Totalled

Ciara aka Colin Cremin is Senior Lecturer in the Sociology Department at the University of Auckland. She is author of several books, including Man-Made Woman (Pluto, 2017), Totalled (Pluto, 2015) and Capitalism's New Clothes (Pluto, 2011).

Have you ever felt totalled? This book provides a utopian vision which could replace the overbearing truth that capitalism encompasses the entirety of our lives, weaving deep into the fabric of all that it means to be human. Through industrialised warfare, surveillance and commodification, deepening crises and ecological catastrophes, capitalism threatens the total destruction of human civilisation. But in amongst this wreckage there are still functioning parts which can be salvaged through the collective force of the human imagination and the mobilisation of the masses. To do so, we must realise a different future to the apocalypticism forewarned by scientists, prescribed by economists, accommodated by politicians and made spectacle by the entertainment industry. This book asks how a utopian possibility is discernible through the power of human creation. Can it be realised when as a society we are in different ways materially, ideologically and libidinally bound to the capitalist machine of destruction?

A powerful work of critical theory which looks at how the destructive nature of capitalism will eventually be used against itself.