Have you ever felt totaled? In this book, Colin Cremin tackles the overbearing truth that capitalism encompasses the totality of our social relations, having woven itself deeply into the fabric of what it means to be human. He shows how the capitalist system totalizes everything in its path, as evidenced in industrialized warfare, modern surveillance, commodification, and political control. With ever deepening social crises and ecological catastrophes this system threatens civilization as we know it. But among the wreckage of capitalism, Cremin argues, we can still find functioning parts, machines to be salvaged. To do so, it is imperative that we be able to both imagine and realize a future other than the apocalypticism forewarned by scientists, prescribed by economists, accommodated by politicians, and made into spectacle by the entertainment industry.
            Totalled maps the deteriorating socio-economic, political, and ecological conditions in which we live. Yet Cremin asks how a utopian possibility discernable in the power of human creation can be realized even though as a society we are bound up materially, ideologically, libidinally—totally—to the capitalist machine of destruction. Totalled concludes with a politically and economically grounded set of propositions on how we might begin to imagine such a possibility.

Colin Cremin is author of Capitalism’s New Clothes: Enterprise, Ethics and Enjoyment in Times of Crisis and iCommunism. He teaches sociology at the University of Auckland, Aotearoa / New Zealand.

— Slavoj Žižek

— Jeremy Gilbert, University of East London, and author of Common Ground