The Divided Totality (War and Revolution in the 21st Century)

Democracy is a façade stretched over a deepening authoritarian core.

Traversing the wreckage of financial crises, imperial wars, and ecological collapse, Maurizio Lazzarato maps the inner logic of a capitalism that has fused the powers of the state, the military, and finance into a single machine of domination. From the trenches of 1914 to today's techno-military experimentation, he shows how capital's "creative destruction" has become a permanent strategy of rule—one in which production and devastation are indistinguishable, and in which democracy survives only as a façade stretched over a deepening authoritarian core.

Gathering Lazzarato's most urgent recent essays, this volume offers a devastating critique of neoliberal fantasies, Western innocence, and the naive liberal belief that capitalism can be governed into civility. Against the West's new imperial wars and the financial aristocracies that command them, Lazzarato insists on the centrality of class struggle, global revolt, and the strategic alliances emerging across the South and the banlieues alike. A book for the crises we are already living through, it calls for nothing less than a total rupture with the state–capital machine and a political imagination adequate to the coming century of struggle.