Books and Magazines


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.  what is to be done under real subsumption?  Edited by Anthony Iles & Mattin  Softcover, 584 pages, Minor Composition, July 2026

aboloshing capitalist totality

Karl Marx spent three consecutive summers in the spa town of Karlsbad (now Karlovy Vary in the Czech Republic) in 1874, 1875 and 1876. Egon Erwin Kisch’s 1946 text Karl Marx in Karlsbad reconstructs these three stays. When Marx arrived in Karlsbad to take the waters for the first time, he was suffering, tired, tense, overworked and overly nervous, in other words, he was burnout. Years of political and theoretical work under agonising hardship and constant oppression had left Marx with pleurisy, inflammation of the lungs, inflammation of the nerves in his head, a carbuncle, a lung abscess and sciatica. Marx’s recovery in Karlsbad, surrounded by princes, ministers, aristocrats, chamber singers, adventurers, spies, and courtesans, is a story full of amusing anecdotes and surprises.  E.E. Kisch, described by Anna Seghers as a “detective,” investigated this lesser known period of Marx’s life and resolved some mysteries of international importance. For the first time fully translated, the essay is introduced by its editor, Sezgin Boynik, presenting Kisch within the context of interwar leftist avant-garde internationalism. The afterword by Sam Dolbear and Hannah Proctor revisits the emotional life of Marx and his daughter Eleonor during their visits to Karlsbad, without insulating them from the forces of history. Dolbear and Proctor are both writers and researchers, who have previously worked together on an essay on revolutionary childhood, as co-editors of a series of pamphlets on Walter Benjamin’s Arcades Project, and on dreams, sleep, work, puppets, play, and proletarian children’s theatre. Designed by Ott Kagovere, the book features etchings and photographs of Karlsbad from the 19th century, as well as a colour reproduction of Christian Schad’s portrait of Kisch with tattoos. Softcover, 150 x 215mm, 80 pp Edition of 1000 Rab-Rab, May 2025

e.e. kisch – Karl marx in karlsbad

Borderline Visible begins as a journey from Lausanne to Izmir in 2022 by two artist friends, one of whom experiences health problems halfway and has to stop. As the other continues towards Turkey, suddenly alone, the narration grows into a moving and troubled psychogeography as it shifts between “we” and “I”, present and past, piecing-together value and meaning from the very human ruins of aspiration, history, and language. Ant Hampton’s careful, at times miraculous, process of reconnection gradually lights up a constellation: voices and earthquakes, the Sephardic diaspora, tourism and forced movement, breakdowns and dementia, the end of the Ottoman Empire, swifts and swallows, Eliot’s The Waste Land and an urgent insight into hidden atrocities at the edge of Europe being funded from its centre.77 min, 232 pages, 16,7x24cmVoice & sound, english version: Ant Hampton Time Based Editions, 2023  Music:Fever, A Warm Poison by Oren Ambarchi. From the album In The Pendulum's Embrace (2007)Corridor Between Days by Perila (2022)Quixotism Parts 1 and 2, by Oren Ambarchi. From the album Quixotism (2014)   Borderline Visible is created by the artist Ant Hampton, who is also co-director of the Time Based Editions series. With a deep focus on liveness, his performance work since 1999 has often involved guiding people through unrehearsed situations using automated devices and a subtle use of instructions and narration.As with all Time Based Editions (about), an audio track combines narration, soundscape, and instructions that guide you over a given time through the book.The work is also experienced collectively as a live event for audiences, presented in theatre, film, sound art and music festivals, museums, book fairs and many other contexts. More info here.

