As I mentioned when I first reviewed it here, Frédéric Lordon's Figures du Communisme is an oddly titled book. It is not about some communist past or event, about the Soviet Union or China, but what communism must mean if it is to be a force of transformation in the future. Its central topics, the environment, work, and the intersection of race and class, are not exactly topics that immediately come to mind when perusing the history of communist thought. Or all of the sections, the long discussion of race and class is the most interesting (and the reason why I agreed to translate it).