In 2000, Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri’s Empire sold out printing after printing on the promise that national imperialism had been replaced by a single borderless sovereign — a hybrid of states, multinationals, NGOs, and media with no “outside” left to break away from. David Broder’s essay in Jacobin’s Fall 2026 issue (“The New Empire”) argues the book was an artifact of the Left’s defeats after 1989, not a description of the century that followed.

What Empire claimed:

  • Sovereignty had passed to a deterritorial “Empire”; the G8 and WTO coordinated a globalized economy while power itself became pervasive and placeless.
  • Marxist-Leninist anti-imperialism (Lenin, Luxemburg) and national liberation were exhausted — nation-building merely reproduced “all the oppressive functions of modern sovereignty.”
  • Resistance would rise spontaneously from life and labor itself: “irrepressible lightness and joy,” not parties, unions, or states.

What Broder says it missed:

  • Samir Amin’s objection: in soft-pedaling the US state’s role, the book ignored what Washington actually did to corner global resources.
  • Globalization pivoted on the US state and on transnationally oriented fractions of US capital — not on a unitary imperial order.
  • Benjamin Bürbaumer’s Chine/États-Unis shows both Washington and Beijing used globalization as a crisis response and as a way to discipline workers: Chinese integration supplied cheap labor that also undercut American labor’s bargaining power.
  • Since 2008 that subordinate arrangement has fractured into open rivalry — patents, the dollar, trade routes, military buildup. Trump and Rubio now openly discuss using the US military to control Venezuelan and Iranian resources.
  • Empire never engaged the subaltern’s actual demands, treated the industrial working class as a dying actor, and cast rights won inside the state as backward-looking.

Set beside Hobsbawm’s The Age of Extremes, the contrast is stark. Hobsbawm saw the “short twentieth century” end by killing off the antagonist that had forced liberal capitalism to reform — and warned that hollowing out democracy and dismantling national social protections still threatened it. Empire had nothing to say about that institutional legacy.

The useful takeaway is that states were never superseded. Labor law, environmental standards, and democratic control over capital remain conquests of the workers’ movement, and still the terrain where fights are won or lost — “unreplaced by genuinely global movements.” A theory that dissolved the American state into everything couldn’t see the state doing the globalizing.