Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative?

by Mark Fisher

it is easier to imagine the end of the world than it is to imagine the end of capitalism.

Actually, a Jameson/Zizek quote, but true nonetheless. (As evidenced by mankind's handling of the pandemic and climate change.)

ultra-authoritarianism and Capital are by no means incompatible:

And Pinochet's Chile is not the only example of this

Superstition and religion, the first resorts of the helpless, proliferate.

It's not a coincidence that radical Christianity is now aligned with the Far Right, and embraces "values" that are literally diametrically opposed to the New Testament

So long as we believe (in our hearts) that capitalism is bad, we are free to continue to participate in capitalist exchange.

A very cynical assessment: even resistance has been incorporated - like a Black Mirror episode

Environmental catastrophe is one such Real. At one level, to be sure, it might look as if Green issues are very far from being ‘unrepresentable voids’ for capitalist culture. Climate change and the threat of resource-depletion are not being repressed so much as incorporated into advertising and marketing.

The significance of Green critiques is that they suggest that, far from being the only viable political-economic system, capitalism is in fact primed to destroy the entire human environment.

cf. The Culture of Extinction

The ‘mental health plague’ in capitalist societies would suggest that, instead of being the only social system that works, capitalism is inherently dysfunctional, and that the cost of it appearing to work is very high.

As Harvey shows, neoliberals were more Leninist than the Leninists, using think-tanks as the intellectual vanguard to create the ideological climate in which capitalist realism could flourish.

Capitalism perfected propaganda and calls it "PR" and "commercials"