In the final weeks of 2024, the news cycle featured the first schism in MAGA ranks since Donald Trump’s triumphant performance in the most recent U.S. presidential election. At issue was the status of H-1B visas, those visas for skilled workers who hail disproportionately from India and China and who so significantly constitute the work force of Silicon Valley. In response to Laura Loomer’s criticism of the visa program as contrary to the sacred writ of “America first,” Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy, his short-lived partner at the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), double-downed on their defense of the visas.1 Indeed, they urged an expansion of the H-1B program. When confronted with criticism on X, Musk played the bully: “Take one step back and FUCK YOURSELF in the face. I will go to war on this issue the likes of which you cannot possibly comprehend.” Steve Bannon was quick to enter the fray as the self-appointed defender of populist nationalism. Condemning the “tech overlords” who use “the entire immigration system… to their advantage,” Bannon ultimately declared that Musk “should go back to South Africa.”2 The battle over how exactly to “make America great again”—what “great” in this context even means—was underway. It is a battle that pits neoliberal economics against nativism, the richest men in the country against the working class, globalization against the sovereignty of the nation-state.
The battle, however, did not last long. Quickly, Trump endorsed Musk’s position on H-1B visas, while Musk began running DOGE on his own and appearing on the cover of Time magazine, seated behind the “Resolute Desk” in the Oval Office as the unelected CEO of the country. As for Bannon, having failed to oust Musk from Trump’s inner circle, he shifted to the long-term project of transforming his rival into a populist nationalist. While certainly not the last word on the contest between “America first” nationalists and Silicon Valley’s Wall Street-conscious oligarchs, this round clearly went to the latter. The message was clear: Even amid the militarization of the U.S.-Mexican border and the promise of mass deportation of undocumented immigrants, when nativist push comes to neoliberal shove, you can take your populist nationalism and “FUCK YOURSELF in the face.”
From the perspective of the collection of essays we have brought together here, this brief conflict over how MAGA will define itself is an object lesson in the conflict between a necessarily porous neoliberal state defined as the maximizer of corporate profits and an enclosed nation-state defined by racial exceptionalism. As the triumph of the neoliberal state, Musk’s victory testifies to the rentier dispossession and arbitrary, personalistic sovereignties thatcritics including Cedric Durand, Yanis Varoufakis, Jodi Dean, Wolfgang Streeck, and Robert Brenner term “techno-feudal,” while also throwing light on the emergence of the peculiar corporate populism—a hybrid of the Bannon-Musk regimes—peddled most prominently by Trump himself.3 As such, the Bannon-Musk contest is also a reminder of the staying power of what Mark Fisher called “capitalist realism,” that “widespread sense that not only is [neoliberal] capitalism the only viable political and economic system, but also that it is now impossible even to imagine a coherent alternative to it.”4 Even White supremacy and the anti-immigration zeal among the MAGA base must bow to the needs of Wall Street and Silicon Valley.
At the same time, however, the Bannon-Musk contest also reminds us that capitalist realism has developed and changed in the 15 years since Fisher first published his surprise bestseller, and that Fisher’s largely Anglo-American archive was never sufficient for capturing the heterogeneity of the experience and power of capitalist realism in either the Global North or Global South. Moreover, if we have witnessed a backlash against neoliberal globalization that has facilitated the rise of populist nationalism and neo-fascist political parties alike, we have also seen the emergence of resistance movements on the left, including the Arab Spring, the Occupy movements around the globe, horizontilidad in South America, massive labor strikes in China and India during the COVID-19 pandemic, and the renewed socialist consciousness spurred by climate change, planetary crisis, and the increasingly dramatic disparity of income. Certainly, pace Fisher, there have always been those who can and do imagine “coherent alternatives to capitalism,” even when they do not believe those alternatives can prevail (Blyn). Those imagined alternatives, as well as all of the anxieties and desires that attend them, continue to find aesthetic expression in a variety of media. In this cluster, our objects of analysis include film and television (Blyn, Bose and Willwerscheid, Dima, Janzen, Tsen), video games (Bose and Willwerscheid), narrative fiction (Aldrete, Sarte-Wood), public monuments (Aldrete), and graphic novels (Lupascu). The essays variously bear witness to the experience and staying power of capitalist realism in different corners of the world, even as they elaborate myriad struggles to imagine and sustain alternatives to it.
