This review-article argues that, while Fisher’s book provides valuable conceptual and strategic resources for the Left, it is hamstrung by several weaknesses – not the least of these a tendency to make unconvincing, sweeping claims about the novelty and distinctness of what Fisher terms ‘capitalist realism’ and a tendency to present a caricature of current left-wing thinking. Building on this analysis, Fisher identifies some key tensions and contradictions in the ideological armour of contemporary capitalism and extrapolates from this some tentative strategic propositions for the anticapitalist Left. Fisher seeks to illuminate the major cultural and social effects of a post-Cold War politico-ideological condition in which (according to Žižek’s well-known observation) ‘it is easier to imagine the end of the world than it is to imagine the end of capitalism’. For Fisher, capitalism currently runs on a logic of ‘precorporation’ (CR: 9), meaning that presently (at least in ‘the West’), capitalism no longer must incorporate or recuperate alternative cultures such as the countercultural and workers movements of the 1960s and 1970s (CR: 7-9) to keep functioning. Fisher’s work on the notion of capitalist realism and interventions to the political imaginary of neoliberalism were critical to our intellectual formation as a collective.

Mark Fisher’s Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? is a provocative polemical analysis of the narrowing of political horizons that has occurred over the past couple of decades and of the powerful ideological grip that capitalism holds on the collective, social psyche, destroying our capacity to imagine political alternatives. Capitalist Realism : Is There No Alternative by Fisher, Mark and a great selection of related books, art and collectibles available now at .uk.

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