1. Linebaugh, Peter, The Magna Carta Manifesto: Liberties and Commons for All (Berkeley, 2008)Google Scholar, 20. Hereinafter cited in text as MC.

2. Hardt, Michael and Negri, Antonio, Commonwealth (Cambridge, MA, 2009)Google Scholar, x. Hereinafter cited in text as CW.

3. For a convenient history of Negri's role, see Moulier, Yann, “Introduction” in Negri, Antonio, The Politics of Subversion: A Manifesto for the Twenty-First Century (Cambridge, England, and Malden, MA, 2005 [1989])Google Scholar. For Negri's more recent views, see Negri, Antonio, with Scelsi, Raf Valvola, Goodbye Mr. Socialism (New York, 2006)Google Scholar.

4. Hardt, Michael, Gilles Deleuze: An Apprenticeship in Philosophy (Minneapolis, 1993)Google Scholar; Jefferson, Thomas, The Declaration of Independence, Hardt, Michael, ed. (London, 2007)Google Scholar.

5. Linebaugh, Peter, The London Hanged: Crime and Civil Society in the Eighteenth Century (London, 1991)Google Scholar; Linebaugh, Peter and Rediker, Marcus, The Many-Headed Hydra: Sailors, Slaves, Commoners and the Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic (Boston, 2001)Google Scholar. Linebaugh's pamphlet on the red and the green, “The True, Incomplete, Authentic, and Wonderful History of May Day” (1986; 1999), is online at http://www.midnightnotes.org/mayday, accessed February 13, 2010.

6. Hardt, Michael and Negri, Antonio, Empire (Cambridge, MA, 2000)Google Scholar and Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire (New York, 2004).

7. Rustin, Michael, “Empire: A Postmodern Theory of Empire,” in Balakrishnan, Gopal, ed., Debating Empire (London, 2003)Google Scholar, 1. Hardt and Negri's corpus does read like an extended gloss on Michel Foucault's famous preface to Deleuze and Guattari's Anti-Oedipus, in which he urges readers to “free political action from all unitary and totalizing paranoia” and to “withdraw allegiance from old categories of the Negative,” including law and limit, among other things, so as to counter “all varieties of fascism, from the enormous ones that surround and crush us to the petty ones that constitute the tyrannical bitterness of our everyday lives.” See Deleuze, Gilles and Guattari, Felix, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Hurley, Robert and others (Minneapolis, 1983), xiii–xivGoogle Scholar. Nancy, Jean-Luc calls for a “Spinozian” rewriting of Heidegger in The Birth to Presence, trans. Holmes, Brian and others (Stanford, 1994), 407, n56Google Scholar.

8. One nationally prominent and very successful organizer told me at the time that the book had been urged upon him. He said he didn't finish it but got the impression that the authors had no sympathy for the powerful, a sentiment he shared!

9. Hardt, Michael and Negri, Antonio, Labor of Dionysus: A Critique of the State-Form (Minneapolis, 1994)Google Scholar.

10. Giovanni Arrighi, “Lineages of Empire,” in Balakrishnan, Debating Empire, 29, 37. This volume includes other critical reviews. See also Dean, Jodi and Passavaunt, Paul, eds., The Empire's New Clothes: Reading Hardt and Negri (New York, 2003)Google Scholar.

11. Negri, Goodbye Mr. Socialism, 18.

12. The canonical references to Foucault are Foucault, Michael, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (New York, 1979)Google Scholar and The History of Sexuality, Volume I: An Introduction (New York, 1980).

13. Hardt and Negri, Multitude, 129.

14. A reasonably large number of those at the bottom of the global labor market do work in the health, hospitality, and personal services industries. But they are not the majority, who must still do a great deal of hard labor in the “material” sector for meager returns, except where they are fortunate enough to be employed by prosperous and well-capitalized enterprises.

15. On proletarianization as a working-class demand, see Wallerstein, Immanuel, Historical Capitalism (London, 1983), 36–37Google Scholar. For more detail see Arrighi, Giovanni, The Political Economy of Rhodesia (Mouton: The Hague, 1967)Google Scholar and “Labor Supplies in Historical Perspective: A Study of the Proletarianization of the African Peasantry in Rhodesia,” Journal of Development Studies 6:3 (1970), 197–234, reprinted in Arrighi, and Saul, John, eds., Essays on the Political Economy of Africa (New York, 1973)Google Scholar.

16. On “the new enclosures,” see Harvey, David, “Accumulation by Dispossession,” The New Imperialism (Oxford, 2003), 137–82Google Scholar.

