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Review [published August 2010]
Mark Fisher: Capitalist Realism
Ben Granger
The only game in town, and a rigged one at that. In what
is swiftly becoming ‘living memory’, capitalism is now
the only economic, social and political system deemed
possible, the logic of its late incarnation invading every
aspect of life, culture, even inner thought. So absolute
is its mental grip that when international finance capitalism
recently imploded in its own greed, devastating
the world, its victims reacted by obediently, meekly,
and pathetically recreating the whole shoddy system,
and handing their public services the bill. Stockholm
syndrome on a global scale.
Capitalist Realism looks at how the logic of this
social and spiritual stranglehold manifests itself in
a myriad of ways. From the meaningless marketbureaucracy
which infests public services, to the
nihilist-materialism of gangster films and gangsta rap,
from the faux-humanitarianism of Bill Gates and his
fellow generous oligarchs, to the omnipresent PR of all
business and government functions, now not just a tool
but an end itself. All neo-liberal life is here.
Mark Fisher writes at the fascinatingly digressive
cultural website k-Punk, and here as elsewhere uses
BUY Mark Fisher books online from and
contemporary cultural fiction as both reference and
launchpad for his analysis. He begins with the suggestion
that the film Children Of Men is the apocalyptic
fantasy most appropriate to the capitalist age – a sterile
populace representing a sterile culture, not openly totalitarian
yet nonetheless brutal, completely atomised,
all public space abandoned, and connecting with the
suspicion that ‘the end has already come’. Most importantly,
that there really does seem to be no alternative.
As Fisher notes, “It is easier to imagine the end of the
world than the end of capitalism.”
The nature of this murky triumphalism is such that
this ‘post-Fordist’ capitalism is a far more amorphous
creature than that which appeared in the old ‘capitalist/
worker’ duality that characterised the conflicts of old.
The new capitalism asserts “we’re all in this together”
(to quote our present regime), the system is everyone
and everyone is the system – to question its logic is
to question the logic of life itself, of your own sanity.
As the class war is rejected the savage disparity inherent
in the system has increasingly turned into internal
conflicts, with mental illness spreading at an exponen-
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