As they pay tribute to the continued relevance of Fisher’s work, the essays in our cluster take up a range of concepts he identifies with capitalist realism, including depressive hedonia, capitalist and postcapitalist desires, bureaucratic expansion, the crumbling of authority structures, the transformation of the public into individual consumers, and the potency of the Lacanian Real, among others. At the same time, the essays expand, revise, and complicate Fisher’s conclusions by attending to the specific national traditions they engage, historical events that Fisher could not have predicted, and the exigencies of genre and media. As they travel from Puerto Rico to China, the Philippines and Senegal to Mexico, the Suez Canal, and Hollywood, these essays reveal the developing conditions of neoliberalism that inform struggles against it. In the process, they engage a wide array of other theoreticians and philosophers. These include some of Fisher’s own inspirations in Capitalist Realism, such as Fredric Jameson, Alain Badiou, and Slavoj Zizek, as well as like-minded contemporaries like Jodi Dean, Laura Berlant, Leigh Claire La Berge, Alberto Toscano, Michael Löwy, and Michael Hardt. Doubtless, the reader will also find names with which they are less familiar, including historian and political theorist Achille Mbembe, anthropologist Haidy Geismar, political scientist Charmaine Chua, and economist Elena Gil, among others. Through these engagements, the essays provide insight into the power of capitalist realism and the potency of imagined alternatives, however tenuous, temporary, or contained.
Why is capitalist realism so entrenched? What accounts for its capacity to thwart challenges from the political left and the political right? Any answers to such questions necessarily entail the recognition of the complex constellation of factors at work. Several of the essays in our collection elaborate elements of this constellation. Robert Tally’s “Ever Given; or, the Crisis Called the World System” contends that it is only in moments of crisis or rupture that we begin to apprehend the totality of the neoliberal “world system” in its material complexity. Such a crisis took place in the Suez Canal on March 23, 2021, when the container ship Ever Given turned sideways and blocked traffic through the canal for six days, costing world trade about $9.6 billion a day, or almost $7 million every minute. The value of attending to the incident lies for Tally in rendering visible the sheer, material complexity of global trade, including the “the very people whose lives and labor are given over to this industry.” Echoing Jameson’s well-known argument in “Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism,” Tally suggests “it remains for art, such as that available through literature and criticism, to map these spaces of the transoceanic world system and to register the real work of those who labor in it and who make our ever-given reality possible.”5 Tally effectively justifies the turn to aesthetic objects that preoccupy so many of the essays in this cluster.
In contrast to Tally, Maria Bose and Jason Willwerscheid identify capitalist realism’s entrenchment with the mediascape’s remarkable twenty-first-century consolidation under the tech titans. Attuned to resulting pressurization of a neoliberal system tending toward techno-feudalism, Bose and Willwerscheid read Jonathan Nolan’s recent series adaptation of Bethesda Studio’s Fallout video game franchise for Amazon Prime Video as a complexly reflexive allegory for the “competitive synergy” of two such titans, Amazon and Microsoft (which acquired Bethesda in 2021). “An occupation of capitalist realism’s horizons of possibility as striking for its seamlessness as its asphyxiation,” Bose and Willwerscheid write, Amazon’s newly-launched “Shop the Look” and “X-Ray” features enact Nolan’s series as formal echo to Fallout’s role-playing gaming interface, cannily dissolving realism into hyper-real product fetishism while conveying the technical affinities by which Microsoft and Amazon would totalize their market dominance across complementary sectors of global computing and e-commerce by way of such nested consumer gateways as Microsoft Game Pass and Amazon Prime. Such consolidation and hypermediation fosters an incarnation of capitalist realism that leads inevitably to the provocation with which Bose and Willwerschied conclude: “It’s Amazon and Microsoft’s world, for better or worse.”
