I’ve been revisiting Mark Fisher’s Capitalist Realism lately. I discovered this book as an undergrad and proceeded to cite it in nearly every paper I wrote, probably to an obnoxious degree. Fisher’s work is surrounded by an aura of sadness, as he wrote thoroughly about mental illness in this book and Ghosts of My Life: Writings on Depression, Hauntology and Lost Futures. However, looking at his text in the atmosphere of the Los Angeles protests, I’ve been struck by the strength of its optimistic convictions. Though the hopefulness under Capitalist Realism’s surface is overshadowed by the tragic circumstances of Fisher’s life, perceiving the ways he challenged our political imagination feels urgent. It’s a book that’s still full of wisdom in 2025.
Capitalist Realism, a treatise on neoliberalism’s hindrance of the imagination, speaks to how we are made to think another world eludes the grasp of reality. He defines the phrase “capitalist realism” as “the widespread sense that not only is capitalism the only viable economic system, but also that it is now impossible even to imagine a coherent alternative to it” (2). We accept capitalism because “that’s just the way it is” and can’t conceive of a different society. It’s so ingrained in our cultural logic and inner psyche that our creativity is stifled. Since the book was published in 2009, the stifling social conditions that inform our acceptance of capitalism have only been exacerbated.
Who can’t see the causal threads of the War on Terror and 2008 financial crash in the fascist armadas terrorizing the immigrant population of LA? Fisher writes, “the normalization of crisis produces a situation in which the repealing measures brought in to deal with an emergency becomes unimaginable” (1, emphasis mine). The fascists want us to think they’re too powerful to stand a chance against. They will use our limited cultural imagination against us.
CEOs lining up at Trump’s anointment made the link between capitalism and fascism clear to everyone. Fascism is the stronghold a dying capitalism needs to sustain itself, a dying capitalism that exploits us with ever-increasing cost of living, ever-decreasing wages and continual lack of meaning in work.
It’s not speculation. Capitalism is dying, but its death won’t inherently result in a better world. Fisher writes, “Capitalist realism can only be threatened if it is shown to be in some way inconsistent or untenable; if, that is to say, capitalism’s ostensible ‘realism’ turns out to be nothing of the sort” (16). We have to imagine that better world to bring it to fruition.
fascism and reality
The Real, following Lacanian psychoanalysis, would be any reality the spectacle is trying to hide. In Debord’s terms, the spectacle is capitalism’s projected reality through “mediated images.” Fascism wants to destroy books and induce censorship as further ways to obfuscate this true reality. The Real is the reality they don’t want you to see, so they create spectacle. Fisher accurately cites the unavoidability of climate change and our growing mental health crisis as examples of such hidden Reals.
I’ve been reflecting on an example of the Real that is specific to the current rise of fascism. One such Real could be that we have the numbers. There are more people willing to protest than there are to fall in line. However, as Slavoj Žižek notes, the Real is a hidden trauma, not just a hidden fact. He writes, “the Real Thing is ultimately another name for the Void. The pursuit of the Real thus equals total annihilation, a (self)destructive fury within which the only way to trace the distinction between the semblance and the Real is, precisely, to STAGE it in a fake spectacle” (libcom). What are the horrors of fascism they’re trying to hide through propaganda AI images and CEO worship in the mainstream media?
The Real could be the horrors themselves, but they don’t appear to be hidden. Maybe that’s what fascism does, make it so the Real is no longer mediated by propaganda. The spectacle is the Real.
One characteristic of modern fascism is that it’s buffoonery, the Real on the other side of meritocracy. Umberto Eco points out that “elitism” and a “cult of heroism” are intrinsic to fascism. The function this holds for the Trump regime is to hide their incompetence. We can see the “inconsistency” and “untenability” of capitalism in the supreme ruler’s visible decrepititude and his now ex-tech bro’s drug-addled social media frenzies. These people are not nearly as powerful as they’d like you to think they are.
The incompetence of the elites isn’t just a symptom of the loud-and-proud, it’s indicative of their bootlickers across the aisle too. Couched in the language of civility and respectability, the failure of Democrats to stand up to fascism reveals itself as cowardice. We see the Real in the failure of our leaders to effect any change, a condition that has plagued the Democratic Party for decades.
The realization of this Real, the incompetence of the powerful, is traumatic in a psychoanalytic sense. Though perhaps following Winnicott more than Lacan, it mirrors both the true self/false self schism and the stage of parental disillusionment. A tenet of Winnicott’s idea of the “good enough” mother is that “Infant development [can be] distorted by maternal care that is not good enough” (33).
It may sound silly because our faith in leaders is at a new low, but I think our frustrations come from the trauma of seeing those with power be so fucking far from good enough. The failure and incompetence of leadership is what out fascists, Democrats and CEOs want to hide. It’s the Real that disproves the realism of capitalism, revealing it to be spectacle.
mental health under fascist realism
The experience of trauma in encountering the Real of our dipshit leaders doesn’t seem great for our mental health. Fisher wrote about the effects of capitalism on our mental health before “doomscrolling” was entered in the Oxford English Dictionary, when blogging was in its heyday and social media platforms hadn’t yet become beholden to the all-powerful algorithm.
What he did write about that feels more pertinent now than ever is the “privatization of stress.” He writes, “Capitalist realism insists on treating mental health as if it were a natural fact” and argues that “Instead of treating it as incumbent on individuals to resolve their own psychological distress… we need to ask: how has it become acceptable that so many people, and especially so many young people, are [mentally] ill?” (19). It’s become acceptable because we’ve lost the creative capacity to imagine any other way. Though there are significantly more workers than bosses, we can’t help but internalize the mental health inducing stressors of the workplace. We don’t see collective bargaining as a viable option because of the skeletal state neoliberalism has left labor power in, even though that itself was once “unimaginable” (17).
