon of human
rights-therein resides the lessons painfully learned
through the experience of twentieth-century
totalitarianisms.
 
What are we to say to this? Again, the problem
resides in the implicit qualifications which can be
easily discerned by "concrete analysis of the concrete
situation", as Lenin himself would have put it. 
"Fidelity to the democratic consensus" means
acceptance of the present liberal-parliamentary
consensus" means acceptance of the present
liberal-parliamentary consensus, which precludes any
serious questioning of how this liberal-democratic
order is complicitous in the phenomena it officially
condemns and, of course, any serious attempt to
imagine a society whose sociopolitical order would be
different. In short, it means: say and write whatever
you want-on condition that what you do does not
effectively question or disturb the predominant
political consensus. So everything is allowed,
solicited even, as a critical topic: the prospects
of a global ecological catastrophe, violations of
human rights, sexism, homophobia, antifeminism, the
growing violence not only in far-away countries but
also in our megalopolises, the gap between the First
and Third Worlds, between rich and poor, the
shattering impact of the digitalization of our daily
lives...there is nothing easier today than to get
international, state, or corporate funds for
multidisciplinary research into how to fight the new
forms of ethnic, religious or sexist violence. The
problem is that all this occurs against the background
of a fundamental Denkverbot, a prohibition on
thinking. Today's liberal-democratic hegemony is
sustained by a kind of unwritten Denkverbot similar to
the infamous Berufsverbot in Germany in the late
1960s: the moment one shows any minimal sign of
engaging in political projects that aim seriously to
challenge the existing order, the answer is
immediately: "Benevolent as it is, this will
necessarily end in a new Gulag!"
 
And it is exactly this same thing that the demand for
"scientific objectivity" means: the moment one
seriously questions the existing liberal consensus,
one is accused of abandoning scientific objectivity
for outdated ideological positions. As for us here,
it goes without saying, none of us is involved in any
unconstitutional activities. You probably all know De
Quincey's quip about the "simple art of murder": how
many people began with a simple murder which at that
point, appeared to them nothing special, and ended up
behaving badly at table! Along the same lines, we
would certainly not like to follow in the steps of
those who began with a couple of innocent beatings of
policemen and Molotov cocktails which, at that point,
appeared to them nothing special, and ended up as a
German foreign minister. However, there is a point on
which we cannot concede: today, actual freedom of
thought means the freedom to question the predominant,
liberal-democratic, "postideological" consensus-or it
means nothing.
 
Although most of us probably do not agree with Jurgen
Habermas, we do live in an era that could be
designated by his term neue Undurchsichtlichkeit, the
new opacity. More than ever, our daily experience is
mystifying. Modernization generates new
obscurantisms; the reduction of freedom is presented
to us as the arrival of new freedoms. In these
circumstances one should be especially careful not to
confuse the ruling ideology with ideology that seems
to dominate. More than ever, one should bear in mind
Walter Benjamin's reminder that it is not enough to
ask how a certain theory (or art) declares itself to
stay with regard to social struggles; one should also
ask how it effectively functions in these struggles. 
In sex, the effectively hegemonic attitude is not
patriarchal repression but free promiscuity; in art,
provocations in the style of the notorious "Sensation"
exhibitions are the norm, the example of the art fully
integrated into the establishment.
 
One is therefore tempted to turn round Marx's eleventh
thesis. The first task today is precisely not to
succumb to the temptation to act, to directly
intervene and change things (which then inevitably
ends in a cul-de-sac of debilitating impossibility: 
"what can one do against global capital?"). Rather,
the task is to question the hegemonic ideological
coordinates, or, as Brecht put it in his Me Ti,
"Thought is something which precedes action and
follows experience." If, today, one follows a direct
call to act, this act will not be performed in an
empty space; it will be an act within the hegemonic
ideological coordinates. Those who "really want to
do something to help people" get involved in
(undoubtedly honorable) exploits like Medecins Sans
Frontieres, Greenpeace, and feminist and antiracist
campaigns, which are all not only tolerated but even
supported by the media; even if they seemingly enter
economic territory (say, by denouncing and boycotting
companies that do not respect ecological conditions or
that use child labor). They are tolerated and
supported so long as they do not get close to a
certain limit. Let us take two predominant topics of
today's radical American academia: postcolonial and
queer (gay) studies. The problem of postcolonialism
is undoubtedly crucial; however, "postcolonial
studies" tend to translate it into the
multiculturalist problematic of the colonized
minorities' "right to narrate" their victimizing
experience of the power mechanisms that repress
"otherness" so that, at the end of the day, we learn
the root of postcolonial exploitation is our
intolerance toward the Other, and, furthermore, that
this intolerance toward the "Stranger in Ourselves",
in our inability to confront what we repressed in and
of ourselves. The politico-economic struggle is thus
imperceptibly transformed into a pseudo-psychoanalytic
drama of the subject unable to confront its inner
traumas. The true corruption of American academia is
not primarily financial-it is not only that they are
able to buy many European critical intellectuals
(myself included, up to a point)-but conceptual: 
notions of "European" critical theory are
imperceptibly translated into the benign universe of
cultural studies chic. With regard to this radical
chic, the first gesture toward Third Way ideologists
and practitioners should be that of praise: they at
least play their game in a straight way, and are
honest in their acceptance of the global capitalist
coordinates, in contrast with pseudo-radical academic
leftists who adopt toward the Third Way an attitude of
utter disdain while their own radicality ultimately
amounts to an empty gesture that obliges no one to
anything determinate.
 
