capitalist realism Concepts

The Glass Half-Empty: Debunking the Myth of Progress in the Twenty-First Century

by Rodrigo Aguilera · 10 Mar 2020 · 356pp · 106,161 words

planet, to the detriment of human prosperity and well-being. Cultural theorist Mark Fisher described our inability to think outside a liberal capitalist framework as “capitalist realism”, a play on the idealist art known as socialist realism which reflected how an economic ideology permeated every aspect of existence, including culture. Fisher also

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understood why capitalism has done so well at resisting alternative narratives: If capitalist realism is so seamless, and if current forms of resistance are so hopeless and impotent, where can an effective challenge come from? A moral critique of

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capitalism, emphasizing the ways in which it leads to suffering, only reinforces capitalist realism. Poverty, famine and war can be presented as an inevitable part of reality, while the hope that these forms of suffering could be eliminated easily

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painted as naive utopianism. Capitalist realism can only be threatened if it is shown to be in some way inconsistent or untenable; if, that is to say, capitalism’s ostensible “realism

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of policymakers that probably never read past the executive summary or, worse still, the even shorter press briefing. And in its most lamentable concession to capitalist realism, it only makes a veiled warning that humanity may not be ideologically ready to make the necessary economic adaptations to achieve these targets, insofar as

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yet to come: The long, dark night of the end of history has to be grasped as an enormous opportunity. The very oppressive pervasiveness of capitalist realism means that even glimmers of alternative political and economic possibilities can have a disproportionately great effect. The tiniest event can tear a hole in the

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grey curtain of reaction which has marked the horizons of possibility under capitalist realism. From a situation in which nothing can happen, suddenly anything is possible again.27 One positive development is that certain dogmas of progress are now

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, S., “Today’s sacred cows…”, The BMJ, 321, 11 Nov. 2000, pg. 1216, https://doi.org/10.1136/bmj.321.7270.1216 2 Fisher, M. Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? (Zero Books, 2009), pg. 16 3 An exception within the communist bloc was Tito’s Yugoslavia, which implemented many measures of

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, pg. 21. 25 Sen, A., Development as Freedom (First Anchor Books, 1999), pg. 31 26 Rawls, J., Justice as Fairness, pg. 4 27 Fisher, M., Capitalist Realism, pg. 80-81 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS First and foremost, I would like to thank the wonderful staff at Repeater Books for helping put this book together, in

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to enter history and assert control over its currents, gathering together scattered and isolated voices with those who have already called for an escape from Capitalist Realism. Our desire is to publish in every sphere and genre, combining vigorous dissent and a pragmatic willingness to succeed where messianic abstraction and quiescent co

Fully Automated Luxury Communism

by Aaron Bastani · 10 Jun 2019 · 280pp · 74,559 words

futile or incomprehensible. Here, liberal capitalism went from a contingent project to a reality principle. Welcome to the world of capitalist realism – where the map is the territory and nothing really matters. Capitalist Realism Capitalist realism is best summed up with a single sentence: ‘It is easier to imagine the end of the world than the

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it’s not criminal like Stalinism. We let millions of Africans die of AIDS, but we don’t make racist nationalist declarations like Milosevic. Because capitalist realism has no offer of a better future – especially so over the course of the last decade – its default logic is one of anti-utopianism. Flat

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’s not the sixteenth century. Over time this argument, seductive for the opening years of the twenty-first century, is being revealed as patently absurd. Capitalist realism, a world where nothing really changes, is giving way to a historic moment defined by crisis. One where, unless we transform our understanding of the

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of the United Kingdom, insurgents declared a caliphate, the Islamic State. But even amid all this it was events in Western Europe, a heartland of capitalist realism, which proved most surprising: a heightened cycle of protest and riot in England after 2010 was followed by a failed but surprisingly close referendum on

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shared a similar faith in the unique ability of markets to find solutions. After all, anything else is tantamount to heresy in a world of capitalist realism – where the end of the world is more plausible than the end of capitalism. This condition presents arguably the most pressing crisis of all: an

