Capitalist Realism cover

Capitalist Realism

by Mark Fisher

Can we imagine anything but this?

For you if

you have the persistent sense that the way things are is not the way they have to be but can't find the language for why everything feels so stuck

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Fisher's central argument fits in one sentence — it is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism — and the book spends eighty pages proving it. Writing in 2009 from inside the wreckage of the financial crisis, Fisher examines how capitalism has not just dominated the economy but colonized the imagination: the sense that there is no alternative, that the market is simply reality, that resistance is nostalgia. He connects this to mental health, to education, to bureaucracy, to the specific exhaustion of living inside a system that presents itself as natural. The most important piece of cultural criticism of the 21st century. Short, dense, essential. The book that gives language to a feeling most people in the P&P audience already have but can't quite name.

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