Similarly attuned to capitalist realism’s mediation but focused, instead, on the neoliberal state expansion rather than its attenuation, Rebecca Janzen’s “Capitalist Realism, Human Rights and the Documentary Mode” offers an institutional critique honed by two federally-funded documentaries about Eufrosina Cruz Mendoza, an indigenous woman from Oaxaca, Mexico, who ran for local office in violation of the indigenous customary law “that women could not vote for local elections or run for local office, even though Mexico had extended suffrage to women in 1953.” As Janzen reveals, the documentaries remain trapped in capitalist realism both because, as per the genre of human rights documentaries, they “focus on the personal” at the expense of systemic or institutional analysis, and, further, because they rely on state-sponsored grants for their funding. The result are films that confirm a capitalist realist agenda, urging voting reform within the existing if unacknowledged framework of a militantly neoliberal system. Janzen demonstrates the extent to which these democracies effectively deny any contradiction or antagonism between democracy and the neoliberal state. Here, funding by the neoliberal state, like corporate media control, serves as an effective adjunct to capitalist realism.
Querying capitalist realism’s entrenchment while prospecting its transcendence, like Tally, John Waldron attends to a moment of crisis, one that creates a rupture in the neoliberal order that allows for the emergence of mutual aid as an alternative to capitalism: Puerto Rico in the aftermath of hurricanes Irma and María, when Puerto Ricans were forced off the electrical grid and abandoned by their government. As “people were forced to leave the cyber-spatial sensorium that allowed them to think that they are complete and entire unto themselves,” Waldron observes, “it was possible to glimpse what a world structured by camaraderie might look like.” That condition of camaraderie and collectivism was short lived, a testament to the power of what Fisher called “capitalist desire;” once the electrical grid was restored, camaraderie and mutual aid dropped dramatically. Waldron’s work thus begs questions posed by many of the essays in our cluster: How do we sustain the alternatives to capitalist realism that we not only imagine but actually realize, however ephemerally? How do we nurture post-capitalist desires? What genres and modalities have emerged to grapple with the global institutionalization and ideological entrenchment of neoliberalism?
The remaining essays in this cluster turn to literature and film as a means of exploring these questions and, as such, they necessarily question the role of the aesthetic in generating, provoking, or otherwise signaling the basis for hope in a postcapitalist future. In “Disorienting Locations: Fugitivity and Hope in Olivier Kugler’s Escaping Wars and Waves: Encounters with Syrian Refugees,” Victoria Lupascu takes seriously Fisher’s conception of “senseless hope” as a modality of hope the text marshals on behalf of neoliberalism’s dispossessed. Taking up Kugler’s graphic novel so as to “think alongside Fisher about the idea of hope as a radical gesture, while taking into consideration concepts such as fugitivity and their association with forced transnational and transcontinental movements,” Lupascu discovers in Kugler’s juxtaposition of words and images an attempt to capture Syrian refugees’ concomitant experience of “anguish and courage.” If hope is “senseless,” insofar as it responds to profoundly intractable world-systemic eruptions, it’s precisely in Kugler’s rendering of Syrian refugees’ compelled stasis and internal dynamism that his text registers the present’s intolerability while motivating toward its redress.
“Cruel optimism” is the concept Darwin Tsen invokes in order to theorize something akin to that conundrum. In “Cruel, Optimistic, Violent: Realism’s Capitalism in Jia Zhangke,” Tsen recasts Lauren Berlant’s account of “cruel optimism” as “capitalist realism’s affective dimension” the better to illuminate what he terms “Realism’s Capitalism”: capitalist realism’s “aesthetic corollary, symptom, and solution,” supercharged by “cruel optimism” toward the project of “ideological re-enchantment.” In other words, For Tsen, Realism’s Capitalism is “an aesthetic practice and economic object that contains the seeds of futurity despite its own enmeshment within the dogmas of the capitalist present.” Jia Zhangke’s Touch of Sin (2013) is exemplary. Here, as affect resists narrative containment, “it discloses [the] artwork’s resistance towards capitalist-realist narratives and thereby potentiate[s] its negation.” So, too, Diana Aldrete considers the potency of what she calls an “affective aesthetics. Her “Affective Aesthetics: Reimagining Memorials in Mexico” targets “speculative practices that reorient memory from passive commemoration to lived experiences,” and from the individual burden of the past to collective responsibility. By juxtaposing the Glorieta de las Mujeres que Luchan (Roundabout of Women Who Fight) with Damián Miravete’s “They Will Dream in the Garden,” Aldrete demonstrates the ways that interactive “anti-monuments” to femicidal violence–in fiction and in fact– are memorial interventions in Mexico that resist the “fatalism” of capitalist realism precisely in the collective affective experiences they enable.
