#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.

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“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.

#books #nonfiction

“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.

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First published in 2014, ‘Utopia for Realists’ is an intervention by ‘rock star historian’ Rutger Bregman to rescue the Left (who are terminally boring) by injecting fresh and radical thinking into stale policy debates. And his ideas certainly are radical. Utopia for Realists unapologetically advocates for a Universal Basic Income (UBI), the abolition on migration controls, and a 15 hour work week. With these three ideas, Bregman sets out to do two things. First, to expand our horizons and teach the Left how to think big again. And second, to demonstrate that all three policies are actually less utopian, and more plausible and beneficial, than most of us think. To do this, Bregman takes us through a lightning, though well-referenced, argument for all three proposals, and he certainly manages to persuade of their plausibility.

The whirlwind pace, though, as well as the book’s tendency to rely on sweeping generalisations, do at times make it feel somewhat like a TED Talk or Buzzfeed listicle in book form: “Three Easy Steps to Revolutionise Your Society”. On closer inspection, the eloquence and academic rigour with which Bregman puts forward his proposals don’t fully manage to obscure some glaring gaps in his analysis. Of these, the one that will confront the reader most prominently is the question why, if these proposals are both just and efficient, we are nowhere near adopting them. If, as Bregman contends, his ideas make for better societies for everyone, then what is holding us back?

#books #nonfiction #history

A saying often incorrectly attributed to Joseph Stalin tells us that whereas the death of one person is a tragedy, the death of millions is merely a statistic. While often used cynically, it describes a genuine phenomenon that we find it easier to relate and emphasise to the misfortunes of individuals, and that death or suffering on a large scale becomes literally incomprehensible to our minds. Yet in his book Late Victorian Holocausts, author Mike Davis fuses statistics and tragedy to describe how the combination of recurring droughts and integration into the capitalist system inflicted a colossal human cost on regions we now call the Global South.