In a society where everything was set up to make you think that your emotional wellbeing began and ended with your own personal psychodrama, perhaps the simplest, most important thing Mark’s book did was to suggest that, just maybe, mental suffering might have something to do with structural flaws in society as a whole.

I was depressed, I suppose - in the trough of my mid-twenties, and looking for explanations about why even the basics of twenty-first-century work, social, and private life seemed so hard, so disempowered, so existentially thankless.įor me - and for many others in a similar place both then and since - encountering Capitalist Realism really did feel like surfacing (to cite the title and central theme of Margaret Atwood’s haunting novel of 1972 - a canonical text for Mark). At the time, I had just suffered a head-on collision with the music industry, after a long period of post-teen crisis sparked by a series of family bereavements. Reading these phrases back now, well over a decade later, I’m slightly embarrassed by the wording, but not at all by the sentiment. I would like to thank you from the bottom of my heart for giving such eloquent expression to pretty much everything that needed to be said, and for providing a reason to hope, when I for one was just about ready to despair.

I read your book Capitalist Realism last week, and it felt like coming up for air after a long time spent underwater.

‘Dear Mark,’ began an email of January 2010 to a man I had never met:

Capitalist Realism by Mark Fisher