This article is a critique of what Ruth Levitas calls the ‘redistributionist discourse’ on social exclusion. While outlining a number of factors that have caused the living standards and welfare of the poorest members of society to deteriorate in recent years, I argue that there are serious limitations in the attempt to define social deprivation as shameinducing exclusion from social norms. I argue that, if breaking the cultural foundations of capitalism is a goal, then this means breaking with the dominant values of ever-rising consumer expectations. It means breaking with the logic of exchange-values, which dictates that the only needs worth expressing are those that correspond to commodity equivalents. As I argue in my conclusion, it also means breaking the link between the right to an income and the obligation to earn or use that income in ways consistent with the economic and cultural hegemony of capitalism.

This article examines Hardt and Negri's Empire in the context of the radical tradition of Italian Marxism from which it developed. It discusses the influence of previously untranslated writings by Marx on the Italian New Left, and the way this prompted a new political analysis which, in studying the interpenetration of capital and labour, treated capital as the dependent variable in the class struggle. The essay considers how faithfully this analysis is sustained in Negri's later work, and suggests that the inconsistencies apparent in Empire derive in part from the continuing influence of Marx's prescient but ambiguous text: the so-called ‘Fragment on machines’.

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