Capitalist Realism – Dispatches from the Eternal Present
#books #nonfiction #politics #culture #boundedimagination
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.