K-Punk: Politics

by Mark Fisher

This selection of essays from The Collected and Unpublished Writings of Mark Fisher (2004-2016) brings together the best of Fisher's political writing. Ranging across topics from UK and American politics to communist realism, football, and depression, as well as including the unpublished introduction to what would have been his next book on acid communism, Politics shows Fisher at his most combative and incendiary, wrangling with the contradictions and complexities of capitalism and setting out the way forward into a more just, fair, and equal future for all.

Genres: Nonfiction, Politics, Philosophy

Kindle Edition

Published August 3, 2020

About the author

Mark Fisher (1968 – 2017) was a co-founder of Zero Books and Repeater Books. His blog, k-punk, defined critical writing for a generation. He wrote three books, Capitalist Realism, Ghosts of My Life and The Weird and the Eerie, and was a Visiting Fellow in the Visual Cultures department at Goldsmiths, University of London.

Librarian’s note: There is more than one author in the Goodreads database with this name.

Reviews

[Ryan · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is only a selection of the much larger collection, but it's all that is available on audiobook at the moment. I'm reading the rest but these selections, in large part, focus on the politics of early 21st Century England (and occasionally beyond). It was somewhat elucidatory, insofar as I wasn't tremendously knowledgeable about many of the subjects but it's also, likely, the subject matter I am least interested in Mark's writings on.

That said, this collection also contains a few standouts that made it, even if it were a standalone, worthwhile: 'No One is Bored, Everything is Boring', 'For Now, Our Desire is Nameless', 'Anti-Therapy', and the concluding unfinished (but still easily comprehensible, only missing things like stray adjectives or descriptors in most cases) 'Manequin Challenge' and 'Acid Communism' (the intended introduction to his next book). Those pieces make me abundantly sad that we're left with these sorts of extraordinary odds and ends, rather than the further work that would more fully realize them into a more cogent whole.

Fully expecting the full collection to get the full ***** but this gets just ****

[Dave Pier · Rating 5 out of 5]

So brilliant. What a loss.