The bestseller "Empire" by Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri caused a stir in 2000 within globalization-critical social movements. The philosopher Slavoj Žižek even regarded this book as the Communist Manifesto of the 21st century. The main thesis of the book, that central Marxist categories such as value and class structure need to be redefined for the current capitalism, with its emphasis on immaterial labor and knowledge production, faced resistance. The departure from value as an analytical category seemed too bold in bourgeois-capitalist society. Philipp Metzger reconstructs Marx's theory of value in the context of the knowledge society in his monograph. On this basis, he questions the theoretical content of Hardt and Negri's analysis. In doing so, the author provides much more than just an approach and critique of post-operaismo theory.