It is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism. After 1989, capitalism has successfully presented itself as the only realistic political-economic system - a situation that the bank crisis of 2008, far from ending, actually compounded. The book analyses the development and principal features of this capitalist realism as a lived ideological framework. Using examples from politics, film (Children Of Men, Jason Bourne, Supernanny), fiction (Le Guin and Kafka), work and education, it argues that capitalist realism colors all areas of contemporary experience, is anything but realistic and asks how capitalism and its inconsistencies can be challenged. It is a sharp analysis of the post-ideological malaise that suggests that the economics and politics of free market neo-liberalism are givens rather than constructions.

New Edition includes:

• Forward by Zoe Fisher, Mark's wife, talking about Mark as a person
• Introduction by Alex Niven, his friend and colleague, talking about the political significance of the book thirteen years after it was written
• Afterword by Tariq Goddard, the original editor and publisher, describing the writing and editing of the book, its original reception, and Mark's own view of it

A quick and entertaining read. Socialist Standard

A provocative and necessary read...for anyone wanting to talk seriously about the politics of education today. Times Higher Educational Supplement

'A must read for modernists, and for anyone who misses the future.' Bob Stanley, musician, journalist, author, and film producer

This collection of writings by Mark Fisher, author of the acclaimed Capitalist Realism, argues that we are haunted by futures that failed to happen. Fisher searches for the traces of these lost futures in the work of David Peace, John Le Carré, Christopher Nolan, Joy Division, Burial and many others.
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A brilliant critique of the Right with very sharp insight on some of the shortcomings of the Left, this book is a must-read for anyone looking to understand how dishonest actors spread their propaganda. Ana Kasparian, Host and Executive Producer of The Young Turks

Michael Brooks takes on the new Intellectual Dark Web.

As the host of The Michael Brooks Show and co-host of the Majority Report, Brooks was a progressive fighter whose work brought people together from around the world. In this, his first book, he lets his understanding of the digital media environment direct his analysis of the conservative rebels who had taken YouTube by storm in 2018.
Brooks provides a theoretically rigorous but accessible critique of the most prominent renegades including Sam Harris, Jordan Peterson, and Brett Weinstein while also examining the social, political and media environment that such rebels thrive in.

'Precise, clear, accessible, and important. I can think of no better introduction to the historical Jesus for the general reader, no clearer statement on the legacy of the Jesus movement in the sweep of subsequent history, or a more worthy challenge to contemporary scholarship on Jesus and the rise of Christianity.' Neil Elliott, author of Liberating Paul: The Justice of God and the Politics of the Apostle

What made the Jesus movement tick? By situating the life of Jesus of Nazareth in the turbulent troubles of first-century Palestine, Crossley and Myles give a thrilling historical-materialist take on the historical Jesus. Delivering a wealth of knowledge on the social, economic, and cultural conflicts of the time, Jesus: A Life in Class Conflict uncovers the emergence of a fervent and deadly serious religious organizer whose social and religious movement offered not only a radical end-time edict of divine reversal and judgment but also a promising new world order ruled in the interests of the peasantry. The movement's popular appeal was due in part to a desire to represent the values of ordinary rural workers, and its vision meant that the rich would have to give up their wealth, while the poor would be afforded a life of heavenly luxury. Tensions flared up considerably when the movement marched on Jerusalem and Jesus was willingly martyred for the cause. Crossley and Myles offer a vivid portrait of the man and his movement and uncover the material conditions that converged to make it happen.

'Like a pastry chef who can MacGyver a five-star dessert out of a Twinkie or a Jell-O packet, Anthony Galluzzo confects something special from the unlikeliest of industrial products: the 1974 Connery-Rampling vehicle Zardoz.' Matt Tierney, author of What Lies Between: Void Aesthetics and Postwar Post-Politics

Alongside scientific knowledge and collective effort, building a degrowth ecological society will require a different set of stories and myths than the big and fast Promethean fables we're accustomed to. Using Boorman's Zardoz as a tool, Into The Vortex unearths the artistic and intellectual output of a decelerationist 1970s, with an eye toward imagining a very different sort of future.

