The Cultural Critic Who Saw Through the Veil
Mark Fisher (1968-2017) became one of the most incisive cultural theorists of the early 21st century, offering a critical perspective that connected cultural production, political economy, and collective psychology. As a writer, philosopher, cultural critic, and educator at Goldsmiths, University of London, Fisher developed theoretical frameworks that continue to resonate with growing urgency in today’s cultural landscape. His influential blog “k-punk” transformed into a vital intellectual space in the early 2000s, blending analyses of music, film, and literature with political theory and philosophy, before being compiled in book form.
Fisher’s work stands out through its distinctive fusion of high theory with popular culture, Marxist analysis with music journalism, and political critique with personal reflection. His intellectual trajectory was shaped by post-punk music journalism of the late 1970s, particularly publications like NME, which intertwined music, politics, cinema, and fiction. This background influenced his ability to analyze cultural artifacts as expressions of deep social and political realities.
What makes Fisher’s work increasingly relevant is his diagnosis of contemporary capitalism’s psychological effects—how it shapes economic structures and our very capacity to imagine alternatives. His concept of “capitalist realism” provides a powerful framework for understanding the ideological atmosphere we inhabit, where capitalism appears as the only conceivable reality, constraining our collective imagination and fostering a pervasive sense of political impotence.
Capitalist Realism: The Invisible Prison of Imagination
Fisher’s most influential concept, articulated in his 2009 book “Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative?”, describes the post-Cold War condition where capitalism appears as the preferred economic system and the only possible reality. The phrase deliberately echoes Margaret Thatcher’s infamous declaration that “there is no alternative” to market-oriented policies. For Fisher, capitalist realism functions beyond a belief system; it operates as a “pervasive atmosphere” conditioning cultural production, work, education, and mental health.
This atmosphere functions as a “collective psychic infrastructure,” a “transpersonal ideological field” that constrains thought and action in ways that often remain invisible to us. It manifests as a sense that radical change is impossible—that we can adjust aspects of capitalism, without going beyond it. As Fisher memorably puts it, “it is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism.”
What distinguishes capitalist realism from simple ideological domination is its ability to operate at a deep, almost unconscious level. It convinces people through arguments and shapes the limits of what can be thought or imagined in the first place. The system’s greatest triumph consists in making certain questions appear meaningless. When alternatives to capitalism are proposed, they are dismissed as unrealistic, impractical, or naive.
Cultural Expressions of Capitalist Realism
The cultural sphere serves as both a mirror and engine of capitalist realism. Fisher analyzed how contemporary culture reflects and reinforces the sense that capitalism represents the only viable reality:
The Recycling Machine
A visible symptom of capitalist realism in culture is what Fisher calls “the slow cancellation of the future”—a growing sense that cultural innovation has stagnated, replaced by endless recycling, reworking, and nostalgic retrospection. While the 20th century saw dramatic artistic revolutions and avant-garde movements, contemporary culture increasingly appears defined by remakes, reboots, and revivals. This goes beyond a question of aesthetic preference and reflects a deep imaginative stagnation—a difficulty in conceptualizing genuine alternatives to the present.
We see this in cinema with its dependence on franchises and remakes, in music with its recursive relationship with past styles, and in literature with its retreat from modernism’s experimental impulses. This “frantic stagnation” manifests in a paradoxical combination of constant activity with minimal genuine innovation. As Fisher observed, this nostalgia-driven cultural industry reveals the erosion of modernism’s future-oriented sensibility, replacing it with an eternal present that recombines familiar elements rather than creating genuinely new forms.
Absorption and Commodification of Critique
Fisher highlighted capitalism’s remarkable ability to absorb and neutralize critiques. Anti-capitalist themes are routinely packaged and sold as entertainment, allowing audiences to experience a frisson of rebellion without questioning the underlying system. Films criticizing corporate culture become blockbusters financing multinational corporations; anti-consumerist art is sold at premium prices; revolutionary aesthetic becomes fashion trends.
This “objective irony of capital” means that “nothing sells better than anti-capitalism” in late capitalist culture. The system performs a kind of “interpassivity” where art “performs our anti-capitalism for us, allowing us to continue to consume with impunity.” The revolutionary impulse becomes an aesthetic pose rather than a political stance, safely contained within commercial structures.
Naturalization of Business Ontology
Fisher identified how capitalist realism successfully implemented a “business ontology”—the assumption that everything in society should be run as a business. This manifests culturally through the adoption of corporate language, values, and practices in spheres previously governed by different logics.
