Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative?
Ratings71
Average rating4
15
Ratings71
Average rating4
It is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism. 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, film (Children Of Men, Jason Bourne, Supernanny), fiction (Le Guin and Kafka), work and education, it argues that capitalist realism colours all areas of contemporary experience, is anything but realistic and asks how capitalism and its inconsistencies can be challenged. It is a sharp analysis of the post-ideological malaise that suggests that the economics and politics of free market neo-liberalism are givens rather than constructions.
Reviews with the most likes.
Mark Fisher deftly outlines the contours of our world as it appears today in Late Capitalism, and how Capital rules even our very imaginations through its logic of desire and production. He shows how everything in our world, even public services and universities, must act as though it is a business providing a product, that we are rational actors, that science and statistics can guide us to the truth, etc. His blistering critique points out that it can't be actual reality that capitalist realism is dealing with, as we are all anxious, miserable, confused, and alienated; and this shows no sign of being resolved through Capitalism, as it is in fact the result of Capitalism and of Neoliberalism's reign legitimized via Capitalist Realism.
He makes a good case, however, that Neoliberalism, while it employs capitalist realism to enforce its ideological supremacy, is not identical to capitalist realism, which does not, by necessity, have to carry a neoliberal flavor to it. Neoliberalism, Fisher argues, stands defrocked and delegitimized by its handling of the 2008 global financial crisis, and as such we, here among the ruins at the “End of History,” can still find new alternatives and build them – alternatives which embrace collective responsibility and a generative constraining of desire in ways the Neoliberal world order, by its own ideological constraints, can not.
The book does a great job at deconstructing the mental state that prevails since the 70s, one takeaway is how we start to attempt to tackle mental problems in the same way we tackle our economy rather than searching for a reason if discontent.
This is so thick with references I honestly didn't understand about half of it, but I'll give 4 stars for the parts that I did understand
Not sure about the bit about dyslexia bro...
honestly I feel like I got into this book already knowing its most relevant talking points. The most cutting remarks I had already read quoted elsewhere. The rest ranged from good to questionable (see aforementioned dyslexia)
