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K-Punk: Politics

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About this listen

This selection of essays from K-Punk: The Collected and Unpublished Writings of Mark Fisher (2004-2016) brings together the best of Fisher's political writing.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across topics from UK and American politics to communist realism, football, and depression, as well as including the unpublished introduction to what would have been his next book on acid communism, K-Punk: Politics shows Fisher at his most combative and incendiary, wrangling with the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.

©2020 Mark Fisher (P)2020 Repeater Books Political Science Politics & Government Social Sciences
All stars
Most relevant
Well worth a listen, K punk offers a real insight into modern day politics.
Worth the money.

Depressingly Accurate, Great Listen.

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If only we had a mind like this making some kind of sense in this now 'post everything' world. A sad loss to the 21st century.

Top Writings...

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This audio book is spot on. Great introduction to Marks work. The reader's tone is spot on, just the right level of sarcasm.

The best left wing theory around

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I love Mark. His works are insightful, innovative, and engaging. Postcapitalist Desire and Capitalist Realism are truly excellent works, the former I feel is in contest for the book of 2021. However, while I was not expecting the same rigour from his blog, I think Mark fails to overcome the very problems he has criticised throughout his career leaving this book a bit of a tarnishing on his otherwise excellent record.

Mark finds himself impaled on the horns of the same bull as Corbyn. A left wing that has run away from underneath them. Mark gets caught up in the movements and mood of the movements rather than analysis of the movements themselves. The SNP are no freer than any other party from Capitalist Realism, he glosses over the role of nationalist sentiments too. His failure to acknowledge any positives or to be almost conspiratorially sceptical of anything the Tories have done is tone deaf and often incorrect. Thats not to say I am fan of the Tories, but essentialism, the idea that the Tories are almost ontologically bad is unhelpful and critically hypocritical. I feel positive about the way he engaged the shift in support to UKIP as more of a cry for help than some blot on the voters conscience. However, it is on his treatment of the English that I feel his work loses the most credibility. His self hatred, hatred for England and general anglo-phobia is entirely overblown, self-flagellationary, nonsense. I dont really care what you say about the English, but the fetishisation of Europe (a problem for many in academia) is entirely independent of truth. Thats not to say Europe is worse or better, its just in a different colour of the same boat. The same goes goes for Scotland etc.
In summary, there are conflicts between the academic mark with a grasp of social currents, economics, and anthropology, and the mark of the labour party and the left. Between group think, and sticking to ones guns, between being an independent voice and leader of a movement, and being an unquestioning follower of ideas he is not entirely reconciled towards.

All in all, if you are a member of labour an really care about the party, you will like this book and it has some use as a tool for articulating the opinions you potentially already have. In that sense, his works are a fantastic collection phrases. Useful for this purpose and why I have allocated it 3 stars when really I thought it was worth less if we judge it against other works in his name.

The weakest title from a Brilliant thinker

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Every sentence is excruciating due to the BBC headline style intonation and cadence of the narrator; makes the thing entirely unlistenable.
Stick to the archived K Punk blog, Mark's lectures online and myriad other freely accessible materials, and read this particular tome yer'sen...

Unlistenable due to narration - but ok compendium.

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