Summary of Mark Fisher's Capitalist Realism

Please note: This is a companion version & not the original book. Book Preview:

#1 In the film Children of Men, it is difficult to imagine a world without capitalism. The world that it projects seems more like an extrapolation or exacerbation of ours than an alternative to it.

#2 The film connects with the suspicion that the end has already come, and that the future will only be re-permutation and re-iteration. It is clear that the theme of sterility must be read metaphorically, as the displacement of another type of anxiety.

#3 The power of capitalist realism derives in part from the way that it subsumes and consumes all of previous history. It objectifies and commodifies all cultural objects, and in doing so, transforms practices and rituals into mere aesthetic objects.

#4 The end of history heralded by Francis Fukuyama after the fall of the Berlin Wall is often derided, but it is accepted at the level of the cultural unconscious. The idea that history has reached a terminal beach is not just triumphalist, but also warning that history’s specters will be Nietzschean rather than Marxian.

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Release date

Ebook: 20 July 2022