No really, let's talk about alternatives: Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative?

No really, let’s talk about alternatives

We should dream of a better world, but there are dreams that lead to action and others that keep us sleeping. Fisher’s is the latter. Capitalist Realism is persuasive about the extent to which capitalism has become normalized, shaping not only our institutions but the limits of what our generation can imagine. Yet diagnosis without alternatives is just complaint and for this topic, reifies the very subject of the essay! Feeling depressed? It is not your fault, it is capitalism’s fault. Perhaps. Now what?

The frustrating part is that alternatives are not merely hypothetical. Nordic and Japanese capitalism produce radically different outcomes from the American model. 20th century European social democracy offers another set of tradeoffs. Other periods and cultures give us still more material from which to decide what should be preserved, discarded, or rebuilt. Fisher spends so much time showing why capitalism feels inescapable, the book reproduces the paralysis it describes. A critique of political imagination should enlarge that imagination. This one mostly demonstrates why we have none.