Centering Gramsci's pivotal pyramid inversion

 And setting the Marxist shitpile rightside up

Adopting an explicit flat-world perspective not entirely unlike that which was later promoted by New York Times columnist Thomas L. Friedman in his 2005 work, The World Is Flat, Hardt and Negri argued that the hierarchical imperialism of old had now been displaced by the "smooth space of the capitalist world market." It was "no longer possible," they pronounced, "to demarcate large geographical zones as center and periphery, North and South." In fact, "imperialism," they went so far as to assert, "actually creates a straitjacket for capital" by interfering with capitalism's flat-world propensities. Hardt and Negri were to give their notion of a rules-based, global-constitutional order, modeled on the United States, which was at the same time decentered and deterritorialized, the name "Empire," to distinguish it from imperialism.