What better time, if not summer, to catch up on, or re-read, a paperback as brief as it is desperate about the reality we are inhabiting? Mark Fisher, undisputedly one of the finest British intellectuals at the turn of the new millennium, packs an easy-to-read book on the confusing contemporary reality based on the instability and monolithic condition of global capitalism, and does so in the midst of the financial crisis of 2007-2008 and about ten years before its suicide.
A bit like in psychology, understanding the problem, accepting it, is a fundamental part of the cure, then accepting the capitalist nefariousness, understanding the total absence of alternatives and accepting our existential condition, which is not caused by us but by the social and political consequences in which we are immersed, can only be a good starting point to understand ourselves and be reborn.
A sublime portrait of the ideological misery of the 21st century made in pop culture blows, a manifesto on the social and psychological condition of all the Earth’s inhabitants, but in particular of the much mistreated Western Millennials, those who most of all paid the price for certain evolutions of the 1980s, a prophetic mirror on reality that abandons the mocking postmodern theories, an emotional vortex that leads to bitter laughter.
“It is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism,” says Fischer. Try as he might, it is undoubtedly so. With the title of the first chapter so simple and yet so illuminating, how can you not want to be emotionally drilled by this seemingly so formal and cold essay?
A sublime portrait of the ideological misery of the 21st century made in pop culture blows, a manifesto on the social and psychological condition of all the Earth’s inhabitants, but in particular of the much mistreated Western Millennials, those who most of all paid the price for certain evolutions of the 1980s, a prophetic mirror on reality that abandons the mocking postmodern theories, an emotional vortex that leads to bitter laughter.
“It is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism,” says Fischer. Try as he might, it is undoubtedly so. With the title of the first chapter so simple and yet so illuminating, how can you not want to be emotionally drilled by this seemingly so formal and cold essay?
Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism. Is There no Alternative?, Zero Books, 2009
