An acute reappraisal for our time of the very concept of revolution. In order to be effective
union struggles struggles for national liberation worker mutualism or struggles for
emancipation were strategies that were necessarily connected to revolution. Starting from the
historic defeat of the global Revolution in the mid-1970s this book draws a portrait—whose
elaboration is still lacking—of the concept of revolution. What conditions could lead us to
speak of revolution once again? In The Intolerable Present the Urgency of Revolution Maurizio
Lazzarato ponders the fundamental importance of the passage from the historical class struggle
(the conflict between capital and labor) to the more recent class struggles that open onto
plural trajectories: social sexual gender and race struggles. Expanding the notion of class
as a rejoinder to the normative appropriation of minority politics the revolution is returned
as the horizon where subjection can be resorbed. In this sense Marxist feminist anticolonial
and postcolonial theories provide the necessary critical tools to understand the relations
between classes and minorities between the global North and the global South and between the
time of revolutions and the eruption of new subjectivities.
