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Books like Capitalist Realism

Loved Capitalist Realism by Mark Fisher? Here are 10 books with the same pull, and why each one fits.

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10 books

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  1. 1Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism

    Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism

    Fredric Jameson

    It is the main source for Fisher's ideas about how culture and economics shape each other under late capitalism.

  2. 2The Sublime Object of Ideology

    The Sublime Object of Ideology

    Slavoj Žižek

    It explores how ideology works as a lived structure rather than a set of explicit beliefs, a central theme in Fisher's book.

  3. 3Specters of Marx

    Specters of Marx

    Jacques Derrida

    Fisher draws on its ideas about haunting and the persistence of unrealised futures in his wider critical work.

  4. 4The Shock Doctrine

    The Shock Doctrine

    Naomi Klein

    It traces how free-market policies were imposed after crises, which helps explain the sense of inevitability Fisher describes.

  5. 5Debt

    Debt

    David Graeber

    It questions the assumed natural basis of market economics by tracing how money and debt have been understood across history.

  6. 6Undoing the Demos

    Undoing the Demos

    Wendy Brown

    It examines how neoliberal reasoning reshapes democratic life and public values, a concern that runs through Fisher's account.

  7. 7The Dispossessed

    The Dispossessed

    Ursula K. Le Guin

    It is a novel about an anarchist society set against a capitalist world, and Fisher uses Le Guin to think about imagining alternatives.

  8. 8The Precariat

    The Precariat

    Guy Standing

    It describes the insecure work and lack of stability that Fisher links to the experience of work under neoliberalism.

  9. 9The Burnout Society

    The Burnout Society

    Byung-Chul Han

    It analyses the exhaustion and self-exploitation of achievement-driven societies, close to Fisher's account of depression as a political condition.

  10. 10Capital in the Twenty-First Century

    Capital in the Twenty-First Century

    Thomas Piketty

    It gives an empirical account of inequality and capital returns that supports the critique of neoliberal economics Fisher makes in more cultural terms.

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