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A review by whoischels
Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? by Mark Fisher
informative
slow-paced
4.0
Provides a tight thesis on how the capitalist soup we live in leads to bureaucracy, affective disorders, and general cultural weirdness. Oddly prescient. Some of his citations predict things like the glut of movie remakes and sequels right now, as well as just...the existence of something like Buzzfeed. This functions as a good primer on ideas from Zizek, Badiou, and Deleuze and Guattari, and I have some good ideas about what I want to read next in this category. I suspect that this was also a good vocabulary dump intro to some of the ideas in anti-capitalist philosophy (e.g. Big Other).
Cons:
- Gets really ranty in the affective disorders section. This man hates his students.
- There are some ideas I don't really buy into, like the section on paternalism, and it being needed to have a thriving culture. Idk about that, though I do think Fischer expanded the definition of paternalism significantly while making this argument.
- Made me realize that a lot of my ideas about freedom of choice and work-flexibility are Post-Fordist neolib ideas. Sad.
Cons:
- Gets really ranty in the affective disorders section. This man hates his students.
- There are some ideas I don't really buy into, like the section on paternalism, and it being needed to have a thriving culture. Idk about that, though I do think Fischer expanded the definition of paternalism significantly while making this argument.
- Made me realize that a lot of my ideas about freedom of choice and work-flexibility are Post-Fordist neolib ideas. Sad.