ant hampton – borderline visible

Olavi Laiho’s aliterative anti-fascist text written in 1944 in Oulu prison just before his execution. First time publsihed in its original Finnish and in English translation. Introduction by Minna Henriksson.   Olavi Laiho (1907-1944) was a writer, political organiser, and communist agitator, who was first imprisoned in 1932 – a time when ‘communist laws’ were in effect in Finland – for producing political material and running an illegal printing press in his home. He opposed Finland’s WW2 era fighting alongside Nazi Germany against the Soviet Union, edited illegal journals, but also planned armed resistance and facilitated correspondence between the party’s leadership in Helsinki and the Soviet embassy in Stockholm. He managed to hide from the police from when the Continuation War broke in summer 1941 until 22nd of December 1942, when he was arrested while visiting his sister in the parish of Paimio. Laiho was sentenced to death for treason and high treason. He was executed on 2nd of September, being the last Finnish citizen to be executed in Finland.  Just a couple of weeks before his execution, Laiho wrote a remarkable essay ‘Katso Koota’ [Look at K], using only words starting with the letter K. It gives a vivid picture of the political situation of the time: the war is still ongoing, but it has become evident that Finland is on the losing side. Not knowing his execution date, Laiho eagerly awaits a new batch of books to arrive at the prison library, enjoying his coffee substitute and the sound of distant music ... ‘Katso Koota’ is an early example of Finnish modern alliterative writing, a lipogram, a literary technique in which every word must start with the same letter. Laiho’s ‘Katso Koota’ predates the French Oulipo (‘workshop of potential literature’) of the 1960s. Considering that he produced his ‘constrained writing’ under conditions of extreme political and cultural confinement, it can be considered a true form of avant-garde subversion.  Published for the first time based on the manuscript at the People’s Archives, the booklet includes its content translation, a short introduction by Minna Henriksson and two illustrations by Kaisa Junttila.  Designed by Otso Peräsaari, the book is printed in 200 copies and is produced in Kalastaman Seripaja silkscreen workshop and If By Magic risography print house. The publication is realised in the context of the Counter-Libraries exhibition at the Library of the Labour Movement, Helsinki.A5 Staplebound, Softcover, 16 pages (Silkscreen and risoprint) Rab-Rab, Helsinki, October, 2025

Olavi Laiho – Look at K

The Haitian Chronicles is a graphic and brutal history of the Haitian Revolution told across three plays. It is the final work by the influential and groundbreaking playwright Douglas Turner Ward (1930-2021) and the first play of his to be published in several decades. Though much of his earlier work has been short one-act satires, The Haitian Chronicles takes place across three long plays: The Rise of Toussaint L'Ouverture, The Fall of Toussaint L'Ouverture, and the one-man drama, Dessalines. The Haitian Chronicles is an example of Ward's political commitment to satirizing, dramatizing, and revealing the structures of white supremacy throughout the history of this so-called civilization. His first play, Star of Liberty, written at 19 years of age, was based the life of Nat Turner and the slave revolt he led. With The Haitian Chronicles, Ward returns to armed Black rebellion, taking as its subject matter the first and only slave revolt to successfully establish a free state. It is a self-consciously ambitious work of astounding narrative and theatrical scope, featuring over 80 speaking roles and logistically demanding production design. The narrative onslaught chronicling the disgusting brutality of colonial French society and the bloody force it took to overthrow it overwhelms the reader and challenges one to question the structures on which society is built and the violence it continues to perpetuate.Ward was one of the central, driving forces of the Black Theater movement in the United States. After moving to New York in 1948, he became immersed in the radical political scene in Harlem, writing for The Daily Worker, and studying as an actor. He served as understudy to Sidney Poitier in A Raisin in the Sun, and began a long friendship with fellow actor Robert Hooks. In 1966, Hooks helped produce Ward’s double bill Happy Ending / Day of Absence. Following the success of these plays, Ward was asked to write an editorial for the New York Times in 1966. His article, titled "American Theatre: For Whites Only?", surveyed the ubiquitous, stifling racism of the American theatre and was widely circulated, earning Ward further recognition for his political and theatrical work. With funding from the Ford Foundation, Ward and Hooks, together with Gerald Krone, founded the Negro Ensemble Company (NEC) in 1967. Writing and directing for the NEC over the next several decades, Ward worked with icons such as Paul Carter Harrison, Gus Edwards, Leslie Lee, Errol Hill, Charles Fuller, Derek Walcott and Wole Soyinka. He directed dozens of plays throughout his career including Song of the Lusitanian Bogey, The River Niger and Pulitzer Prize-winning A Soldier’s Play. Ward continued to write until his death in 2021– The Haitian Chronicles is the result of over four decades of work, a superb series of plays by an inimitable writer and artist.First edition. Softcover, 366pp Boo-Hooray, New York, 2020

douglas turner ward – the haitian chronicles