Lenin is for us not the nostalgic name for old,
dogmatic certainty-quite the contrary. To put it in
Kierkegaard's terms, the Lenin we want to retrieve is
the Lenin-in-becoming, the Lenin whose fundamental
experience was that of being thrown into a
catastrophic new constellation in which old
coordinates proved useless, and who was thus compelled
to reinvent Marxism-recall his acerbic remark apropos
of some new problem: "About this, Marx and Engels
said not a word." The idea is not to return to Lenin
but to repeat him in the Kierkegaardian sense: to
retrieve the same impulse in today's constellation. 
The return to Lenin aims neither at nostalgically
reenacting the "good old revolutionary times" nor at
the opportunistic-pragmatic adjustment of the old
program to "new conditions", but at repeating, in the
present, the Leninist gesture of reinventing the
revolutionary project in the conditions of imperialism
and colonialism-more precisely, after the
politico-ideological collapse of the long era of
progressism in the catastrophe of 1914. Eric Hobsbawn
defined the concept of the twentieth century as the
time between 1914, the end of the long, peaceful
expansion of capitalism, and 1990, the emergence of
the new form of global capitalism after the collapse
of really existing socialism. What Lenin did for
1914, we should do for1990. "Lenin" stands for the
compelling freedom to suspend the stale, existing
(post)ideological coordinates, the debilitating
Denkverbot in which we live; it simply means that we
are allowed to think again.
 
Lenin's stance against economism as well as against
pure politics is crucial today, apropos of the split
attitude toward economy in (what remains of) radical
circles: on the one hand, there are pure
"politicians" who abandon economy as the site of
struggle and intervention; on the other hand, there
are the economists, fascinated by the functioning of
today's global economy, who preclude any possibility
of a political intervention proper. Today, more than
ever, we should here return to Lenin: yes, economy is
the key domain, the battle will be decided there, one
has to break the spell of global capitalism-but the
intervention should be properly political, not
economic.
 
The battle to be fought is thus twofold. 
First-yes-anticapitalism. However, anticapitalism
without problematizing capitalism's political form
(liberal parliamentary democracy) is not sufficient,
no matter how radical it is. Perhaps the lure today
is the belief that one can undermine capitalism
without effectively problematizing the liberal
democratic legacy which (as some Leftists claim),
although engendered by capitalism, acquired autonomy
and can serve to criticize capitalism. This lure is
strictly correlative to its apparent opposite, to the
pseudo-Deleuzian, love-hate, fascinating/fascinated
poetic depiction of capital as a rhizomatic
monster/vampire that deterritorializes and swallows
all-indomitable, dynamic, ever rising from the dead,
each crisis making it stronger, Dionysus-Phoenix
reborn. It is in this poetic (anti)-capitalist
reference to Marx that Marx is really dead: 
appropriated when deprived of his political sting.
 
So where in all this is Lenin? According to the
predominant doxa, in the years after the October
Revolution, Lenin's declining faith in the creative
capacities of the masses led him to emphasize the role
of science and scientists, to rely on the authority of
the expert: he hailed "the beginning of that very
happy time when politics will recede into the
background...and engineers and agronomists will do
most of the talking." Technocratic postpolitics? 
Lenin's ideas about how the road to socialism runs
through the terrain of monopoly capitalism may appear
dangerously naïve today.
 
<<Capitalism has created an accounting apparatus in
the shape of the banks, syndicates, postal service,
consumers' societies, and office employee unions. 
Without big banks socialism would be impossible...our
task is here merely to lop off what capitalistically
mutilates this excellent apparatus, to make it even
bigger, even more democratic, even more
comprehensive...This will be country-wide
book-keeping, country-wide accounting of the
production and distribution of goods, this will be, so
to speak, something in the nature of the skeleton of
socialist society. (Lenin 1960-70, 26: 106)
 
 
Is this not the most radical expression of Marx's
notion of the general intellect regulating all social
life in a transparent way, of the postpolitical world
in which "administration of people" is supplanted by
the "administration of things"? It is, of course,
easy to play against this quote the tune of the
"critique of instrumental reason" and "administered
world" (verwaltete Welt): "totalitarian" potentials
are inscribed in this very formula of total social
control. It is easy to remark sarcastically how, in
the Stalinist epoch, the apparatus of social
administration effectively becomes "even bigger." 
Furthermore, is this postpolitical vision not the very
opposite of the Maoist notion of the eternity of class
struggle ("everything is political")?
 
