The point he is making is that despite the GFC and the near collapse of the world financial system, that is, just when you might have thought capitalism would have been in serious trouble, it barely trembled. It also quotes Thatcher’s TINA: There Is No Alternative.

This book starts with the quote from either Zizek or Jameson, that it is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism. As such it remains mostly invisible to us because it is the air we breathe or perhaps it is the air we don’t notice weighing down upon us at 101 kPa or, shifting metaphor yet again, as Bourdieu liked to say, it is the yes we say in answer even before the question has been asked. It is, rather, an all-encompassing way of life. Perhaps that is because it looks too much like western advertising from the 1950s – and we have learnt to be suspicious of perfect little worlds that are a single purchase away.Ĭapitalist Realism isn’t just an art movement, although it is that too, with advertising being its high art. When we look at Socialist Realism today we see it as all too obviously propaganda.

Socialist Realism was pointedly ideological, and the point was to create images of healthy and vibrant people doing whatever it took to make that better world. It was conceived as a means to create a new kind of human – often called the new man – the point being to present heroic visions of people engaged in labour that was setting out to build the new and better world.

Capitalist realism book