After discussing Mark Fisher’s Capitalist Realism in my last post, it felt appropriate to follow it up with a seminal text by one of the other key representatives of the early 21st Left: David Graeber. Graeber was strongly involved with the Occupy Movement and is credited with coining its famous “we are the 99%” slogan. An anthropologist by training, Graeber, like Fisher, applied his critical eye to a whole range of social phenomena, including debt, bureaucracy and social resistance. Sadly, also like Fisher, Graeber died too young, succumbing to acute necrotic pancreatitis in 2020.
Where Fisher gave us the insight that it remains easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism, one of Graeber’s enduring concepts is that of ‘bullshit jobs’. Bullshit jobs made their debut in a short essay in STRIKE! Magazine in 2013, which remarkably is still online. The essay generated a flurry of interest, including several surveys commissioned by pollsters like YouGov, which led Graeber to expand it into a full sized book. Unfortunately, what makes for a strong provocative essay does not necessarily translate into convincing social analysis. I had a vague recollection of Graeber’s argument from having read the essay years ago, and as with Fisher’s Capitalist Realism remember the sense of it expressing a truth that we all feel but can find hard to express. I was intrigued how Graeber had developed the original argument of the essay into a full length book, so decided to give the audiobook a listen. This was, sadly, a disappointment. The book is a padded out version of the essay, with the padding reinforcing its weaknesses and diminishing its strengths.
Every now and then a text is published that explosively captures its zeitgeist. For early 21st century Britain (and the West beyond), Mark Fisher’s Capitalist Realism: Is There no Alternative is such a text. The title of its first chapter (“It is easier to imagine the end of the world than to imagine the end of capitalism”) has become and remains a truism on the Left. The first part of the book’s title has become the descriptive term for the pervasive sense that there is, indeed, no alternative. That we are forever stuck in an Eternal Present of a crumbling public realm, increasing precarity and environmental disintegration, all the while being told by our capitalist overlords that this really is the best of all possible worlds.
Capitalist Realism came out in 2009, resonating with the politics that emerged from the Great Financial Crash: Occupy, student protests in the UK and elsewhere, the abortive resistance to austerity, the failed revolutions of the Arab Spring. If anything, events since then reinforce the observation that resistance is indeed futile. Reading Capitalist Realism for the first time in 2025, I was struck by how much it is of its time yet remains relevant today.
There must be a point where history becomes culture. When the cultural artefacts by which we choose to remember an event overgrow it to such an extent as to obscure it. It seems this is what has happened to the Great Financial Crash of 2008. The shock, despair and anger of those times have long since dissipated, while we continue as if nothing has happened in our Eternal Present, and cultural commentary on the Crash has been safely defanged for consumption as mere entertainment.
The immediate aftermath of the Crash saw a flurry of books, movies and documentaries trying to make sense of what happened and, maybe more importantly, what didn’t happen afterwards. These were followed by plays, such as the The Lehman Trilogy. Premiering at the Edinburgh International Festival this year Make It Happen is a play in the same tradition about the meteoric rise and fall of Royal Bank of Scotland and its CEO, Fred Goodwin.
In 1992 Francis Fukuyama published his now infamous The End of History and the Last Man, commonly understood to proclaim that with the victory of liberal market democracies, history had run its course and we could all kick back and relax in the knowledge that we lived in the best of all possible worlds. A lot of history has happened since then, and continues to happen. Yet our collective cultural imaginary remains singularly foreshortened, giving rise to the oft-cited observation that it is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism. In the spirit of Mark Fisher’s Capitalist Realism, we might say that Fukuyama’s book would have been better titled ‘The End of the Future’.
The hegemony of the present and the absence of a plausible alternative future is particularly noticeable in much science fiction. I’m with Ursuala K. le Guin in that good science fiction tells us something about the present, but sadly much of it simply is the present, with added spaceships. Mass Effect, originally released in 2007 but re-released as a remaster in 2021, is a prime example of the latter type of science fiction. I decided to replay it partly for nostalgia, and partly because I never played the third installment of the trilogy.
“Where is the revolution?” With rising inequality, impending ecological breakdown, ongoing genocide – many of us feel that ‘something should be done’,. Then we look around and see everyone else turning up at work, doing the dishes or just trying to get through the day. And so we, too, put the day’s misery out of mind and get on with it. The rent must, after all, be paid.