For Fisher, the “‘mental health plague’ in capitalist societies” is another example of the Real. Mental health struggles erase the surface of the spectacle because they “suggest that, instead of being the only social system that works, capitalism is inherently dysfunctional, and that the cost of it appearing to work is very high” (19). If there were no other way to structure society, then why are we all so depressed and anxious?
There’s a tendency to associate Fisher’s work with despair knowing the circumstances of his life, but Capitalist Realism does not theorize that mental illness is permanent or a natural consequence. Fisher emphasized the impact social conditions have on our experience of mental illness, that those social conditions are not the only way and that we can be a happier, healthier society. Fisher does the opposite of despair. He encourages us to resist this tendency, to strengthen the capacities of what we believe possible.
The purpose of this is not to preclude biochemical analysis of the brain, but to leave the reader feeling like they have autonomy. It doesn’t have to be like this. If we cease the individual privatization of stress we’ve internalized, we will feel less alone. We all struggle. There are literally a handful of people in this world who aren’t subjugated by the ever-increasing wealth gap between rich and dispossessed, who don’t feel despondent seeing ICE kidnap civilians and protesters bulldozed by SUVs and rubber bullets, who aren’t experiencing those traumas first-hand.
the failures of post-structuralism at the end of postmodern capitalism
It really is that black-and-white. Fisher was an avid reader of Fredric Jameson and responsively, a critic of postmodernism. That’s a big scary word. It’s been used in every context imaginable to mean everything under the sun. That itself is a product of postmodernism, the breakdown in our understanding between signifier and signified, or, the presentation of a word and what it means. A breakdown of meaning that results from heightened economic disparity.
Jameson noted the cultural depthlessness that occurred with “the great semiotic opposition between signifier and signified” (62), a depthlessness that he characterizes as endemic to postmodernism. Postmodernism generally, I think, is best understood as the hollow cultural impasse we’ve found ourselves in since the hegemony of neoliberalism asserted itself. This process started perhaps as early as the 1960’s and was fully cemented in the 1980’s with Thatcherism-Reaganism. It’s the poverty we feel as the wealth gap grows amidst the empty oversaturated artistic landscape of nostalgia porn simulacra.
If, as Jameson surmises, postmodernism is “the cultural logic of late capitalism,” the two are intrinsically bound. Since we’ve already established the handshake between fascism and capitalism, it’s easy to see how fascism is the iron fortress at the death of the postmodern world.
Jameson seemed to see a link between postmodernism and post-structuralism. He at times uses the two interchangeably in naming the “poststructural or postmodern period” (62). They are not interchangeable terms, but Jameson’s usage as such suggests he thought post-structuralist theory opened the door to the depthlessness of postmodern culture. Post-structuralism, broadly, is a skepticism towards totalizing narratives. Eerily relevant to Fisher’s case, Jean-François Lyotard expressed post-structuralist resistance towards “great master-narratives… that suggest that something beyond capitalism is possible” (xix)
I was once seduced by this decentralized view of post-structuralism. Particularly in Michel Foucault’s far-reaching analysis of micropower and in Lee Edelman’s rejection of futurism. The History of Sexuality and No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive were also formative texts for me. At our current political moment however, I’ve become more skeptical of how much that horizontal view really matters when faced with the totality of power. The amount of power exchanged in the relations Foucault was concerned with seem to pale to those Marx and Jameson are concerned with. Where fascism isn’t a far-off theoretical, but a mainstay of our everyday lives, rejecting a vision of the future beyond capitalism seems like giving their armies the winning hand.
yes future
Another world is possible. Postmodern capitalism is on its deathbed and fascism is its surgeon. We can imagine better futures through our art. Alternatives to capitalist realism can be found in the schism of joy and oppression that characterizes Stevie Wonder’s Innervisions and Songs in the Key of Life, the prescience of humanity’s optimism in the face of imperialist-fascist conflict on Star Trek: Deep Space Nine and more recently, the triumphantly mythic call to stand against oppression at the end of the world on Christian Mistress’s Children of the Earth LP.
Fisher knew another world was possible. Perhaps he despaired in his personal life because he understood that, yet saw we were drifting towards global fascism over the next fifteen years. Maybe he succumbed to the very ideas he argued so persuasively against in Capitalist Realism. The tragedy of that is the world needs his voice now more than ever. All we can do is look to what was preserved, make sure it is preserved, and find new wisdom in it. Wisdom we can use to our purposes.
If you’re depressed by the state of the world, we are all are. If you’re thinking of leaving, please don’t. We need you. Let’s not just imagine a better future, let’s fight for it. The LA protests prove that fascism cannot stamp out our will to live. “Those of us who want more with our victories are not foolish. Those of us who see the potential for a promised land, even if we have resigned ourselves to the fact that we might not be alive to bask in it” (Abdurraqib 320).
-Meadow
works cited
Hanif Abdurraqib, There’s Always This Year: On Basketball and Ascension
Guy Debord, Society of the Spectacle
Umberto Eco, ‘Ur-Fascism’
Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative?
Fredric Jameson, ‘Postmodernism, or The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism’
Jacques Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis
Jean-François Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge
D. W. Winnicott, ‘The Maturational Processes and the Facilitating Environment: Studies in the Theory of Emotional Development’
Slavoj Žižek, ‘Welcome to the desert of the Real’
Fourth Dominion 