Slowly, a Counter-Empire is emerging of disillusioned and resisting people - from South American revolutionaries to Islamic fundamentalists. Soon they will rise up and institute "global citizenship". Negri begins to laud, as he often does, "the communist and liberatory combatants of 20th-century revolutions", as if there was no contradiction between communism and liberation.

I try to think of a polite way to remind him of the fact that every communist revolution of the 20th century lead to tyranny and mass murder. And a nice way to say that communism was a betrayal of the democratic values of the left. I fail. I blurt it out. "These communist regimes are waiting for a historical revision. They may not be seen so negatively in the next century," he says, as though this was perfectly obvious.

Negri recently described the Soviet Union as "a society criss-crossed with extremely strong instances of creativity and freedom", which is more than he has ever said for any democracy. He even says that the Soviet Union fell because it was too successful. I point this out, and he replies: "Now you are talking about memory. Who controls memory? Faced with the weight of memory, one must be unreasonable! Reason amounts to eternal Cartesianism. The most beautiful thing is to think 'against', to think 'new'. Memory prevents revolt, rejection, invention, revolution."