Logo image
Back
Capitalist Realism at 15: An Introduction
Journal article   Open access   Peer reviewed

Capitalist Realism at 15: An Introduction

Robin R Blyn and Maria Bose
ASAP Review: open access reviews of arts of the present, Vol.Capitalist Realism at 15(Statehood, Multipolarity, and the Global South)
09/15/2025

Metrics

1 Record Views

Abstract

reviews capitalist realism
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 that critics 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. 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.
url
Capitalist Realism at 15: An IntroductionView
Published (Version of record) link to article Open CC BY V4.0

Related links

Details

Logo image