17. Hardt and Negri, Multitude, 192.

18. Ibid., 247–49. The twelve people indicated and tried for their parts in the rebellion were not executed. All were pardoned. Two young men were convicted of raiding and robbing the homes of government officials and militia officers in June 1787, several months after the rebellion had ended and Daniel Shays, among others, had long fled the state. But they weren't among the twelve to which Hardt and Negri (or their source) referred. Expecting the same exoneration as the other rebels had received, they died on the gallows. The punishment was disproportionate to the crime and, as an injustice, contemptible. Nevertheless, it was imposed because it could be seen, at least by some, rightly or wrongly, as separate from the protest. (At least it appears to have been so seen by the appeals tribunal. The victims, the presiding minister at the execution, and the author of at least one published account of the hangings, however, did not agree; for them, it was very much tied up with the rebellion. See the story bylined “Lenox, Dec. 8th, 1787” in The Hampshire Gazette, December 19, 1787.) Also, while the armed resistance was crushed, the larger movement of which these violent popular actions were a rump part was successful: The measures protested were repealed. I regret to say that Hardt and Negri base their account on information drawn from Zinn, Howard, A People's History of the United States (New York, 1980; 1999), 91–95Google Scholar, which is similarly and generally not to be relied upon as accurate. Hardt and Negri, however, don't even get Zinn right. He refers to twelve rebels being tried and sentenced to death and then observes that “[s]everal hangings followed; some of the condemned were pardoned”—still off but closer to the mark. For more reliable discussions, see Szatmary, David P., Shays' Rebellion: The Makings of an Agrarian Insurrection (Amherst, MA, 1980)Google Scholar and Richards, Leonard L., Shays's Rebellion: The American Revolution's Final Battle (Philadelphia, PA, 2002)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Sean Wilentz and I have also offered a different interpretation of the movement as a whole in “The Invention of American Politics,” in The Key of Liberty: The Life and Democratic Writings of William Manning, 1747–1814, Michael Merrill and Sean Wilentz, eds. (Cambridge, MA, 1993), 21–28.

19. Taylorism was a response to the ability of craft workers to exercise more control over production than managers desired. But the new-style “Taylorist” management successfully challenged this control at the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth century. The council movement was a response to this success. See Montgomery, David, Workers Control in America: Studies in the History of Work, Technology, and Labor Struggles (Cambridge, England, 1979)Google Scholar and The Fall of the House of Labor: The Workplace, the State, and American Labor Activism, 1865–1925 (Cambridge, England, 1987), for American perspectives. See also Chandler, Alfred, The Visible Hand: The Managerial Revolution in American Business (Cambridge, MA, 1977)Google Scholar for the perspective of management; and Veblen, Thorstein, The Engineers and the Price System (New York, 1921)Google Scholar for an indispensible contemporary view.

20. Of course, it is also hard to pin any of this down precisely, since Hardt and Negri eschew the conventional standards of evidence and proof that even Marxist economic historians take for granted. Theirs is not a quantitative study, even when it could be.

21. Wood, Gordon, The Creation of the American Republic, 1776–1787 (Chapel Hill, NC, 1969)Google Scholar is indispensable on these points.

22. Even their literary critical glossing must be treated cautiously. Thomas Gradgrind, one of the principal characters of Charles Dickens's novel Hard Times, was not “the soulless factory owner” (CW, 312) but a merchant retired from the “wholesale hardware trade” (Hard Times, chapter three, paragraph five), the softening of whose soul by his daughter's concern for others is one of main subplots of the story.

23. Hardt and Negri, Multitude, 68.

24. See note 6 supra.

25. Machiavelli, Niccolò, The Discourses, Walker, Leslie with Richardson, Brian, trans., (Harmondsworth, England, 1998 [1519])Google Scholar, Section I.5, 116.

26. There is actually a large literature on both the possibility and the limits of such cooperation. For recent overviews, see Ridley, Matt, The Origins of Virtue (New York, 1998)Google Scholar and Buchanan, Mark, The Social Atom: Why the Rich Get Richer, Cheaters Get Caught, and Your Neighbor Usually Looks Like You (New York, 2007)Google Scholar. For the more advanced readers, there is Bowles, Samuel, Micro-Economics: Behavior, Institutions, and Evolution (New York and Princeton, NJ, 2004)Google Scholar. There is also a large and persuasive critical literature on the reasons why wholly ungoverned networks, whether markets or cooperatives, are never perfect. For one intriguing introduction to this literature, see Stiglitz, Joseph E., Whither Socialism (Cambridge, MA, 1994)Google Scholar, which makes the case for seeing the perfect competition of market fundamentalists and the perfect cooperation of anarcho-communists or the perfectly transparent planning of the state socialists as two sides of the same coin.

