This article takes the suggestions by Jameson and Žižek that Hardt and Negri's recent Empire is an important `new theoretical synthesis' and a challenge to a politically complacent Cultural Studies as its starting point to explore Negri's understanding of `production'. It opens out Negri's apparent synthesis to consider the formative elements of his work: operaismo's `social factory', Marx's `Fragment on Machines' and Deleuze's figure of `control society'. The article argues that whilst Negri develops the important analytic categories of socialized and (...) affective labour, he breaks with operaismo's and Deleuze's `cramped' and `minor' interrogation of the intricacies of capitalized production to develop a problematic understanding of an emerging autonomy-in-production. In this Negri makes a strange return to the orthodox Marxian and - in an inverted way - neo-Gramscian positions which operaismo had sought to undermine; so making Empire less a synthesis of, than a break with some of the core theoretical principles of operaismo, Marx and Deleuze. (shrink)