Capitalist Realism
A few pages into this book took me back to the late 2000s
Its tone, its references, the debate at its core immediately transported me back. It took me a while to dispel the nostalgia of the debate and try to peer more earnestly at the book.
I still do not know how to think about what I found. In some ways its core message feels so dated. An argument from within “the end of history”. That we needed to find a way to wake a population from a belief that “there is no alternative”. In politics there are always alternatives, of varying degrees of palatability.
Once the Cold War ended however, western capitalism ceased to see itself as “one system” (it might argue the best), amongst others. Instead it began to be presented as something more “natural”. It was just reality itself. Alternatives became unrealistic, unserious, naïve. Not worth considering.
Much of the debates I remember were how you escape this world. How do you restart the process of imaginative alternatives. How could you picture a better world.
These debates feel dated now. An artefact of a “soft power” world that consolidated itself but with a smile and open hand. The 2020s feel more like a “hard power” world, where the fault lines are easier to see, perhaps easier to imagine resisting, but the force threatened is overwhelming. Imagining the alternative may no longer be the preeminent problem.
I don’t think this book is just a historical curiosity though. The world it describes was not fully replaced, just superseded. Some of what he describes lives on alongside the present.
I found sections on mental health, bureaucracy and audit culture, education, crisis management as post-politics, and nostalgia clear and relevant. The move there may still be to narrow what is thinkable, beyond alternative.
So even if it is a bit of a blast from the past, I’d recommend it as reading in the mid-2020s.
After "Capitalist Realism" I read: Classic Chinese Stories by Lu Xun
Before "Capitalist Realism" I read: Hayek's Bastards