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absence of collective imagination. It is as if all humanity has been afflicted by a psychological complex, capitalist realism making us believe the present world is stronger than our capacity to remake it – as if it were not our ancestors who created what stands

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. Capitalism, at least as we know it, is about to end. What matters is what comes next. The claim that capitalism will end, is, for capitalist realism, like saying a triangle doesn’t have three sides or that the law of gravity no longer applies while an apple falls from a tree

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end of history means presuming our social systems to be as unchanging as the physical laws that govern the universe. And yet the truth is capitalist realism is already coming apart. The fact you are reading these words at all is proof. Despite the observations of Francis Fukuyama and his disciples, history

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they might not share much politically, Trump and Corbyn, along with Brexit and the emergence of Podemos, Bernie Sanders and Syriza, indicate the era of capitalist realism is over. And yet there is also a deeper story at play, one which remains largely unremarked upon. While the events of the last several

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labour, which, however, appears as the productiveness of capital, as all other productivity does under the capitalist mode of production. To repurpose the phrase from capitalist realism: is it easier to imagine the end of the world than public ownership of the immense wealth beyond it? Why should it be? For the

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submit the possibilities of the Third Disruption to the needs of people rather than profit must be populist. If not, it is certain to fail. Capitalist realism is simply too adaptable for a radical politics of management and technocracy, meaning any rupture must be understandable to most people in an idiom that

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is a politics that refuses to recognise the prevailing common sense in managing the economy. Consequently a portion of its critics, those most seduced by capitalist realism, attack it from the incorrect assumption that there is no alternative to neoliberalism. As the status quo is imperilled by the five crises, as well

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to a form of economic globalisation interchangeable with market capitalism – has allowed elites to evade responsibility. Here ‘global coordination’ is merely the international adjunct to capitalist realism, allowing the biggest polluters – who are also the most powerful nations – to avoid changing their path. Which is why we must re-imagine and replicate

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to the 1930s – when nation-states last turned their back on a failing global order. Such rhetoric is analogous to the anti-utopianism through which capitalist realism prevails at the domestic level. Nothing ever changes – and that’s the point. Prototype politics could not be more different, emphasising action and decision, no

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and enforce the ‘judgement of the market’ on those which lose money. The claim of central bank ‘independence’, a favoured policy at the apogee of capitalist realism during the 2000s, is as absurd a conjecture as the end of history itself. Here the pivotal actors within modern capitalist economies, who make specific

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Deal’. Reuters, 8 November 2017. Part I. Chaos under Heaven 1. The Great Divide Fukuyama, Francis. ‘The End of History’. National Interest, 16 Summer 1989. Capitalist Realism Cox, Christoph, Molly Whalen and Alain Badiou. ‘On Evil: An Interview with Alain Badiou’. Cabinet, Winter 2001-2. Fisher, Mark

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. Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? Zero Books, 2010. Menand, Louis. ‘Francis Fukuyama Postpones the End of History’. New Yorker, 3 September 2018. Crisis Unleashed ‘Depression Looms

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–71 ‘capital stock’, 69 capitalism about, 22, 51–3 critics of, 34–6 features of, 137 market, 39–40, 197–8 Marx on, 35, 199 capitalist realism, 17–19, 186 capitalist state central banks as central planners, 226–9 end of GDP, 232–6 socialised capital market, 230–2 speculative economy, 229

Practical Anarchism: A Guide for Daily Life

by Scott. Branson · 14 Jun 2022 · 198pp · 63,612 words

violent practices, seem to come to us ready-made from nowhere—another utopian dream. Making Space Visible If invisibilization is a major method of maintaining capitalist “realism,” as Mark Fisher called it (making us believe in the inevitability and inescapability of capitalism), then perhaps a tactic when it comes to rethinking space

