STALINIST REALISM AND IDENTITY
Ian ParkerThese three essays are about the rotten underbelly of today’s dominant ideology, the ‘capitalist realism’ that Mark Fisher explored as the potent story we are told, and tell ourselves, that it is easier to imagine the end of the world than to imagine the end of capitalism. The rotten underbelly is the equally potent and toxic story that tells us that there is only one alternative, a fixed worldview functional to what remains of the old ‘workers states’ which is a caricature of Marxism and which is obsessed with identities, some identities that are marked out as progressive and the rest that are marked out as degenerate, ‘woke’. That rotten underbelly is stalinist realism.