01Empire: sovereignty without a center
The old left imagined capitalism as centered in nation-states — the US, Britain, the European imperial powers — and liberation as national self-determination. Hardt and Negri argued this model no longer described the actual structure of global power. Sovereignty had become decentered: no single nation-state controls global capitalism, but that doesn't mean it's uncontrolled. It's controlled through networks — financial institutions, international law, military alliances, corporate supply chains — that operate above and below the nation-state level simultaneously.
They called this new form Empire (capital E): not the empire of a particular nation, but a diffuse system of power with no outside. Previous empires always had an outside — territories not yet conquered, peoples not yet incorporated. Empire has no outside, because its logic is to incorporate everything.
02Immaterial labor
As manufacturing moved to lower-wage regions of the global economy, the dominant form of labor in the global north shifted toward what Hardt and Negri called immaterial labor: the production of knowledge, affect, communication, relationships, and code rather than physical goods.
This matters because immaterial labor is inherently cooperative and inherently common. You can't produce knowledge, affect, or code in isolation. The inputs are always already shared — language, culture, prior knowledge, relationships. And the outputs tend toward being public goods: code can be copied, knowledge can be shared, relationships create networks.
Capital must constantly enclose the commons that immaterial labor produces. Intellectual property, platform monopolies, non-competes, trade secrets — these are all mechanisms for enclosing what cooperative immaterial labor creates. The commons is always already there; enclosure is always the imposition.
03The multitude
The traditional Marxist subject of revolution was the proletariat — a unified class with common interests defined by their relationship to the means of production. Hardt and Negri thought this subject had dissolved: the global working class is too fragmented, too diverse, too distributed to constitute a unity in the old sense.
Their alternative: the multitude. Not a unity but a multiplicity — a network of different struggles, different locations, different forms of labor — that can act in concert without becoming identical. The multitude is held together not by shared class position but by shared opposition to Empire and shared investment in the commons.
04The commons as political horizon
By Commonwealth (2009), Hardt and Negri were explicit: the commons is not just a resource management problem but the horizon of political transformation. The goal is not to seize the state but to build autonomous institutions of common governance that render state power increasingly irrelevant.
Their work is useful here because it names the mechanism by which late capitalism depends on the commons it simultaneously destroys. Immaterial labor produces value through cooperation and shared knowledge — the commons — and that value is then appropriated through intellectual property and platform monopoly — enclosure. The commons is both the foundation of contemporary capitalism and the thing capitalism can least afford to acknowledge.
Commonwealth is a dense book. A plain-language guide to it walks through the common, biopolitical labor, altermodernity, and the book's argument for love as a political idea — in short, plain sentences.