Critical Theory After Mark Fisher: 10 Essential Books, Ranked
Where to go after Capitalist Realism: the 10 best books of critical theory since Mark Fisher, from Inventing the Future to Technofeudalism and Capital's Grave.
When Mark Fisher died in January 2017, he left behind a slim book that had quietly become a manifesto for a generation. Capitalist Realism (2009) described the “widespread sense that not only is capitalism the only viable political and economic system, but also that it is now impossible even to imagine a coherent alternative to it.” Fisher taught at Goldsmiths, co-founded Zero Books and Repeater Books, and wrote the blog k-punk. He linked depression, cultural stagnation and the disappearance of the future in a way no academic theorist had managed. His essays on “hauntology” in Ghosts of My Life (2014) and The Weird and the Eerie (2016) extended the diagnosis.
So where do you go once you’ve read Fisher? The past decade has produced a rich body of critical theory that takes up his questions about capitalism, technology, depression and the future. This ranking selects the ten most essential books, weighing how well they answer Fisher’s challenge to imagine an alternative, originality, and readability (Fisher’s great virtue).
1. Nick Srnicek and Alex Williams, Inventing the Future (2015)
The book Fisher’s readers turned to first, and the most direct attempt to escape capitalist realism. Inventing the Future criticizes the left’s “folk politics” of protests and local horizontalism. In its place it proposes an ambitious program: full automation, a shorter working week, universal basic income and a weaker work ethic. It came out of the same London milieu as Fisher’s own late work. A decade on, its techno-optimism looks both prescient and naive, which is why it’s still worth arguing with.
2. Nancy Fraser, Cannibal Capitalism (2022)
The most important big-picture critical theory of the decade. Cannibal Capitalism argues that capitalism is not just an economy but a social order that devours its own preconditions: unpaid care work, the natural world, public power and the expropriated labor of racialized populations. It gives Fisher’s mood a structural explanation.
3. Jodi Dean, Capital’s Grave (2025)
Dean, who earlier coined the influential concept of “communicative capitalism,” now argues that capitalism is turning into something worse. Capital’s Grave, subtitled “Neofeudalism and the New Class Struggle,” describes a world of platform lords, rentiers and a growing class of servants. It’s polemical and urgent, and a natural sequel to Fisher.
4. Kohei Saito, Slow Down (2024)
The English version of a Japanese bestseller, and one of the most widely read Marxist books of the decade. Slow Down: The Degrowth Manifesto argues that green capitalism is an illusion and that the late Marx pointed toward “degrowth communism.” It’s the most hopeful book on this list, and it answers Fisher’s question with a future he didn’t imagine.
5. Nick Srnicek, Platform Capitalism (2016)
Short, lucid and still the best primer on the business model behind Google, Facebook, Uber and Amazon. Platform Capitalism explains why data became the raw material of the twenty-first-century economy and why platforms tend toward monopoly.
6. Yanis Varoufakis, Technofeudalism (2023)
The former Greek finance minister argues that capitalism has already died, replaced by a system in which “cloud capital” extracts rent from users and businesses alike, much as feudal lords extracted rent from serfs. Technofeudalism is written as a letter to his late father, and it’s the most entertaining book on this list. Its thesis is contested: critics like Evgeny Morozov have argued that what looks like feudalism is simply capitalism doing what it always does. That’s half the fun.
7. McKenzie Wark, Capital Is Dead (2019)
Wark got there before Varoufakis. Capital Is Dead, subtitled “Is This Something Worse?”, argues that a new ruling class, the “vectoralists” who own and control information flows, has displaced the old capitalists. It’s playful and theoretically adventurous in a way Fisher would have loved.
8. Franco “Bifo” Berardi, Quit Everything (2024)
Berardi was one of Fisher’s major influences. The phrase Fisher used for our stalled culture, “the slow cancellation of the future,” is Berardi’s. The Italian theorist has long connected capitalism to depression and exhaustion. Quit Everything: Interpreting Depression asks whether the mass withdrawal of the young from work, politics and even reproduction might be a form of refusal rather than mere despair. It’s bleak but provocative, and it’s the book on this list closest to Fisher’s own sensibility.
9. Wendy Brown, Nihilistic Times (2023)
Brown’s Undoing the Demos (2015) was a key text on how neoliberalism hollows out democracy. Nihilistic Times, based on her Tanner Lectures, rereads Max Weber to ask how politics and knowledge can be rescued from an age in which values have collapsed into market prices and resentment. It’s elegant and quietly devastating.
10. Matt Colquhoun, Egress (2020)
Written by one of Fisher’s former students, Egress: On Mourning, Melancholy and the Fisher-Function is part memoir, part philosophy. It asks how to grieve a thinker and how to keep a project alive collectively. Colquhoun also edited Fisher’s final lectures, and the book is a fitting coda to the list.
Honorable mentions
- Postcapitalist Desire: The Final Lectures by Mark Fisher (2021): Fisher’s last course at Goldsmiths, where he was turning toward what he called “acid communism.”
- k-punk (2018): the collected writings, including the introduction to his unfinished book on acid communism.
- This Life by Martin Hägglund (2019): a philosophical case for democratic socialism grounded in our finite time.
- Capitalism and the Death Drive by Byung-Chul Han (English 2021): the psychoanalytic diagnosis from the German side.
- Surplus-Enjoyment by Slavoj Žižek (2022): the Lacanian version of the same question. Fisher credited Žižek, along with Fredric Jameson, for the line that it’s easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism.
Conclusion: what Fisher started
The books above split into two camps. One, from Srnicek and Williams to Saito, takes up Fisher’s challenge to imagine an alternative. The other, from Dean to Varoufakis and Wark, argues that capitalism is already becoming something else, and maybe something worse. Fisher would likely have found both camps necessary. As he wrote in Capitalist Realism, “the tiniest event can tear a hole in the grey curtain of reaction which has marked the horizons of possibility under capitalist realism.” Start with Srnicek and Williams for the hope, Dean and Varoufakis for the warning, and Berardi for the feeling.
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