Are, however, things really so unambiguous? What if
one replaces the (obviously dated) example of the
central bank with the World Wide Web, today's perfect
candidate for the General Intellect? Dorothy Sayers
claimed that Aristotle's Poetics effectively is the
theory of detective novels avant la lettre: since
poor Aristotle didn't yet know of the detective novel,
he had to refer to the only examples at his
disposal-the tragedies. Along the same lines, Lenin
was effectively developing the theory of the role of
the World Wide Web but, since the Web was unknown to
him, he had to refer to the unfortunate central banks.
 Consequently, can one also say that "without the
World Wide Web socialism would be impossible...our
task is here merely to lop off what capitalistically
mutilates this excellent apparatus, to make it even
bigger, even more democratic, even more comprehensive?
 In these conditions one is tempted to resuscitate the
old, opprobrious, and half-forgotten Marxian
dialectics of the productive forces and the relations
of productions. It is already a commonplace to claim
that, ironically, it was this very dialectics that
buried really existing socialism: Socialism was not
able to sustain the passage from industrial to
postindustrial economy. However, does capitalism
really provide the "natural" frame of the relations of
production for the digital universe? Is there not in
the World Wide Web and explosive potential also for
capitalism itself? Is not the lesson of the Microsoft
monopoly precisely the Leninist one: instead of
fighting its monopoly through the state apparatus
(recall the court-ordered split of the Microsoft
Corporation), would it not be more "logical" to
socialize it, rendering it freely accessible?
 
The key antagonism of the so-called new (digital)
industries is thus how to maintain the form of
(private) property, within which only the logic of
profit can be maintained (see also the Napster
problem-the free circulation of music). And do the
legal complications in bioenergetics not point in the
same direction? The key element of the new
international trade agreements is the "protection of
intellectual property": whenever, in a merger, a big
First World company takes over a Third World company,
the first thing they do is close down the research
department. (In Slovenia-Henkel-Zlatorog, our company
had to sign a formal agreement not to do any
research!) Paradoxes emerge here that bring the
notion of private property to extraordinary
dialectical paradoxes: in India, local communities
discover that medical practices and materials they
have used for centuries are now owned by American
companies, so they should be bought from them; with
the biogenetic companies patentizing genes, we are all
discovering that parts of ourselves-our genetic
components-are already copyrighted, owned by others.
 
Today we see the signs of general unease, which is
already exploding: I am, of course, referring to the
events usually listed under the name of "Seattle." 
The long honeymoon of triumphant global capitalism is
over, the long-overdue "seven-year itch" is here. 
Witness the panicky reactions of the big media which,
from Time to the Cable News Network, all of a sudden
started to warn about Marxists manipulating the crowd
of "honest" protesters. The problem is now the
strictly Leninist one of how to actualize the media's
accusations: how to invent the organizational
structure that will confer on this unrest the form of
the universal political demand. Otherwise, the
momentum will be lost and what will remain will be the
marginal disturbance, perhaps organized as a new
Greenpeace, with certain efficiency, but also strictly
limited goals, marketing strategy, and so on. In
other words, the key "Leninist" lesson today is: 
politics without the organizational form of the party
is politics without politics, so the answer to those
who want just the (quite adequately named) "new social
movements" is the same as the answer of the Jacobins
to the Girondin compromisers: "You want revolution
without the revolution!" Today's blockade is that
there are two ways open for the sociopolitical
engagement: either play the game of the system-"engage
in the long march throught the institutions"-or get
involved in new social movements, from feminism
through ecology to antiracism. And again, the limit
of these movements is that they are not political in
the sense of the universal singular: they are
"one-issue movements" lacking the dimension of
universality-that is, they do not relate to the social
totality.
 
Here, Lenin's reproach to liberals is crucial: they
only exploit the working classes discontent to
strengthen their own positions vis-à-vis the
conservatives, instead of identifying with it to the
end. Is this not also the case with today's left
liberals? They like to evoke racism, ecology,
workers' grievances, and so forth to score points over
conservatives without endangering the system. Recall
how, at Seattle, Bill Clinton himself deftly referred
to the protesters on the streets outside, reminding
the gathered leaders inside the guarded palaces that
they should listen to the message of the demonstrators
( the message which, of course, Clinton interpreted,
depriving it of its subversive sting attributed to the
dangerous extremists introducing chaos and violence
into the majority of peaceful protesters). It's the
same with all new social movements, up to the
Zapatistas in Chiapas: systemic politics is always
ready to "listen to their demands," depriving them of
their proper political sting. The system is by
definition ecumenical, open, tolerant, ready to
"listen" to all. Even if one insists on one's
demands, they are deprived of their universal
political sting by the very form of negotiation.
 
To repeat Lenin is thus to accept that "Lenin is
dead"-that his particular solution failed, even failed
monstrously, but that there was a utopian spark in it
worth saving. To repeat Lenin means that one has to
distinguish between what Lenin effectively did and the
field of possibilities that he opened up, the tension
in Lenin between what he effectively did and another
dimension, what was "in Lenin more than Lenin
himself." To repeat Lenin is to repeat not what Lenin
did but what he failed to do, his missed
opportunities.
 
 
 References
 
Hardt, M., and A. Negri. 2000. Empire. Cambridge,
Mass.: Harvard University Press
Lenin, V.I. 1960-70. Collected Works. 45 vols. 
Moscow: Foreign Languages Publishing House.