Where Tsen and Aldrete offer different expressions of affective aesthetics, Alden Sajor Marte-Wood’s “The Anti-Developmental Aesthetics of Reproductive Irrealism” turns the focus to affect labor. He proposes what amounts to a theory of Global North-South affective cost-shifting brought into focus by fiction of the Philippine diaspora. As Marte-Wood writes, “the daily sacrifices made my millions of overseas Filipino workers (OFWs) reveal an altruistic hedonism of deferral—a Global South complement to Fisher’s depressive hedonia in the Global North—wherein the OFW’s suspension of their individual pleasure principle enables the very livelihoods of their kin left behind in the Philippines.” Keyed to Filipina fiction’s privileged capacity to register this dynamic and also disrupt it formally, Marte-Wood tracks the emergence of what he terms an “anti-developmental aesthetics of reproductive irrealism.” Instanced by Mia Alvar’s second-person narration in her short story, “Esmerelda” (2015), Alvar’s distinctive and unsettling “you” addresses “readerly empathy as political-economic culpability, thereby holding the Global North and South’s combined but uneven manifestations of capitalist realism to account for their mutual complicity in the continued subordination of overseas Filipina reproductive labor.” Arcing that subordination toward “utopia” is Vlad Dima’s exfoliation of Mati Diop’s celebrated zombie love story, Atlantics (2019) in “Leaning into Utopia in the Global South.” Homing in on the turn to romance in contemporary Senegalese cinema, Dima finds a locus for political engagement and critique. Ultimately, Atlantics allegorizes the reparative virtue of an “emotional pleasure that resists commodification” and, at the same time, a specifically Senegalese intervention into Western Theory.
Contrarily, Robin Blyn’s “Desire in the Dark: From Capitalist Realism to Postcapitalist Desire” locates the demand for political action in a desire distinct from the “utopianism” that concerns Dima and which persists a priori of the “hope” theorized by Lupascu, Tsen, and others. Concurring with Fisher that capitalist realism entails a failure of the imagination, Blyn argues that it is not a failure to imagine postcapitalist “alternatives,” but, rather, the failure to imagine their success. The distinction makes visible the space between postcapitalist desire and hope. Taking Alfonso Cuarón’s Children of Men as her paradigmatic example, Blyn demonstrates that such postcapitalist desire finds aesthetic expression even—or especially—at its most defeated and resigned. While such desire traffics in doubt and despair, it remains crucially unlike the “left melancholy” censured by Wendy Brown, less prone to spiraling intellection, if also more nuanced in its conception of failure: a “crying out from the depths of our capitalist realist abjection” that demands amelioration.6 In short, Blyn demonstrates the extent to which postcapitalist desire allows for political action in the absence of the ontological fact of hope.
From the depths of our capitalist realist abjection circa 2025, might we yet summon such postcapitalist desires? As the clash of techno-feudalist and populist-nationalist regimes seems increasingly to yield an ever-intractable corporate populism, exceptionalizing tech-finance capital’s most bullish sectors, if also its predominantly white American executives, does the state’s accelerated arrogation of the political to the economic not seem to confirm Fisher’s abiding pessimism? Or might we yet transcend “left melancholy” along with its nihilistic therapies, creating, as Blyn writes, “the conditions for a hope we cannot ourselves produce?”
As you ponder these questions, we invite you to listen to our cluster playlist, a compilation of songs that appear in the texts that form the basis of our diverse analyses.
: :
: :
Endnotes
- See Rachel Dobkin, Newsweek, December 28, 2024. https://www.newsweek.com/elon-musk-war-maga-h-1b-visas-2006934
- See Joey Garrison, USA Today, January 13, 2025. https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/elections/2025/01/13/steve-bannon-elon-musk-evil-guy/77675412007/
- See Evgeny Morozov, “Critique of Techno-Feudal Reason,” New Left Review, no. 133/134 (2022): 89-126.
- Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? (Winchester, UK: Zero Books, 2008).
- Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism and the Logic of Late Capitalism (Duke University Press, 1991), 54.
- Wendy Brown, “Neoliberalism and the End of Democracy,” Edgework (Princeton University Press, 2005), 54-57.
Robin Blyn
Maria Bose
