Capitalist realism no longer stages this kind of confrontation with modernism. On the contrary, it takes the vanquishing of modernism for granted: mo… - Mark Fisher

A moral critique of capitalism, emphasizing the ways in which it leads to suffering, only reinforces capitalism realism. Poverty, famine and war can be presented as an inevitable part of reality, while the hope that these forms of suffering could be eliminated easily painted as naive utopianism. Capitalism realism can only be threatened if it is shown to be in some way inconsistent or untenable; if, that is to say, capitalism's ostensible 'realism' turns out to be nothing of the sort.

It would be a mistake to regard this market Stalinism as some deviation from the ‘true spirit’ of capitalism. On the contrary, it would be better to say that an essential dimension of Stalinism was inhibited by its association with a social project like socialism and can only emerge in a late capitalist culture in which images acquire an autonomous force. The way value is generated on the stock exchange depends of course less on what a company ‘really does’, and more on perceptions of, and beliefs about, its (future) performance. In capitalism, that is to say, all that is solid melts into PR, and late capitalism is defined at least as much by this ubiquitous tendency towards PR-production as it is by the imposition of market mechanisms.

What we are dealing with now is not the incorporation of materials that previously seemed to possess subversive potentials, but instead, their precorporation:the pre-emptive formatting and shaping of desires, aspirations and hopes by capitalist culture. WItness, for instance, the establishment of settled 'alternative' or 'independent' cultural zones, which endlessly repeat older gestures or rebellion and contestation as if for the first time. 'Alternative' and independent' don't designate something outside mainstream culture; rather, they are styles, in fact 'the' dominant styles, within the meainstream.