From social media to so-called 'AI', from cyberpunk society to automated apartheid, The New Flesh asks and answers the same questions: What does it mean to live in an increasingly online world and what is it doing to us? The thesis is this: Data production has permeated everyday life, on platforms that addict the bored and enslave the dispossessed. Communication has taken on an accelerated viral character, life is rendered ever more as a profitable simulation of itself, and new fascisms arise to disseminate themselves through cyberspace and develop their imperial weaponry. The platform is a factory for producing content, and security technologies are increasingly being trained by human beings displaced and enclosed within digitalized plantations. When we can understand the interconnections between the internet and the empire, we can fight back. By fusing Marx and Engels with William Burroughs, Mark Fisher, and contemporary Queer Theory, Adam C. Jones takes cybernetic philosophy beyond hype and hyperbole, presenting a materialist politics of the psychological and economic relations that permeate cyberspace today.

Recent years have seen a revival of the heated culture wars of the 1990s, but this time its battle ground is the internet. On one side the alt right ranges from the once obscure neo-reactionary and white separatist movements, to geeky subcultures like 4chan, to more mainstream manifestations such as the Trump-supporting gay libertarian Milo Yiannopolous. On the other side, a culture of struggle sessions and virtue signalling lurks behind a therapeutic language of trigger warnings and safe spaces. The feminist side of the online culture wars has its equally geeky subcultures right through to its mainstream expression. Kill All Normies explores some of the cultural genealogies and past parallels of these styles and subcultures, drawing from transgressive styles of 60s libertinism and conservative movements, to make the case for a rejection of the perpetual cultural turn.

The utopian project lies in ruins, but perhaps in our present moment, there are elements from the history of thought that can provide fresh resources for utopianism. In this groundbreaking introduction, Jon Greenaway explores the work of German philosopher Ernst Bloch, whose complex and challenging philosophy is a primer for a philosophical renewal of the struggle for a better world.

More than 15 years have passed since the speculative realism conference at Goldsmiths College, London, hosted Ray Brassier, Iain Hamilton Grant, Graham Harman, and Quentin Meillassoux. Their dictum was simple: Reality is not what it seems. 15 Years of Speculative Realism begins with four chapters, each dedicated to the work of a speculative realism panellist. On one level, their respective projects engaged with the great philosophical systems of yesteryear: Cartesian dualism; the Platonist distinction between reality and appearance; and the Kantian revival of noumena. But there is much more at stake here, such as the repositioning of the subject as yet another object in the universe, and the radically egalitarian view that individual human thought is best described as a local manifestation of nature. Through these observations, we are also encouraged to ask: 'Could the laws of physics change at any moment?' and 'How does thought think the gradual extinction of itself as but another perishable phenomenon in the physical universe?' Two further chapters offer wider context: the Analysis & Impact chapter evaluates speculative realism's relevance to the wider domain of philosophy, as well as its achievements and shortcomings, with commentary by Slavoj Zizek, and the Interviews chapter has contributions from Graham Harman, Ray Brassier, and Goldsmiths College's speculative realism conference coordinator, Alberto Toscano. As we prophetically enter into a new epoch - characterized by artificial intelligence and a withering climate - we call the Anthropocene, it seems that many of the insights offered to us through the speculative realist lens have come to fruition. The objective, now, is to speculate upon how far this major shift in the humanities will ensue, and how different this reality will be from our preconceived notion of the real offered to us by previous tenets of realism. This book charts the essential meaning of the movement in the wake of its spell as one of the most significant philosophical movements of the twenty-first century.

While the past 300 years have witnessed immense growth in productive capacity, the 'logic' of capitalist production is now pushing progress in all the wrong directions. We've passed the point where our biggest enemy is material scarcity. Our problems no longer revolve around insufficient production, but iniquitous distribution - and the fact that we're fast running out of planet - and these are problems that capitalism cannot solve. Taking in a diverse range of contemporary and historical evidence - from the Putney Debates of 1647 to Modern Monetary Theory, from John Locke to Thomas Piketty, from the Rights of Man to the rise of identity politics How Capitalism Ends navigates a path through current affairs, history, economics and philosophy and sets the scene for the conversation we, as a civilization, urgently need to begin...

