Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative?

by Mark Fisher

Overview

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781846943171
Publisher:	Hunt, John Publishing
Publication date:	12/16/2009
Pages:	92
Product dimensions:	5.40(w) x 8.50(h) x 0.40(d)

About the Author

Mark Fisher is highly respected both as a music writer and a theorist. He writes regularly for The Wire, frieze, New Statesman, and Sight & Sound. He is a Visiting Fellow at Goldsmiths, University Of London, and maintains one of the most successful weblogs on cultural theory, k-punk (http://k-punk.abstractdynamics.org)

Table of Contents

Foreword Zoe Fisher ix

Introduction Alex Niven xiii

1 It's easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism 1

2 What if you held a protest and everyone came? 12

3 Capitalism and the Real 16

4 Reflexive impotence, immobilization and liberal communism 21

5 October 6, 1979: 'Don't let yourself get attached to anything' 31

6 All that is solid melts into PR: market Stalinism and bureaucratic anti-production 39

7 '…if you can watch the overlap of one reality with another': capitalist realism as dreamwork and memory disorder 54

8 'There's no central exchange' 62

9 Marxist Supernanny 71

Afterword Tariq Goddard 82

Editorial Reviews

"The beauty of Mark Fisher's laser sharp critique of the destructive effects of life under Neo-Liberalism was that it spoke to ordinary people in plain language that went beyond the often hermetic intellectual world of Academia. He is greatly missed. We need voices like Mark's more than ever." - Bobby Gillespie, Primal Scream

From the Publisher