Name: Capitalist Realism
Rating: 4.15 (80 reviews)
ISBN: 9781846943171

Mark Fisher

After 1989, capitalism has successfully presented itself as the only realistic political-economic system - a situation that the bank crisis of 2008, far from ending, actually compounded. The book analyses the development and principal features of this capitalist realism as a lived ideological framework. Using examples from politics, films, fiction, work and education, it argues that capitalist realism colours all areas of contemporary experience. But it will also show that, because of a number of inconsistencies and glitches internal to the capitalist reality program capitalism in fact is anything but realistic.

Is There No Alternative?

Capitalist Realism

An idealist academic who is trying to create something new out of issues which have exhaustive literature on them already. A philosophers wet dream, a marxists nightmare.

Adam Arif-Pardy

An idealist academic who is trying to create something new out of issues which have exhaustive literature on them already. A philosophers wet dream, a marxists nightmare.

Read July 16 2023

Is there no alternative?

chris

Jason Lo

Capital is clearly the reason why Mark Fisher’s students keep leaving him poor reviews. 

Closer to a 4.25.

jess

basically says welcome to capitalism 101 : a crash course in the failure of post-modernism; good entry level critique, so to speak..

Where was this book all my life. It's so short that by the time I've figured out how to write something that might do it justice, you could have just picked it up and read it. Which you should do at all costs. I want to kiss him on the mouth for this one. 

Kaye Barnett

Gavin

Fisher was strange. He's a very clear thinker who nonetheless devotes most of his writing to extremely unclear people, the Hegel/Baudrillard approach to society, existence, and pop culture. He is humane, focussing on why we might think we need these Theorists.

Thesis here is the usual one, that capitalism has mind control powers somehow.

elif sinem

The Twitter screenshots could've never prepared me for how amazing that book was and how dense it ended up being. So amazing and I think if Fisher was around today he'd be overjoyed to see the events of last year and the socialist wave in south America in particular.

madina

i can write a whole response essay that basically corroborates the conceptions & situations described in this book to the cultural reality of indonesia. pat recommended me this book following our conversation about robin sloan's "An app can be a home-cooked meal", & the tech industry inside capitalist realism  - thank uuuu pat - and i am so, so grateful that i read this.

i've long been uncomfortable with the idea of living life just for work, just for profit, & the notion that "that's just how it's always been". that we just have to accept this brutal machinery we have that is this system. the book provides a background, sebuah landasan untuk pemikiran itu dan referensi untuk this defeatism and mental fatigue that permeates the middle-upper class indonesians IMO. the fact that we have been demonizing the left so much yet we think we perform anti-capitalism just by *being* a representation of "budaya timur", when we've never healed from the cultural trauma that US intervention left us with. our obsession with "personal branding", turning everything into a small business in instagram, the illusion of upward socioeconomic mobility being something achievable - that's not semangat ketimuran, that's capitalist realism. i flip-flopped between the 4.5 and 5 stars rating (due to me losing it a bit at the end - but it's because i don't have the intertextual understanding for the uhh paternalism & family structure stuff), but this shit is in my personal canon bro. it gave voice to my formless thoughts. it illuminated the shadows that were collecting in my mind.

i actually don't get why some of the reviews say this book is depressing and offers no actual solutions/alternatives. like.. that was the point? we as a collective being make it. you can't expect a single author to posit a solution to literally the problem he says has to be a collective effort. this was a springboard. an illuminator, as i said. we have to radically imagine a different future rather than the inevitable end capitalist realism requires us to believe in, and hold each others hand to barrel towards it.

more relevant and vital during these times. a fast, passionate read.

Erfan Abedi

Consider this my very inecstastic turn to the left.

Lily

Ryan Nylander

This book is it. It is an absolute banger. I'd recommend it to anyone who has noticed how often young people on the internet complain (and meme) about how much they hate capitalism, and wondered, what exactly is the ideological position that so many people are expressing?

There have been several popular thinkpieces in recent years (ugh) regarding a so-called "Great Awokening" that has taken place on the internet over the last decade; my favorite of these is from The Cut, in which Molly Fischer reflects: "[in 2017] A racist reality star was in the Oval Office and actual neo-Nazis were claiming Taylor Swift as their Aryan princess... It was the perfect year to take pop culture very seriously." https://www.thecut.com/2018/01/pop-cu...

In Capitalist Realism, one thing is certain, which is that pop culture is serious business. Fisher backs up his claims with references to Children of Men, Kurt Cobain, classic 90's rap, Goodfellas, Pulp Fiction, Memento, Jason Bourne, Heat, and Supernanny. (Like so much pop-culture writing of the 2010's, the Prestige-television-era figure of the white male Auteur looms large over the book.) It's pop philosophy, a Sparknotes on Zizek (without the accompanying sliminess). It is fun to read, and best of all, succinct.

It also has a colossal problem; that of actually answering the question of an alternative to Capitalism. Supporting his critique of late-Capitalist cultural logic is a rich intellectual tradition of critical theory that analyzes the artifacts of consumer culture, beginning with the Frankfurt School, Debord, Deleuze, Baudrillard and Lacan (all of whom Fisher dutifully namechecks). Even with this pedigree, however, one still has to wonder: if the goal is to abolish capitalism, how will applying Lacanian psychoanalysis to our favorite movies help? Is it the best starting point, or is it just the one that sells the most books?

The book ends on a familiar note to anyone who has spent some time reading leftist theory. Fisher never has any intention of answering the titular question; the real question that the book sets out to answer is, more broadly, "what is to be done?" We are treated to a few modest suggestions, including, as expected: "write more leftist philosophy books." 

The cynic in me wonders, does theory of this sort achieve anything more than reflexively justifying the theorist's career? In a way, this can all start to feel a bit like religion. There is a promise of a heaven (a utopian economy in which capital is abolished, so that, among other things, movies won't suck as much), and a man at a pulpit, who has read a number of books that we have no interest in actually reading ourselves, telling us that as long as we believe, or work hard enough, or even just "stay woke," all of our suffering will eventually end. Like religion, the message is mostly at odds with what a reasonable person can expect to materially come from all our faith; that is to say, effectively, nothing.

Or something. Maybe. Leftism on the whole has more going for it than mere faith. Regardless of one's belief in the viability of a socialist alternative, as Fisher demonstrates here, a great number of people genuinely hate capitalism, even if they have not yet been trained to recognize it as the source of their malaise. If our current economic situation is indeed, as Thatcher and countless others will claim, as good as it gets, then we have to at least wonder: why are we all so unhappy?

It is impossible to read Realism, especially in light of Fisher's suicide in 2017, without wondering at times if the titular question betrays a feeling of desperation, or even hopelessness. He struggled openly with mental illness and depression throughout his life. The most poignant passages of this book touch on the prevalence of mental illness among members of capitalist society, locating depression as a symptom not merely of chemical imbalance, but of alienation from one another. He forecasts the emergence of a new collective subject under capitalism -- those who suffer from mental illness as a consequence of the Kafkaesque conditions we are all subject to.

This all brings us back to the sizeable Internet subculture of teenagers and young adults who complain, often in the same breath, of capitalism and their struggles with mental illness. The sentiment can be generalized to the progressive movement in the American Democratic party that challenges the private healthcare industry. It can also feel hyper-specific, as just the other day I applied for a popular social group on Facebook, and one of the entry questions was, literally: "Who was Mark Fisher?" Read Realism ten years after it was published, and the answer is clear: he was a man who saw the future.

Capitalist Realism Is There No Alternative?

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