Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? by Mark Fisher
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Truly remarkable precisely because it couches the problem of late stage capitalism in our concrete reality, it briefly, eloquently poses the exactly correct questions we should all be asking every day -- and realizing that we have all been fooled. That we are continually being fooled.

Here's the rub: We weren't always in this deep. There are still living people who remember the protections against runaway capitalism and the reality of a better way of doing things.

There was a massive push by capitalism, itself, to re-frame and re-contextualize the very concept of the profit motive, how people work, even the idea that good works could be offloaded as donations to non-profit mega-corps rather than the thing itself. (Look at carbon credit programs which have all almost entirely turned out to be fraud-schemes.)

And more importantly, look at what kinds of problems that capitalism can NEVER solve: the medical field, mental health, bureaucracy itself, or the circular self-serving nature of a monolithic money machine that cycles through the endless stages of control, from putting leashes on politicians, creating laws to benefit their profit margins, steamrolling popular opposition, controlling all narratives, and successfully silencing or exhausting the grand majority of the entire population -- making us all accept the fact of our Learned Defeatism.

The fact that practically all of us genuinely hate this entire system, sees how it is destroying us, and how we all wish it could just go away is really rather funny.

But it IS the core narrative. Capitalism is designed to have everyone hate it IF ONLY TO OFFER UP A PLEASING PRODUCT MADE BY CAPITALISM TO FIX THE PROBLEM THAT IT, ITSELF, CREATED.

See the trap?

None of us will get out of this without understanding that there are no quick-fixes, no products we can buy, and we can't even trust our near-universal cry of: "Oh, there's nothing that I (singular, just me,) can do." That line has also been programmed into us by the same people who make 500+ times our take home salaries. Honestly... should we trust their narrative?


This book is pretty amazing. It is smart, short, and drives each point home in a way that old masterworks on economic theory rather fail to do. This, at least, holds up an unclouded mirror.

It's VERY relevant for today.

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