mark fisher capitalist realism is there no alternative

And as anyone who picks this book up will see, he looked in many, many places. Mark saw that resignation to neoliberalism everywhere he looked. “Neoliberalism now shambles on as a zombie,” he writes, “but as the aficionados of zombie films are well aware, it is sometimes harder to kill a zombie than a living person.” Rather, it’s a widespread sense of resignation over the foregone conclusion that neoliberal capitalism is the only game in town.

Those social forces were tied, no doubt, to the concept he was most famous for: “capitalist realism.” Capitalist realism, he wrote in his book of the same name, is “the widespread acceptance that there is no alternative to capitalism.” It’s not an enthusiastic embrace of neoliberal capitalism - that embrace has long passed, if it ever existed. But Mark came to see that voice as “the internalized expression of actual social forces.” And those forces “have a vested interest in denying any connection between depression and politics.”

That voice felt deeply personal, to be sure. He often experienced his depression as a “sneering” voice inside his head. And the social has given us plenty to be depressed about over the past four decades. As he wrote in several essays in K-Punk : The Collected and Unpublished Writings of Mark Fisher (2004-2016), recently published by Repeater Books, he came to see depression as also a social affliction. For Fisher, depression wasn’t solely an individual affliction, the result of a miswired brain or an imbalanced chemical or two.

That struggle culminated in his suicide on January 13, 2017. Mark Fisher struggled his entire life with depression. Adapted remarks delivered at a Chicago panel discussion on the life and work of Mark Fisher, on the occasion of the publication of K-Punk.

Mark fisher capitalist realism is there no alternative