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As one of its most evocative chapter titles asked, with almost childlike clarity and hopefulness: what if you held a protest and everyone came? It set aside solipsism, irony and ego to imagine a community of people united by a simple belief that things were not OK – and then to offer the tantalising possibility that this imagined community might soon become a social reality capable of changing the world. Whatever political and theoretical nuances it might otherwise have implied, this was a book which called for a joining of human hands.Ĭapitalist Realism went on to become one of the seminal political texts of the 2010s, and beyond. This is the near-spiritual message in the short, sharp text of Capitalist Realism, published on the eve of a new and tumultuous decade.

Also, more hopefully, it said that if we were to realise this, and somehow make connections between our several hardships, we would be taking the first step towards doing something we seemed to have mostly forgotten about by the late Noughties: mounting an organised resistance. In a political system which endlessly promoted the notion that we were all alone, Fisher’s book announced that we were suffering together. In a society where everything was arranged to make you think that emotional well-being began and ended with your own personal psychodrama, perhaps the most important thing Capitalist Realism did was to suggest that mental suffering might have something to do with structural flaws in society as a whole. For me, and for many others, encountering Mark Fisher’s Capitalist Realism in 2009 felt like coming up for air.

Capitalist realism by mark fisher