Mbembe writes from the conviction that the planet has entered an age of combustion, its resources, atmosphere, water and food visibly degrading while public discourse fills with predictions of collapse. He is unsatisfied with that mood, noting that many peoples have long had to make life out of ruin, and that withdrawal and the hardening of borders are themselves political postures.

Brutalism is his name for a form of power admitting no outside and no exit. It binds together economic calculation, digital computation and the biological sciences on the premise that living beings and machines are no longer distinguishable, humanity turning artificial as objects and machines take on life.

Against this he sets a demand for planetary consciousness and for a refounded human community standing in solidarity with everything alive, arguing after Fanon that genuine struggle begins as reparation, with the repair of what has been broken.