Global Civil War: Essays on the State-Capital Machine
Maurizio Lazzarato
Translated by Kieran Aarons and Eric Aldieri
Release date: October 1, 2026
ISBN: 979-8-9941059-0-0
Traversing the wreckage of financial crises, imperial wars, and ecological collapse, Maurizio Lazzarato maps the inner logic of a capitalism that has solidly 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 experimentations, 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 stubbornly 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’re 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.
Maurizio Lazzarato is an Italian sociologist and philosopher whose work spans political theory, labor studies, and the critique of contemporary capitalism. Now based in Paris, he first became active in the Autonomia movement in Italy before going into exile in France. Lazzarato’s studies of immaterial labor, debt, neoliberalism, war, and global class struggle have been translated into numerous languages. A researcher at the National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS) and Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne University, he is author of Wars and Capital and The Intolerable Present, the Urgency of Revolution, among many others.
Kieran Aarons is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at University of Detroit Mercy. He has translated numerous books from French, including Elsa Dorlin’s Self-Defense. A Philosophy of Violence, which received the nonfiction translation Award from the French-American Foundation. He is currently completing a monograph on the philosophy of political myth.
Eric Aldieri is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Bridgewater State University. He has translated several works of French Spinozism and is currently working on his first scholarly monograph dedicated to the question of personhood and impersonality in Deleuze’s philosophy. He holds a PhD in Philosophy from DePaul University.