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The Intolerable Present, the Urgency of Revolution: Minorities and Classes (Semitext
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.
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.
432 pages, Paperback
Published April 25, 2023
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About the author
Maurizio Lazzarato
47 books103 followersMaurizio Lazzarato is a sociologist and philosopher in Paris. He is the author of Governing by Debt and Signs and Machines: Capitalism and the Production of Subjectivity, both published by Semiotext(e).
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Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
February 13, 2024
Lazzarato share a lot of context and tries to examine 'revolution against capital' given the complications of dealing with 'internal enemies' and 'external enemies'. He criticizes Foucault and Butler for falling short of revolutionary thought, but seems to adopt many of the same paradigms of subjectivity - only adding class war to the mix. Unlike many of his other books, this one seems to need more gestation. Certainly the present is intolerable, and revolutionary praxis is urgent, but then what?
"The anti-capitalist “revolution” is necessary because the force of this machine resides in its ability to have heterogeneous power relations function together but attacking capitalism does not exhaust all the modes of exploitation and domination. There is therefore a need to maintain and develop autonomous forms of organization that both converge with and diverge from the “revolution against capital" (p.360).
"The anti-capitalist “revolution” is necessary because the force of this machine resides in its ability to have heterogeneous power relations function together but attacking capitalism does not exhaust all the modes of exploitation and domination. There is therefore a need to maintain and develop autonomous forms of organization that both converge with and diverge from the “revolution against capital" (p.360).
August 30, 2023
“Without revolution, workers are simply a component of capitalism.”
“While they first gathered to fight racism and sexism, they then attacked “heterosexism and economic oppression under capitalism,” without ever separating one oppression from another, one struggle from another, because of capitalism functions by integrating them, revolution must do the same.”
“While they first gathered to fight racism and sexism, they then attacked “heterosexism and economic oppression under capitalism,” without ever separating one oppression from another, one struggle from another, because of capitalism functions by integrating them, revolution must do the same.”
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews