Los fantasmas de mi vida

In his first book, Mark Fisher called “capitalist realism” the widespread belief that no alternative to capitalism is possible, that we are obliged to bury things like class solidarity or the concept of the public in the past in exchange for remaining connected to the private circuit of consumption and entertainment. But is it possible to definitively close off our horizons and resign ourselves to any transformative project? The central thesis shared by the articles gathered here is that this closed present, condemned to repetition and pastiche, will always be haunted by the ghosts of that which no longer is and that which never was. And that it is necessary to reactivate historical memory and those lost futures in order to escape from the detained temporality in which we live.

In this sort of Wraith of Marx for the 21st century, Mark Fisher confronts the ruins of that moment when popular culture – especially music – still had the capacity to produce innovative forms and to dream of radically alternative ways of life. In the collective experience of the raves, the refusal to work of the mods, the militant modernism of the post-punks, the Promethean ambition of the working class to produce a world that existentially and aesthetically exceeds bourgeois culture still resonates. But it is not a matter of clinging nostalgically to that past in order to take refuge from the present: not abandoning the ghosts means not adjusting to what current conditions call “reality”.