Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative?

— Mark Fisher, Zero Books, 2009

Title says it all, really.

Fisher’s main point is expressed in the title of Chapter 1: it is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism. The rest of the book is really kind of just talking around that. Capitalism consumes everything, so that even anticapitalist movements (punk, alternative music, not to mention the very concept of anticapitalism itself), eventually become highly profitable and mainstream ventures. To get any traction in a capitalist world, you have to embrace capitalism.

And if you feel a bit disaffected and cynical about that, then that’s exactly where capitalism wants you to be! Cynicism, writes Fisher, quoting Žižek, is a way to blind yourself to the structural power of the world as it is: “even if we do not take things seriously, even if we keep an ironical distance, we are still doing them”. The fear and cynicism engendered by late capitalism keep us on the straight and narrow, breeding conformity and “the cult of minimal variation”.

It all feels a bit circular. We can’t imagine an end to capitalism, and the proof is that media is filled with messaging about how we can’t imagine an end to capitalism (Children of Men (2006)), the Kafkaesque absurdity but dominance of the corporation (Office Space (1999)), or the world as an endless quilt of interchangeable and indistinguishable roads and businesses (Heat (1995)). But by the end of book, I feel deluged by examples but not really convinced of anything. I’m left with the feeling that, yes, we, societally, certainly do seem to feel trapped and powerless within a capitalist system. But why? How did we get here? How can we leave? And is there no alternative? These were the questions I was hoping to – well, not to have answers to, but at least to have some more intellectual tools to think about by the of the book, but Fisher doesn’t tackle them.