Capitalist realism became entrenched in Britain within a single decade by the mid-1980s.

Evidence

The miners’ strike is the most powerfully symbolic image of the end of the worker’s movement. I think when we think about that — when we think about the miners’ strike — that gives us the most kind of vivid sense of how deeply established capitalist realism was by the middle of the Eighties, and certainly by the end of the Eighties. By the end of the Eighties we were in a situation that would have seemed science-fictional from the perspective of the middle of the Seventies. If you told people that all of the national utilities would be sold off and privatised, that the mining union which had just brought down the Conservative government would be sort of defeated in abeyance, that the unions were simply not major players in public life anymore — that would have seemed unimaginable. Yet it happened, and it happened in a relatively short time. — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk, 2102

Categorization

• DEFINE: Concretely illustrates ‘capitalist realism’ — the sense that no alternative to capitalism exists — via the miners’ strike as its founding image.
• XREF: connects to: Thatcher’s second term and the miners’ defeat concretised British capitalist realism — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk: The Collected and Unpublished…, 1362; Britain had a popular-modernism network that irreversibly vanished in the Eighties — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk: The Collected and Unpublished…, 2287

Broader Connections

• Thatcher’s second term and the miners’ defeat concretised British capitalist realism #exemplifies (0.88) — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk, 1362
• Britain had a popular-modernism network that irreversibly vanished in the Eighties #complicates (0.78) — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk, 2287