In Airplane Reading, Christopher Schaberg and Mark Yakich bring together a range of essays about air travel. Discerning and full of wonder, this prismatic collection features perspectives from a variety of writers, airline workers, and everyday travelers. At turns irreverent, philosophical, and earnest, each essay is a veritable journey in and of itself. And together, they illuminate the at once strange and ordinary world of flight. Contributors: Lisa Kay Adam - Sarah Allison - Jane Armstrong - Thomas Beller - Ian Bogost - Alicia Catt - Laura Cayouette - Kim Chinquee - Lucy Corin - Douglas R. Dechow - Nicoletta-Laura Dobrescu - Tony D'Souza - Jeani Elbaum - Pia Z. Ehrhardt - Roxane Gay - Thomas Gibbs - Aaron Gilbreath - Anne Gisleson - Anya Groner - Julian Hanna - Rebecca Renee Hess - Susan Hodara - Pam Houston - Harold Jaffe - Chelsey Johnson - Nina Katchadourian - Alethea Kehas - Greg Keeler - Alison Kinney - Anna Leahy - Allyson Goldin Loomis - Jason Harrington - Kevin Haworth - Randy Malamud - Dustin Michael - Ander Monson - Timothy Morton - Peter Olson - Christiana Z. Peppard - Amanda Pleva - Arthur Plotnik - Neal Pollack - Connie Porter - Stephen Rea - Hugo Reinert - Jack Saux - Roger Sedarat - Nicole Sheets - Stewart Sinclair - Hal Sirowitz - Jess Stoner - Anca L. Szil gyi - Priscila Uppal - Matthew Vollmer - Joanna Walsh - Tarn Wilson

Our contemporary horror stories are written in a world where there seems little faith, lost hope, and no salvation. All that remains is the fragmentary and occasionally lyrical testimony of the human being struggling to confront its lack of reason for being in the vast cosmos. This is the terrain of the horror genre.

Eugene Thacker explores this situation in Tentacles Longer Than Night. Extending the ideas presented in his book In The Dust of This Planet, Thacker considers the relationship between philosophy and the horror genre. But instead of taking fiction as the mere illustration of ideas, Thacker reads horror stories as if they themselves were works of philosophy, driven by a speculative urge to question human knowledge and the human-centric view of the world, ultimately leading to the limit of the human--thought undermining itself, in thought.

Tentacles Longer Than Night is the third volume of the Horror of Philosophy trilogy, together with the first volume, In The Dust of This Planet, and the second volume, Starry Speculative Corpse.

Could it be that the more we know about the world, the less we understand it? Could it be that, while everything has been explained, nothing has meaning?

Extending the ideas presented in his book In The Dust of This Planet, Eugene Thacker explores these and other issues in Starry Speculative Corpse. But instead of using philosophy to define or to explain the horror genre, Thacker reads works of philosophy as if they were horror stories themselves, revealing a rift between human beings and the unhuman world of which they are part. Along the way we see philosophers grappling with demons, struggling with doubt, and wrestling with an indifferent cosmos. At the center of it all is the philosophical drama of the human being confronting its own limits. Not a philosophy of horror, but a horror of philosophy. Thought that stumbles over itself, as if at the edge of an abyss.

Starry Speculative Corpse is the second volume of the Horror of Philosophy trilogy, together with the first volume, In The Dust of This Planet, and the third volume, Tentacles Longer Than Night.