Amateurs!: How We Built Internet Culture and Why It Matters

by Joanna Walsh · 22 Sep 2025 · 255pp · 80,203 words

related to that of the revolutionary, for whom the new can appear only through the destruction of the old.’21 Mark Fisher, in his 2009 Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative?, deplores the cultural decontextualisation of the curated gallery or museum but sees no hopeful alternatives online. Meanwhile, novelty for the amateur

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, or Das Kapital, a monetary value’. Capitalism’s decontextualisation of everything, its ‘conversion of practices and rituals into merely aesthetic objects’, led Fisher to speculate: ‘Capitalist realism is therefore not a particular type of realism; it is more like realism in itself.’5 If capitalism is like realism, then it is mimetic

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2023; Jacques Rancière, Aesthesis: Scenes from the Aesthetic Regime of Art, trans. Zakir Paul (Verso, 2019), p. 3. 2.Ibid., p. 4. 3.Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? (Zero Books, 2009), p. 4. 4.Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, p. 275. 5.Christopher D. Manning, Prabhakar Raghavan and Hinrich Schütze

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Cahun, Claude, 139 capital, 84 capitalised aesthetics, 16 capitalism, 6–7, 84, 218 accelerationism, 93 alienation of, 6 decontextualisation of everything, 106 and risk, 19 capitalist realism, 106 Caplan-Bricker, Nora, 138–9, 141–2 Capote, Truman, 133–4 Carr, Nicholas, 91 CD-ROMs, 53 CDs, 79, 81 Center for Research on

The Social Life of Money

by Nigel Dodd · 14 May 2014 · 700pp · 201,953 words

; that is to say, money is hyperreal. Couched in these terms, it is intriguing to consider Baudrillard’s argument in light of the notion of capitalist “realism” recently advanced by Mark Fisher. According to Fisher, neoliberalism produced a form of reality closure in which its major actors and institutions articulate a single

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of Great Depressions.” Econometrica 1 (4): 337–57. Fisher, I., H. R. Cohrssen, et al. (1933). Stamp Scrip, New York, Adelphi Company. Fisher, M. (2009). Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? London, Zero Books. Foster, W. and W. Catchings (1926). The Dilemma of Thrift, Newton, MA, Pollak Foundation for Economic Research. Foucault

Inventing the Future: Postcapitalism and a World Without Work

by Nick Srnicek and Alex Williams · 1 Oct 2015 · 357pp · 95,986 words

.31 The successes of this time were inseparable from a broader utopian culture. By contrast, today’s world remains firmly confined within the parameters of capitalist realism.32 The future has been cancelled. We are more prone to believing that ecological collapse is imminent, increased militarisation inevitable, and rising inequality unstoppable. Contemporary

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.Harvey, Brief History of Neoliberalism, p. 53. 58.Dardot and Laval, New Way of the World, p. 3. 59.Ibid., p. 265. 60.Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? (Winchester: Zero, 2009), Chapter 4. 61.Wanda Vrasti, ‘Struggling with Precarity: From More and Better Jobs to Less and Lesser Work

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Mezzadra, ‘How Many Histories of Labor? Towards a Theory of Postcolonial Capitalism’, European Institute for Progressive Cultural Policies, 2012, at eipcp.net. 6.Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? (Winchester: Zero, 2009). 7.Similar arguments have also been made about postmodernity. See Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity: An Enquiry into

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Possibilities’, Mackinac Center for Public Policy, 4 January 2006, at mackinac.org. 16.This can be conceived in cultural terms as the creation of ‘capitalist realism’. See Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? (Winchester: Zero, 2009). 17.‘In such a situation, hegemony has nothing to do with the capacity to make people

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Age of Acquiescence: The Life and Death of American Resistance to Organized Wealth and Power (New York: Little, Brown US, 2015), Chapter 6. 32.Fisher, Capitalist Realism. 33.The shift from the secular, postcapitalist techno-optimism of Star Trek to the fundamentalist techno-pessimism of Battlestar Galactica is one example of this

