Abolishing Capitalist Totality: What Is to Be Done under Real Subsumption?
Edited by Anthony Iles & Mattin
When capitalism feels inescapable, theory becomes a weapon to challenge fatalistic totalities. This book explores the limits of the colonization of everyday life by economic logic gone mad.
Wherever we are we find ourselves choking, trapped in a world built against us we feel we don’t belong to. A world that is going down the drain. Unable to stop this process as if history has surpassed us, we seem to have missed our opportunity to take hold of the future. We must ask ourselves: why are fatalistic and totalising narratives so prevalent in our times? What would it take to work against fear, to restore a sense of agency and critical comprehension over capitalism’s runaway processes? By tracing and uncovering the subterranean history of the Marxist concept of subsumption within the French ultraleft, Operaismo, the Frankfurt School and Mexican movements, as well as through heated debates within communist circles in the last decade, Abolishing Capitalist Totality offers a profound and critical inquiry into what we understand by capitalist totality and its dominating powers. It addresses radical forms of antagonism: the self-abolition of the proletariat, of gender and race, and explores how these relate to other forms of abolition, thereby opening possibilities for new alliances and constellations.
As an integral aspect of interrogating and reorganising the form of the book, poets and artists have been invited to challenge what we perceive as the totality of this book by intervening into its conventions. Our hope is that readers will be able to grasp not only the concepts presented in the book but also its form, in a multifaceted and engaged manner. What has been perceived in recent years as an enclosed capitalist totality is, in fact, composed of concrete processes that we can act upon: how we understand capitalism determines how we abolish capital.
Includes texts and interventions from Anthony Iles, Mattin, Andrés Saenz De Sicilia, Bolívar Echeverría, Négation, Federico Corriente, Roland Simon, Anne Boyer, Lisa Jeschke, Em Hedditch, Loss Choi, Danny Hayward, Sean Bonney, Sacha Kahir, Théorie Communiste, Ray Brassier, Neil Gray, Rob Lucas, Nadia Bou Ali, Jessika Khazrik, Andrei Chitu, Marina Vishmidt, Dimitra Kotouza, and Endnotes.
Bio: Anthony Iles is a book editor and writer based in London. He is a founding member of Full Unemployment Cinema and a Contributing Editor with Mute since 2005. He is the author, with Josephine Berry, of the book No Room to Move: Art and the Regenerate City (2011), co-author, with Tom Roberts, of All Knees and Elbows (2012).
Mattin is an artist, musician, and theorist working conceptually with noise and improvisation. Through his practice and pedagogy, he explores performative forms of estrangement as a way of engaging with structural alienation. He is the author of Social Dissonance (2022) and, together with Anthony Iles, co-edited Noise & Capitalism (2009). He runs the podcast Social Discipline with Miguel Prado, and both are members of Noise Research Union (NRU).
Ordering Information
Available direct from Minor Compositions for the special price of £15 + shipping.
A digital version can freely be downloaded here.
584 pages, 130 x 202mm, paperback, 13 illustrations
UK: £25 / US: $35
ISBN 978-1-57027-441-1
Release to the book trade 24 July 2026
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