While Disco Elysium gets a pass for it as it's meant primarily as an entertainment product (and the ridiculousness of the sentence might serve as a parody of the idea, which would be incredibly on brand for the game), I've found Mark Fisher's analysis in Capitalist Realism to be incredibly surface level and either wrong, or so vague, as to be meaningless, and it revolves around Fisher's obession with pop culture, and failure to distinguish between images of the thing and the thing itself.
Obviously dyeing ones hair green does not constitute a meaningful attempt to subvert capitalism. In order to combat capitalism, one must first decide what capitalism actually is, what's actually bad about it and how to combat it.
Let's say the evil of capitalism is that it allows an incredible concentration of capital, therefore the enemy are the rich, and the solution is to raise social support for taxing them. Wearing a t-shirt saying 'tax the rich' is a hilariously inept mode of delivering said message in an impactful way, and serves more of a low-effort consumerist way of supporting the good cause, rather than geniune activism. Yet it can't be dismissed entirely.
If someone wrote a book on why the rich must be taxed, and said book became popular and influential, and influenced the tax policy in the end, you can't say capitalism won in the end, because people paid money for the book, or the author is a hypocrite because he got rich off of royalties.
As for the bit about the British Museum, it's utterly nonsensical - what does a state's military dragging away cultural artifacts by force, and displaying it in a state institution have to do with capitalism?
My understanding is that most people who dislike capitalism dislike multiple features of it, features that are not downstream of one single variable to be optimized.
So if you break up the wealth concentration effect, you are reducing dissatisfaction overall, but you are also reducing the likelihood of any future alteration to any number of more minor dissatisfactions that seem characteristic of this system — e.g., the way it makes people's lives repetitive, predictable, robotic; the way it often preferentially rewards behaviors that service medium-term goals rather than ultra-short or ultra-long term goals; the way it reduces the dimensionality of the activities that are needed, from the average individual, and the way this reduction of dimensions along which one might be needed can make a person feel less like a person, etc.
I do not myself agree with anti-capitalists that all these patterns are best explained in terms of capital. You see similar tendencies correlated with, for example, most any attempt to scale culture. My point is just that the people who are trying to formulate the grandiose complaint are, deep down, generally not trying to designate as evil some single feature (even if they have latched onto that feature as being strategically their best line of attack); generally, I think, they are not saying, "Man, I see this nose everywhere and am sick of this nose," they are saying, "Why is it that people seem to be looking increasingly similar?" which sentiment (however flawed statistically) we expert statisticians might charitably translate as, "Why is it that there seems increasingly to be a single stable equilibrium for an increasing number of the increasingly divided planes of our diminishing existence?"
And maybe that last formulation is also empirically incorrect — but isn't there a general thrust in it that you recognize? "One default, one optimal path and anything I do to get out of it is either wasteful or imitated until it is the rule." Can you come up with a tax policy that will break up the concentration effect at that level? Maybe you can. Would it really break up the monoculture, or would it strengthen it? I don't know. I suppose reformers and revolutionaries have always diverged at this juncture.
Obviously dyeing ones hair green does not constitute a meaningful attempt to subvert capitalism. In order to combat capitalism, one must first decide what capitalism actually is, what's actually bad about it and how to combat it.
Let's say the evil of capitalism is that it allows an incredible concentration of capital, therefore the enemy are the rich, and the solution is to raise social support for taxing them. Wearing a t-shirt saying 'tax the rich' is a hilariously inept mode of delivering said message in an impactful way, and serves more of a low-effort consumerist way of supporting the good cause, rather than geniune activism. Yet it can't be dismissed entirely.
If someone wrote a book on why the rich must be taxed, and said book became popular and influential, and influenced the tax policy in the end, you can't say capitalism won in the end, because people paid money for the book, or the author is a hypocrite because he got rich off of royalties.
As for the bit about the British Museum, it's utterly nonsensical - what does a state's military dragging away cultural artifacts by force, and displaying it in a state institution have to do with capitalism?