Book launch – with Anthony Iles, Mattin, Rob Lucas, Andrés Saenz de Sicilia, Svenja Bromberg

Abolishing Capitalist Totality: What is to be Done under Real Subsumption?
Edited by Anthony Iles & Mattin (published by Minor Compositions, 2026)

Thursday, 9 April 2026
15:00 – 17:00
Goldsmiths, RHB room 137 (in person only)
Organised by the Centre for Philosophy and Critical Thought
Free and open to all

About the book
The concept of subsumption informs an account of how capital seizes hold of social forms and shapes them to its ends. Subsumption can also help us describe what is shaped by capital and what is used as found, therefore how we might meaningfully begin to distinguish between thought processes and social processes, between capital as a seemingly self-perfecting system and the contradictory realities and inequalities of capitalist society. This anthology combines new translations of seminal communist theory from the archives, poetic interventions and recent critical exchanges which each contribute to a radical reconstruction of the concepts of subsumption, self-abolition, communisation and capitalist totality. 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.

With Contributions by: Sean Bonney, Nadia Bou Ali, Anne Boyer, Ray Brassier, Federico Corriente, Andrei Chitu, Loss Choi, Luisa Lorenza Corna, Bolívar Echeverría, Endnotes, Neil Gray, Danny Hayward, Em Hedditch, Anthony Iles, Lisa Jeschke, Sacha Kahir, Jessika Khazrik, Dimitra Kotouza, Rob Lucas, Mattin, Négation, Andrés Saenz de Sicilia, Roland Simon, Théorie Communiste, Marina Vishmidt.

About the editors
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).