Capitalist Realism: Is there no alternative?

Some of the shock absorbers—from faith to family—that helped us cope with setbacks in the past have atrophied. It’s possible that a new basis of solidarity is slowly coming into view in which we are bound together by a new set of shared risks: the risk of loneliness and isolation; the risk of mental illness; the risk of being left behind. But these

Unions and the state might have been outdated, but nothing was nurtured to replace them. Instead, all that was left was individual, atomised power: power that could only be mobilised by appeal to self-interest, and could only be expressed in the choice between options, not the power to shape those options.

I’m convinced that we’re suffering from an ‘imaginary crisis’. By this, I don’t mean that the various crises around us aren’t real, but rather that there’s a deep malaise affecting our capacity for imagination, whether social or political.