Michael Hardt

Michael Hardt appears in the book chiefly through his political arguments with Antonio Negri, not through biographical or personal detail. Their significance here lies in a tension within contemporary anticapitalist thought: capitalism may itself generate communist possibilities, yet treating that process as the path forward can sideline the distinct political intervention the author considers necessary.

Position in the Debate

Hardt is discussed together with Antonio Negri as a thinker whose recent statements unexpectedly support Alain Badiou’s account of capitalism’s revolutionary force. The book notes a paradox: their focus on anticapitalism has led them to acknowledge that capitalism may already be producing communist potentials. In this account, capitalism is not only an object to oppose; its own movement can produce capacities that might be turned toward a different social order.

The book characterizes this possibility as the becoming-communist of capitalism, using a phrase associated with Gilles Deleuze. It presents the idea as an implication of Hardt and Negri’s position, rather than as a claim that political struggle has become unnecessary. The paradox is that emphasizing capitalism’s generative potential may make opposition appear less urgent precisely when the system’s power still demands political confrontation.

The Political and the Economic

The discussion places Hardt’s and Negri’s position within a broader argument that economic and political struggle cannot be collapsed into one another. Class struggle takes place within economic relations, while economic analysis also helps explain political conflict; neither level offers a neutral standpoint from which the other can simply be translated or replaced. Their entanglement is real, but it does not make them identical.

This distinction matters because the book sees two recurring errors on the Left. One treats politics as sufficient and abandons the economy as a site of intervention. The other concentrates on how the global economy functions and thereby rules out specifically political action. The author insists that the economy is a decisive arena, but that intervention there must still be political. Against this standard, Hardt and Negri’s emphasis on capitalism’s productive communist potentials risks making economic development itself carry too much of the emancipatory burden.

The State and the Limits of the Strategy

The book contrasts the twentieth-century Left’s dream of subordinating the economy to politics through state control of production with what it sees as the opposite temptation in Hardt and Negri’s more recent work: shifting the emphasis toward economic struggle while relying on the state. The contrast is not a claim that the two positions are equivalent. It identifies a strategic difficulty: neither placing the economy under state direction nor expecting economic processes to generate emancipation resolves the problem of political action.

Hardt’s role in the argument is therefore diagnostic rather than biographical. His association with Negri’s account of capitalism’s communist potentials helps expose the unresolved relation between economic transformation and political intervention. The book treats that relation as a persistent divide within anticapitalist strategy, not as a choice that can be settled by declaring either politics or economics the sole ground of change.