On the 10th anniversary of Fisher’s highly popular (in all senses of the word) and influential text, I want to sketch some of the salient points of our discussion, and to ask what critical purchase remains for the concept of capitalist realism in 2019, and beyond. But as a cultural product, its problem-space is also blatantly ‘ pre-’ certain pivotal historical moments that, vainly, we’d want it to address, and that the phantom limb of its explanatory power seems to grasp at: the Occupy Movement, the return of Western nationalisms, critiques of neoliberalism from the right, and the uptick of socialist rhetoric and political membership in US establishment politics. As an attempt at theorizing the predicament of the present, it dazzles with descriptive insights. Looming over our conversation was the feeling that the book seemed both timely and artifactual. This review-article argues that, while Fisher’s book provides valuable conceptual and strategic resources for the Left, it is hamstrung by several weaknesses – not the least of these a tendency to make unconvincing, sweeping claims about the novelty and distinctness of what Fisher terms ‘capitalist realism’ and a tendency to present a caricature of current left-wing thinking.On October 25 of this year, an interdisciplinary group of Stanford graduate students gathered to discuss Mark Fisher’s Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? (2009), as part of a workshop called The Contemporary. Building on this analysis, Fisher identifies some key tensions and contradictions in the ideological armour of contemporary capitalism and extrapolates from this some tentative strategic propositions for the anticapitalist Left. Fisher seeks to illuminate the major cultural and social effects of a post-Cold War politico-ideological condition in which (according to Žižek’s well-known observation) ‘it is easier to imagine the end of the world than it is to imagine the end of capitalism’. Abstract Mark Fisher’s Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? is a provocative polemical analysis of the narrowing of political horizons that has occurred over the past couple of decades and of the powerful ideological grip that capitalism holds on the collective, social psyche, destroying our capacity to imagine political alternatives.

Capitalist realism zero books