We see this in educational systems reframed around “deliverables” and “performance metrics,” in healthcare systems organized around “efficiency” and “customer satisfaction,” and in arts institutions judged by their “return on investment.” This colonization of non-economic spheres by market logic appears as simple common sense—the most “realistic” way to organize social life.
The Privatization of Stress and Mental Health
One of Fisher’s most penetrating insights concerns how capitalist realism handles mental health. While rates of depression, anxiety, and other psychological distress have risen dramatically under neoliberalism, the system insists on treating these conditions as purely individual biological problems, rather than recognizing their social and political dimensions.
Fisher questioned this depoliticization of mental illness, arguing that the “mental health plague” afflicting contemporary societies cannot be adequately understood or addressed if viewed as a private problem of defective individuals. Instead, he connected the increasing mental distress to the pressures of precarious employment, competitive individualism, constant assessment, and the erosion of community support structures.
This “privatization of stress” serves the ideological function of redirecting attention away from capitalism’s psychological costs, placing responsibility on individuals to manage their well-being through medication, therapy, and self-care practices. The system produces widespread suffering while simultaneously selling palliatives for that suffering, all while preventing us from addressing its structural causes.
Beyond Capitalist Realism: Fisher’s Proposals
Despite his sobering diagnosis, Fisher did not resign himself to melancholy. Throughout his work, he explored possible routes beyond capitalist realism, inviting us to abandon resignation and collectively build exits from current crises. His later work increasingly focused on how to reopen possibilities for the future:
Hauntology and Lost Futures
In “Ghosts of My Life” (2014), Fisher developed the concept of hauntology (borrowed from Jacques Derrida) to describe the persistent sense that contemporary culture is haunted by the specter of futures that failed to materialize. These “lost futures” of modernity—the possibilities for social transformation, technological liberation, and artistic innovation promised by earlier eras—continue to haunt our cultural imagination.
Recognizing this haunting becomes a potential source of resistance, as it reminds us that the present wasn’t inevitable and that alternative paths once existed. By acknowledging what has been lost, we might begin the work of imagining new possibilities beyond capitalist constraints.
Collective Political Subjects
Fisher emphasized the need to construct new collective political subjects capable of questioning capitalist realism. Against neoliberalism’s atomization of society into competitive individuals, he called for rebuilding forms of solidarity and collective action that could articulate and fight for alternatives.
This would involve overcoming the fragmentation of the working class and the absence of a collective class experience that has been a major obstacle to effective resistance. Fisher suggested that new forms of indirect action and the revitalization of public space would be important in this process.
Desire and Imagination
Fisher recognized that overcoming capitalist realism requires more than rational critique—it demands reactivating our capacity to desire and imagine alternatives. He explored how to “instrumentalize libido for political purposes,” understanding the crucial role of desire in shaping political and social landscapes.
This approach connects to his interest in the counterculture of the 1960s and 1970s as a source of inspiration for expanding collective consciousness and recognizing the provisional and transformable nature of reality through collective desire.
Fisher’s Relevance Today
The continuing relevance of Mark Fisher’s work lies in its ability to diagnose the pathologies of our time while pointing to possibilities for transformation. His analysis provides conceptual tools for understanding phenomena ranging from the rise of right-wing populism to climate crisis denial, from the gig economy to social media addiction.
Fisher would likely view today’s “self-care” culture as a symptom of capitalist realism’s privatization of stress, where structural problems are reframed as personal issues to be managed through individual consumption and lifestyle adjustments. Similarly, glorifying “hustle culture” and entrepreneurial self-promotion represents the internalization of business ontology, where everyone becomes an enterprise to be optimized.
Fisher’s work helps us recognize emerging questions to capitalist realism. Movements for mutual aid, climate justice, labor organizing, and artistic collectives experimenting with non-commercial forms represent attempts to break through the constraints of capitalist imagination and build alternatives in practice.
Conclusion: Opening the Future
Mark Fisher’s premature death in 2017 left a legacy of critical thought that continues to influence and inspire those seeking to overcome capitalist realism and invent new futures. His work offers a powerful diagnostic framework for understanding our current situation and conceptual resources for imagining beyond it.
In a world facing interconnected ecological, economic, political, and psychological crises, Fisher’s call to reactivate the imagination of alternatives has never been more urgent. Against capitalism’s colonization of consciousness, his work reminds us that different worlds are possible if we can break through the seemingly impenetrable barrier of “realism” that constrains our collective imagination.
The question Fisher leaves us is theoretical and practical: How can we build cultural, political, and psychological spaces where alternatives to capitalism become conceivable and achievable? The work of answering this question—of reopening the future that capitalism has closed—remains our shared responsibility.