Ultraleft reformists
The curious thing about communism is how blandly realistic it is. It’s a straightforward reformist demand: “yes, go ahead and reform capitalism, but the only conceivable change at this point is towards communism.” Consider the demands for a social wage: it’s the only form of payment that makes any kind of sense given the contemporary structure of capitalism. Capitalism needs some form of wage to carry on exploiting labor; but the more socially-dispersed production is, the more socialized the wage has to be. And yet, if you look at neoliberalism, becase of its need for control, it can’t possibly allow a living social wage (hence welfare reform doesn’t quite eliminate support, but tries to substitute as much of the social wage as possible with more direct forms of control).
It’s odd that people like Negri know this, but always present the reformist side of the social wage, forgetting to mention that this reform will destroy capitalism (and we will have to do that destroying). Negri could have written Empire in the same style he wrote Domination and Sabotage (“every time I pull on the ski-mask, I feel envelopped in the intergalactic Zapatista community,” or whatever it is); aside from not wanting to go back to prison, one wonders why he didn’t.