Mark Fisher's Capitalist Realism [3-week Reading Group, $150 suggested]

Instructor: Andrews | Thursdays June 9-23 | 7:00-8:30 PM ET

“It’s easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism.” Mark Fisher’s 2009 treatise, Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative, begins with this famous claim attributed to Marxist scholar Fredric Jameson. Fisher argues that since 1989, “capitalism has successfully presented itself as the only realistic political-economic system–a situation that the bank crisis of 2008, far from ending, actually compounded.” Why is it so hard to imagine an alternative? Why do our lives seem inextricably determined by and beholden to an economic system that exacerbates inequality while stealing our time, work, and energy for someone else’s profit? The book analyzes the development and principal features of this capitalist realism as a lived ideological framework. Using examples from politics, films, fiction, work and education, it argues that capitalist realism colors all areas of contemporary experience. But it will also show that, because of a number of inconsistencies and glitches internal to the capitalist reality program, capitalism in fact is anything but realistic.” Over the course of three weeks, we will read this short but dense and powerful 90 page work, unpacking why we’ve come to perceive life under capitalism as the only possible reality, and ask what we can do about it.
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