27. For an indispensable summary of this literature, see Shapiro, Ian, The State of Democratic Theory (Princeton, NJ, 2003)Google Scholar.

28. To be fair, I should note that Negri devoted considerable effort to the critical consideration of these issues early in his career, as the essays collected in Labor of Dionysus testify. But the restatement of his conclusions in the most recent work still does not convince.

29. The line of influence went both ways, as is evident from the following appeal from John Sinclair, president of the English Board of Agriculture, who “spearheaded the passage of Parliamentary enclosure bills” at the end of the eighteenth century (MC, 131). “Let us not be satisfied,” he urged, “with the liberation of Egypt or the subjugation of Malta, but let us subdue Finchley Commons; let us conquer Hounslow Heath, let us compel Epping Forest to submit to the yoke of improvement” (MC, 142–43).

30. Unfortunately, this is not the only such sacrifice in Manifesto. See also, for example, Linebaugh's reductive interpretation of passages from Shakespeare's The Life and Death of King John (1596) (MC, 61–63).

31. Linebaugh noted that the headmaster of Kipling's English boarding school, which catered to the children of lesser English colonial officials in the Indian Civil Service, was “sympathetic to the socialist outlook of William Morris” (160). But he seems to have missed the fact that Morris was a close friend of Rudyard Kipling's uncle, a well-known artist, at whose home the young Rudyard spent many a happy vacation period. Morris was a frequent visitor and often joined the games of the children, who knew him as “Uncle Topsy.” Kipling, Rudyard, Something of Myself: and Other Autobiographical Writings (Cambridge, England, 1990)Google Scholar, 8. Linebaugh also doesn't mention that we can hear in “Mowglai” an echo of mughlai, which is a Bengali, Hindi, and Urdu word for “Mughal” or “Mongol,” a reference to the sixteenth-century Muslim invaders of the Indian subcontinent from Central Asia.

32. The three decisions were the 1842 ruling in Martin v. Lessee of Waddell, concerning common rights to oyster bed fisheries in New Jersey's Raritan Bay (sixteen citations: The court upheld the common rights); the 1884 decision in Hurtado v. California, concerning whether the Fourteenth Amendment to the US Constitution required that states comply with the Fifth Amendment prohibition against indictments for capital crimes by some procedure other than a grand jury (thirty-three citations: The majority ruled that the state did not have to so comply); and a 1989 case, Browning-Ferris Indus. v. Kelco Disposal, concerning punitive damages awarded Kelco in a suit against Browning-Ferris (forty-four citations: The majority found the Eighth Amendment prohibition against cruel and unusual punishment did not apply).

33. For example, see Leviticus 19:9–10 and Deuteronomy 23:24–25, 24:19–22 for references to some of the received common rights in ancient Israel.

34. Sahlins, Marshall, Stone Age Economics (New York, 1972)Google Scholar, 1. We see the fruits of their choice all around us, in the persistent settlements of indigenous peoples that continue to exist, however precariously, about the world. For a comprehensive treatment, see Coates, Ken S., A Global History of Indigenous Peoples: Struggle and Survival (New York, 2004)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. The inhabitants of such societies number approximately 350 million people, compared to the human settlements of two million to twenty million estimated to have existed before the institution of agriculture. For the contemporary estimates, see ibid., 12; and “Indigenous Peoples—Who Are They?” posted on the website of the International Work Group for Indigenous Affairs (IWGIA), under “Indigenous Issues”/ “Identification of Indigenous Peoples” at http://iwgia.org/sw641.asp, accessed February 19, 2010. For a range of sources on the pre-agriculture size of the human population, see Cohen, Joel E., How Many People Can the Earth Support? (New York, 1995)Google Scholar, 77.

35. See, for example, Davis, Wade, Light at the Edge of the World: A Journey through the Realm of Vanishing Cultures (Vancouver, 2007)Google Scholar; idem., The Wayfinders: Why Ancient Wisdom Matters in the Modern World (Toronto, 2009); and, Ronald Wright, A Short History of Progress (Cambridge, MA, 2005).

36. Locke, John, “The Second Treatise of Government: An Essay Concerning the True Original, Extent, and End of Civil Government,” in Two Treatises of Government, Laslett, Peter, ed. Revised Edition (New York, 1965)Google Scholar, Chapter V: On Property, 327–44, esp. Sections 31–33, pp. 332–33.