He begins with the suggestion that the film Children of Men is the apocalyptic fantasy most appropriate to the capitalist age – a sterile populace representing a sterile culture, not openly totalitarian yet nonetheless brutal, completely atomised, all public space abandoned, and connecting with the suspicion that ‘the end has already come’. Mark Fisher writes at the fascinatingly digressive cultural website k-Punk, and here as elsewhere uses contemporary cultural fiction as both reference and launchpad for his analysis. From the meaningless market-bureaucracy which infests public services, to the nihilist-materialism of gangster films and gangsta rap, from the faux-humanitarianism of Bill Gates and his fellow generous oligarchs, to the omnipresent PR of all business and government functions, now not just a tool but an end itself. Stockholm syndrome on a global scale.Ĭapitalist Realism looks at how the logic of this social and spiritual stranglehold manifests itself in a myriad of ways. So absolute is its mental grip that when international finance capitalism recently imploded in its own greed, devastating the world, its victims reacted by obediently, meekly, and pathetically recreating the whole shoddy system, and handing their public services the bill. In what is swiftly becoming ‘living memory’, capitalism is now the only economic, social and political system deemed possible, the logic of its late incarnation invading every aspect of life, culture, even inner thought.

The only game in town, and a rigged one at that.

Capitalist realism review