Speculative Everything: Design, Fiction, and Social Dreaming

by Anthony Dunne and Fiona Raby · 22 Nov 2013 · 165pp · 45,397 words

, 2011. Feenberg, Andrew. Transforming Technology: A Critical Theory Revisited. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002 [1991]. Feenberg, Andrew. Questioning Technology. New York: Routledge, 1999. Fisher, Mark. Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative. Winchester: 0 Books, 2009. Flanagan, Mary. Critical Play: Radical Game Design. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2009. Fogg, B.J.Persuasive Technology

Blank Space: A Cultural History of the Twenty-First Century

by W. David Marx · 18 Nov 2025 · 642pp · 142,332 words

the history books, if it gets a mention at all.” The movement’s failure to achieve tangible victories reinforced theorist Mark Fisher’s idea of “capitalist realism,” in which we could no longer even imagine a “coherent alternative” to the current economic system. Surprisingly, OWS struggled to find a foothold in mainstream

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richest person in the world. Perhaps some millennials embraced leftist critiques of capitalism, but even they admitted that their generation was mostly swept up in capitalist realism. Marxist writer Malcolm Harris argued that young people conceived of themselves as “human capital” to be optimized, driving an obsession with credentials, efficiency, and career

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://archive.nytimes.com/dealbook.nytimes.com/2012/09/17/occupy-wall-street-a-frenzy-that-fizzled. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT idea of “capitalist realism”: Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? (Zero Books, 2022), 2. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT “ally with whites”: Stacey Patton, “Why African Americans Aren’t

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long before poptimism; see Theodor Adorno, The Culture Industry (Routledge Classics, 1991), 89–90. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT bored with repetition: Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? (Zero Books, 2022), 76. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT “The media class’s refusal”: Fisher

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, Capitalist Realism, 75. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT “products that are complex”: Fisher, Capitalist Realism, 75. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT “interested in being seen”: Caroline Busta, “The Internet Didn’t Kill Counterculture

Work Won't Love You Back: How Devotion to Our Jobs Keeps Us Exploited, Exhausted, and Alone

by Sarah Jaffe · 26 Jan 2021 · 490pp · 153,455 words

, and social democracy still had a grip on much of Europe. But TINA was the foundation of the phenomenon the British theorist Mark Fisher called “capitalist realism”—the idea that it is impossible to imagine any other way that the world could be organized. Neoliberalism relies on such realism, even when—or

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the privatized family as the necessary locus of social reproduction and a haven in a heartless world.” The collapse of communism and the triumph of capitalist realism has led to diminished imaginings, too, of how domestic work could be done differently. Instead, in the age of the “two-earner family,” we hear

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work long, grueling schedules to make up for the work that should be done by a much larger workforce. 35 Indeed, in the era of capitalist realism, charity itself became a business model. Perhaps the most famous example of this was Project (RED), U2 singer Bono’s branded clothing and tchotchke line

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command to love our jobs a brutal joke. We are, to steal a term from the feminist movement of the 1960s, having our consciousness raised. Capitalist realism has had a thousand growing cracks put in it since the 2008 financial crisis, and at any moment now it could shatter entirely. 4 And

Boom: Mad Money, Mega Dealers, and the Rise of Contemporary Art

by Michael Shnayerson · 20 May 2019 · 552pp · 163,292 words

artists, though no one could have predicted how high he would rise. Starting as a humble sign painter, he had appeared in a show called Capitalist Realism, a German send-up of Pop art, because “the artists associated with it were similarly interested in mass media and the banal.”48 Soon, he

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-us/1977/projects/82/. 47. Andreja Velimirovic´, “Joseph Beuys,” Widewalls, November 3, 2016, www.widewalls.ch/artist/joseph-beuys/. 48. Capitalist Realism, Tate, www.tate.org.uk/art/art-terms/c/capitalist-realism. 49. Elizabeth Day, “Marian Goodman: Gallerist with the Golden Touch,” Guardian, October 11, 2014, www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2014/oct/12