Capitalist Realism – Dispatches from the Eternal Present

#nonfiction #politics

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.

At only 81 pages, Capitalist Realism does not pretend to be an all-encompassing analysis or programmatic manifesto. It is an attempt at sense-making, at articulating something that many of us experience but are unable to express. It is this ability to give voice to the psychological impact of existing within late-stage capitalism, weaving together observations on culture, academia, precarity and bureaucracy, that give Capitalist Realism its enduring significance. There is something undeniably true in Fisher’s examples, and while nobody will identify with all of them, Fisher convincingly demonstrates how they all trace back to the way our lives are structured under Actually Existing Capitalism.

Fisher’s examples are very much inflected by his own experience as a precariously employed academic and cultural critic, but are broadly recognisable nonetheless. There is the increasing bureaucratisation of targets and form-filling, familiar to anyone who has been to hospital, only to receive a text message afterwards asking if they would recommend the experience to friends and family. There is the absence of cultural innovation and counter-culture, which feels even truer now we have been forced to watch the same three superhero movies for over a decade. There is the growing sense of despair, expressing itself as a mental health crisis in particular among the young. And above all, there is the crushing sense of powerlessness that comes from being unable to hold anyone accountable for what is happening to us. From being entangled in a web of overlapping public and private institutions that are all somehow ‘involved’ but never actually responsible. In 2009, it was the aftermath of the financial crisis that generated the feeling of collective impotence. In 2025, it is the long shadow of Grenfell, the toeslagenaffaire or the literal enshittification of the UK’s waterways.

In a way, nothing that Capitalist Realism tells us is new, and that is sort of the point. The enduring value of the book lies in three ways in which it helps us change our relationship to the cultural and political stasis in which we appear to be inextricably trapped.

First, it is just good to know that we are not alone in how we feel. Fisher accurately diagnoses how pathological individualism and social atomisation leave us feeling isolated, frustrated and impotent. Capitalist Realism functions as virtual consciousness raising or group therapy, showing us that we are not alone in how we feel. This directly leads to its second merit, which is to juxtapose our individual powerlessness with the power of collective action. Not that Capitalist Realism is an organising manual, but it does posit a revitalised left-wing project centred on both collective action and an active/creative collective culture as a possible way out of the trap of capitalist realist inertia, which at least suggests a course of action to the reader.

Capitalist Realism’s real power however is in how it gives name to the source of our existential dread and cultural miasma. It is a core principle of any magic that only when we know the true name of something can we hope to exert power over or vanquish it. Fisher’s enduring legacy is that he enabled us to express what afflicts us, as a first step towards overcoming it. It is why Capitalist Realism is as relevant today as when it was written, possibly even more so.

Similar to Burnout – How to be well in a sick world, or Bullshit Jobs – A Theory, Capitalist Realism doesn’t give us all the answers. But it does help us ask some of the right questions, and its dizzying array of cultural references, relatable personal insights and political theories give ample leads for an engaged reader to pursue further. For while Fisher is careful not to suggest that we can simply will our circumstances away, he is equally clear that with commitment to a collective, active, creative effort, we have a chance to reclaim our future from capitalist realism’s Eternal Present.

Notes & Suggestions