The fall of the Berlin Wall and the first war of Father Bush against Iraq shaped the world of the 90s: the world of the superpower, the market, and the political religion of neoliberalism. Today, we are experiencing the deconstruction of this world. The throne of the dollar is shaking, oil is skyrocketing, and the global recession is evolving into an endemic threat. The second war of Bush's son in Iraq, instead of fortifying the American empire, accelerated its erosion. The chimera of "globalization" gives way to new walls, in Baghdad, Ramallah, and Rio Grande.

Petros Papakonstantinou approaches late capitalism from three converging paths, in history, political economy, and international relations. He argues that the latent crisis is transforming the system into a kind of totalitarian capitalism. However, it also creates the possibility of a democratic overthrow, which can curb the threats to freedom, global peace, the planet's biosphere, and the culture of the social human.

"The subject of the book that the reader has in his hands is the new, alarming characteristics of late capitalism that make up its oligarchic-neo-authoritarian mutation. (...) The difficulty of capitalism to overcome the symptoms of decline, and not the new technological elixirs that it constantly invents, forces it to increasingly turn to political and military violence, something that characterized the infantile capitalism of primary accumulation when it was liberated from the bonds of feudalism. Gerontic capitalism withers away without the grace of its childhood, without the promise of a freer and richer life that will compensate, for the inevitable pains of childbirth, the spades of a new future. The social system that was erected over the Bastilles of the Dark Ages with the tricolor flag of Liberty-Equality-Fraternity does not seem to be able to survive in the visible future except under the black flag of piracy and imposition."