Hegemony Now! – How Big Tech and Wall Street Won the World (and How We Win It Back) Jeremy Gilbert & Alex Williams interrogates why this happens. Why, if so many of us so acutely feel the injustices of our present moment, does nothing ever seem to change? Gilbert and Williams seek the answer in an update of Antonio Gramsci’s concept of hegemony. Gramsci introduced the term during the days of Mussolini’s fascism to describe the ability of one group in society to exercise control over everyone else. Control here doesn’t need to mean men with guns, nor does it mean total control of the North Korean variety. Instead, hegemony describes a state where a dominant group, or bloc of groups, manages to get just enough of the rest of us to do as they wish to keep themselves in power, using a variety of means, most of them not directly violent.
Clarke’s Third Law teaches us that “any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic”, but magic does not necessarily make for a good story. This is the fundamental weakness of Cixin Liu’s Remembrance of Earth’s Past trilogy, which starts with The Three Body Problem. Over the course of three books, Cixin Liu introduces us to a dazzling array of cosmic wonders. Amidst this onslaught of speculative tech, human agency becomes so marginal that the story devolves into a mere mechanism for delivering a steady stream of scientific curios.
I chose to review the series in its totality, so this is a longer post than normal. What follows is a brief overview of each book, followed by a conclusion on the entire series.
It has been a long time since a game has made me cry.
Towards one of the endings of Citizen Sleeper, there is a choice. It is not the common type of ‘moral’ videogame choice that is as subtle as being hit in the head by a careening trolley. It is not a choice about acting, but about being. About what it means to live, to connect, to relate. It does not have a right or wrong answer. It offers a beautiful gift and a profound loss either way you choose. It is a choice that makes the player think, and even now I still don’t know if I chose wisely.
Citizen Sleeper is a game set on Erlin’s Eye, a decrepit and gradually decaying orbital space station, abandoned by its corporate owners and left to fend for itself. You are a Sleeper; a copy of a human mind imprisoned in a cybernetic body. You are not human, because you are an artificial creation. You are not AI, because your mind is a human intelligence. Where you come from, you were property. Where you’ve arrived, you are a fugitive.
Halfway through Civil War, the protagonists are confronted by an unidentified militia who asks them who they are. He has just casually shot one of their friends, so it is a rather pointed question. “Americans”, answer our reporters. “What kind of Americans”, is the retort, followed by a version of Russian Roulette where hailing from the wrong state means death.
This scene also featured in the movie’s trailer, for obvious reasons. Its visceral depiction of how the unifying signifier ‘American’ has fractured invites the audience to believe this disintegration is not only possible, but plausible. As a trailer this is effective, prompting the viewer to wonder how we got here, with the intent that they go and see the movie to find out. Which makes encoutering this scene again in the movie itself all the more disappointing, because by then, we are still looking for the answer.
“Change is hard” reads the opening of Burnout by Hannah Proctor. It is undeniably true. What is also true, as Proctor cogently argues, is that we don’t recognise this and its implications often enough.
Burnout is Proctor’s attempt to recast how we think about mental health and healing, predominantly in left-wing movements, drawing on a variety of historical experiences. The book is organised as a series of meditations on different mental maladies: melancholia, PTSD, depression, and so forth. In each chapter, Proctor explores how these maladies specifically afflict activists, how these have responded, and how Left thinking has diverged from, or engaged with, mainstream psychiatry.
“The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brain of the living,” s_aid Karl Marx. And while he had the proletariat in mind rather than the aristocracy, the words might have been the motto of Mervyn Peake’s Gormenghast Trilogy. Published between 1946 and 1959, Gormenghast gets classed as prototypical fantasy. Nowadays, it might have been labelled magical realism, suffused as the entire series is with the logic of dreams, where time, space and fate all bend in service of the story.
All three books follow Titus Groan, Seventy-Seventh Earl, first as child, then as youth and finally as a young man. Yet the main character of the novel is not Titus, but the eponymous castle of Gormenghast. Gormenghast is the ur-castle of our European collective imagination: so vast, complex and ruinous that even its lifelong inhabitants cannot fathom it. It is miles of crumbling ramparts and towers, battlements and courtyards, corridors and chambers, arrested in a permanent state of slow decay. Think the castle from Disney’s Beauty and the Beast, except if it was 20 times larger and designed by M.C. Escher. It would eat Hogwarts for breakfast.
As labyrinthine as the castle are the rituals of the House of Groan. They are the sediment of contingent decisions and events of generations of Groans, ossified into strictures that lock the castle’s inhabitants down in time in the same way the physical castle contains them in space. It is the rituals and the castle together that hold the essence of the House of Groan. Any living members of the line are incidental. As a metaphor for any old, impoverished, anachronistic aristocratic English family, stuck on a decrepit estate surrounded by mouldering artifacts of a glorious past, it could not do any better.