Universal human rights are intrinsically radical in espousing liberty, equality and fraternity for every single person. We must claim them.
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In the age of global capitalism, vaporwave celebrates and undermines the electronic ghosts haunting the nostalgia industry. Ours is a time of ghosts in machines, killing meaning and exposing the gaps inherent in the electronic media that pervade our lives. Vaporwave is an infant musical micro-genre that foregrounds the horror of electronic media's ability to appear - as media theorist Jeffrey Sconce terms it - haunted. Experimental musicians such as INTERNET CLUB and MACINTOSH PLUS manipulate Muzak and commercial music to undermine the commodification of nostalgia in the age of global capitalism while accentuating the uncanny properties of electronic music production. Babbling Corpse reveals vaporwave's many intersections with politics, media theory, and our present fascination with uncanny, co(s)mic horror. The book is aimed at those interested in global capitalism's effect on art, musical raids on mainstream indie and popular music, and anyone intrigued by the changing relationship between art and commerce.

In 2021, as part of a programme called Shaping for Excellence, bosses at the University of Leicester made redundant numerous scholars in what was simultaneously an attack on academic freedom and trade union organisation. The authors of Shaping for Mediocrity not only had front-row seats in the campaign against these mass redundancies, they were in the ring - both as targeted employees and as trade union officers and negotiators. Shaping for Mediocrity tells the inside story of these attacks and the campaign against them. It situates this story within a longer history of struggle to make the university a place where critical thinking is possible, showing how events in Leicester are both reflective of higher education in the UK following four decades of neoliberal 'reform' and a particularly egregious instance of the increasingly authoritarian management of public institutions such as universities.

Modern art is a mass phenomenon. Conceptual artists like Damien Hirst enjoy celebrity status. Works by 20th century abstract artists like Mark Rothko are selling for record breaking sums, while the millions commanded by works by Andy Warhol and Francis Bacon make headline news. However, while the general public has no trouble embracing avant garde and experimental art, there is, by contrast, mass resistance to avant garde and experimental music, although both were born at the same time under similar circumstances - and despite the fact that from Schoenberg and Kandinsky onwards, musicians and artists have made repeated efforts to establish a synaesthesia between their two media. Fear of Music examines the parallel histories of modern art and modern music and examines why one is embraced and understood and the other ignored, derided or regarded with bewilderment, as noisy, random nonsense perpetrated by, and listened to by the inexplicably crazed. It draws on interviews and often highly amusing anecdotal evidence in order to find answers to the question: Why do people get Rothko and not Stockhausen?

This short book engages the myriad dimensions of Night, through ancient rituals, medieval storytelling, modern philosophy, and futuristic images, in order to explore the human experience of the after-dark. It thereby tracks Night through the prisms of its most fascinating practitioners: namely, those who keep strange hours and navigate the various potentialities of nocturnal experience (both of terror and enchantment). The Thief's Night; The Runaway's Night; The Drunkard's Night; The Insomniac's Night; The Revolutionary's Night; The Lunatic's Night; The Sorcerer's Night. Undoubtedly, each of these conceptual figures provides a unique gateway into understanding the powerful sensorial effects of evening, as well as its vast connections to larger questions of time, space, fear, nothingness, desire, death, forgetting, vision, secrecy, criminality, monstrosity, and the body.

'Ben Burgis has written a clarifying, humorous and sharp as hell wake up call for the left, and political culture at large. Read this book...'Michael Brooks, host of The Michael Brooks Show

Between the decline of the labor movement, the aftershocks of the falls of so-called actually existing socialism, and the long exile of even social democrats from the levers of real power, we have gotten far too used to thinking of leftism as a performative exercise in expressing our political commitments rather than a serious effort to achieve left-wing goals in the real world. Cancelling Comedians While the World Burns calls for a smarter, funnier, more strategic left.

Completed in 1999 during his time with the Cybernetic Culture Research Unit, Mark Fisher's PhD thesis, Flatline Constructs, invents a fusion of culture, critique, and radical philosophy that would define his signature style from Capitalist Realism to Acid Communism. Drawing on sources from David Cronenberg to Gilles Deleuze and William Gibson, Fisher presents a Gothic vision of cyberpunk reality, in which Man and media are drawn ever closer together, and life and death are never truly far apart.