Dan Taylor

A lucid and groundbreaking analysis of contemporary neoliberalism and its devastating effects for young people today.

Thatcher’s claim that ‘There is No Alternative’ to free-market capitalism has long rung hollow. Yet why is it that, despite the best efforts of protest movements, radical theorists and an increasingly liberal popular culture, when it comes to politics a consensus still reigns about the impossibility of change?

Written to provoke reflection and discussion, Negative Capitalism argues that cynicism is the key feeling of our era, and an effect of our collective disempowerment by the political establishment. Produced for an informed but not academic reader, the book charts the negation of democratic power in chapters covering debt, mental health, meaningless political languages, popular cynicism and pornography. It also grounds its account of neoliberalism in political theory and history, focusing particularly on Thatcher’s monetarism. It raises pertinent doubts about blind optimism, and concludes with a fiery, startling polemic.

Praise for Negative Capitalism:

‘Negative Capitalism represents a new generation of critique by what I’ve termed graduates without a future. Taylor brings together incisive and provocative analysis alongside personal experience to explore how debt, cynicism, smartphones, psychopharmacology, underemployment and neoliberalism all represent a new era of negation. In a time of economic meltdown and mass struggle, this book offers one way out of the current crisis.’ – Paul Mason, journalist and author of Why its Kicking Off Everywhere

‘Seriously researched… its sections on London and gentrification, class and the riots, Ruin Porn and DIY Porn, the brave and risky notes on fascism, and the intriguing practical proposals near the end all really stand out.’ – Owen Hatherley, author of A New Kind of Bleak

‘Negative Capitalism is a timely reminder of how a logic of negation is as central to an analysis of culture, politics, and the economy as it is to the machinations of capital itself.’ – Eugene Thacker, author of In The Dust Of This Planet

Read a sample chapter here, and an interview about the work here.