Michael Hardt’s The Subversive Seventies offers a thorough and original contribution to the decades-long debate on a period that transformed once and for all the political and cultural horizons of the left. Contrary to many (and mostly U.S.-based) historians and political scientists, Hardt contends that the Seventies were not a dark time of endings, following the (partial) victories of the Sixties—the end of the industrial working class’s power through its unions, parties, and ideology, on the one hand, and the collapse of the New Left dreams, on the other. Instead, this book argues that the Seventies are the dawn of new beginnings: a moment marked by a profound redefinition of the proletariat, recomposed through the intertwinement of production, circulation, and reproduction; by the convergence of diverse struggles and insurgencies; and by unexpected forms of political subjectivation that laid the groundwork for a renewed theory of revolution.

Hardt advances three main hypotheses. First, that the Seventies were prefigurative times. They offered a distinctive source of contemporary critical thought and praxis, characterized by the irruption of feminist, antiracist, and ecological perspectives that have complexified and enriched our very understanding of “subversion.” Second, that the Seventies were a global phenomenon, articulating innovative social claims and political imaginaries across extremely diverse contexts, and foregrounding new encounters—between the political, the spiritual, and the economic; between self-transformation and collective emancipation; between clandestine action and mass spontaneity. Third, that far from representing a remote, exotic, and often violent past, the Seventies pose a set of open questions that continue to speak to the present.

In this way, Hardt distances himself from, and formulates a critique of, the historiographical commonplaces that have long sustained both orthodox Marxist automatisms—which are all too often haunted by a phantasmatic past of “working men”—and post-Marxist left melancholia. From the book’s introduction, however, he argues that if the cliché of the Seventies as a time when “nothing happened” rests on “blindness,” the image of a decade “when everything went wrong”—often tied to the “good Sixties/bad Seventies” paradigm—is more difficult to dismiss. Neoliberalism, which was predicated upon new technologies of power and logics of exploitation, was indeed forged during these years, while the internal divisions and tragic defeats of revolutionary movements fractured popular forces. Here, Hardt proposes a shift of perspective. His vantage point privileges subversive processes over their outcomes, interpreting them as the primary motor driving the reshaping of capital as well as gender and racial oppression. While acknowledging the importance of studying the forms of domination invented in the Seventies, he insists that these were themselves responses to “the other side”—to the productivity of social struggles, whose complexity and ambivalence “should not be lamented but recognized as a virtue” (p. 7).

Hardt’s approach operates at the boundaries of several disciplines and methodologies; it is at once globalizing, impressionistic, and genealogical. It is globalizing, first, because—while recognizing Italy’s “long 1968” as a “laboratory” of subversion—it provincializes Europe and North America as the centers of political experimentation and instead opens onto a broader geography that extends from the Turkish countryside to Central and South America, passing through Japan, South Korea, Angola, Mozambique, and Iran. This geography is not framed solely in terms of nations but also through cities (as in the case of homosexual struggles in New York in chapter 3), specific institutions and territories (as in the case of “ungovernable” and “self-managed” factories in France and the United States in chapters 8 and 9, and land occupations against nuclear infrastructures in Germany and Japan in chapter 14), and the transnational circulations of ideas and practices (such as liberation theology in Iran and Nicaragua in chapter 4, or Black power in South Africa, the United Kingdom, and the United States in chapter 12). In this way, Hardt reframes our perspective on the decade’s key events. By shifting the focus away from a supposed center of the capitalist world-system, he also complicates our understanding of the social subjects animating these struggles, moving beyond the ossified “industrial workers + students” prism of analysis. For Hardt, indeed, the Seventies’ new beginning demands a complexification of our conception of the working-class itself. Heterogeneity, multiplicity, and the matrix of different dominations and liberations must be placed at its very core.

Hardt’s approach is impressionistic because, rather than developing an in-depth investigation into a single fact or context, it offers a series of snapshots across the decade and around the globe. This choice, as the author himself acknowledges, is not exhaustive: it leaves aside, for instance, experiments as decisive as the Indian Maoist insurrections, beginning with the Naxalite movement, or the internal conflicts of post-Maoist China—not to mention the numerous and often incommensurable insurgencies across South America and the Caribbean. Rather than attempting to cover the entire decade, Hardt’s selection follows a genealogical criterion: it seeks to grasp the disruptive events and long-term processes that have given rise to our current questions by developing a Foucault-inspired “history of the present.” For Hardt—as for any thinker who conceives of critique as transformative praxis—theory and strategy are inseparable and deeply connected in the present conjuncture. Past conjunctures, in turn, can illuminate our current challenges.

Yet, he does not derive from the Seventies dogmas to be readily applied to contemporary struggles; his stance is not assertive but problematizing. Hardt suggests that paradigmatic historical incursions into that decade chart the emergence of three major conundrums facing revolutionaries today. These problems structure the main parts of the book and are framed as questions of “invention” and “articulation”: the invention of revolutionary democracy, new modes of life, and political spirituality (parts 1 and 2); the articulation of workers’, antiracist, and feminist struggles (parts 3 and 4); and the changes in self-defensive, clandestine, and mass-political organizing in the face of the authoritarian turn (part 5). Four concepts are particularly illustrative of Hardt’s current reflections. He theorizes “strategic racial multiplicities,” “feminist articulations,” and “gay liberation”—which he examines through a thought-provoking dialogue between Foucault and the young Marx—together with the notion of the “end of mediation.” On these questions, Hardt innovates upon his earlier analyses co-developed with Toni Negri and extends the insights of their last book, Assembly (2017). On the one hand, he argues that the Seventies show that no single subject, tendency, or figure of labor assumes the role of new revolutionary vanguard; rather, multiplicities come to occupy the center of any politics of liberation. On the other hand, the “end of mediation” between popular movements and political institutions, already visible in the Seventies, may enrich the diagnosis of what Alberto Toscano has called “late fascism.”

In this respect, The Subversive Seventies raises fundamental questions that cannot but occupy contemporary debates in critical theory and radical political organizing. When it comes to analyzing power: are the Seventies the primary referent for understanding our time, or do the Tens and Twenties offer more telling parallels? Is the concept of “neoliberalism”— understood by Hardt in the light of Negri’s theory of the “crisis-state”—sufficient to account for the late-fascist turn we are witnessing today across the “West” and beyond? And when it comes to theorizing subversion: how should we put the notion of “articulation” to work politically? Given its shifting meanings across thinkers such as Althusser, Deleuze and Guattari, and Laclau, to name only three, how should we define it? Who can articulate a multiplicity of struggles within a common frame? How might articulation function as a successful strategy of democratic organization? What balance between force and consensus, autonomy and centrality, convergence and proliferation, direction and spontaneity is required for—and at the same time already exhibited by—the uprisings of our present? If, in Hardt’s view, we should relate to the Seventies as “runners in a relay race” (p. 257), something similar could be said of his book, which contributes to the resolution of key political problems by posing them correctly—that is, by tracing their emergence.