Best book about issues and future of capitalism
Socialist Realism was an artform. It was conceived as a means to create a new kind of human – often called the new man – the point being to present heroic visions of people engaged in labour that was setting out to build the new and better world. Socialist Realism was pointedly ideological, and the point was to create images of healthy and vibrant people doing whatever it took to make that better world. When we look at Socialist Realism today we see it as all too obviously propaganda. Perhaps that is because it looks too much like western advertising from the 1950s – and we have learnt to be suspicious of perfect little worlds that are a single purchase away.
Capitalist Realism isn’t just an art movement, although it is that too, with advertising being its high art. It is, rather, an all-encompassing way of life. As such it remains mostly invisible to us because it is the air we breathe or perhaps it is the air we don’t notice weighing down upon us at 101 kPa or, shifting metaphor yet again, as Bourdieu liked to say, it is the yes we say in answer even before the question has been asked.
This book starts with the quote from either Zizek or Jameson, that it is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism. It also quotes Thatcher’s TINA: There Is No Alternative. The point he is making is that despite the GFC and the near collapse of the world financial system, that is, just when you might have thought capitalism would have been in serious trouble, it barely trembled. The reason given here is that capitalism has proven much better at defining the limits of the real than socialism was ever able to.
Even if we were all to agree that capitalism is killing the planet, is causing almost satirical levels of inequality, is feeding racism, and sexism, and homophobia, and on and on and on, and even after all this, we could even agree that capitalism is failing on its own terms of providing economic growth and financial stability – and still, even so, we don’t seem able or willing to imagine an alternative. Rather, it is almost as if recognising the problems gives us permission to ignore them and go back to being good consumers.
The parts of this book I enjoyed the most were centred around his discussions of various films – films that almost invariably involved the characters being impotent to fundamentally change their world on any level, and so as if to cope with this incapacity, they are involved in various forms of forgetting: think Memento, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, or the Bourne Identity films. Or again, films where the dystopian future doesn’t centre on a despotic government forcing its own will upon the people by force of violence (a jack-boot stomping a face for all eternity), but rather the world ending as in Children of Men, where infertility threatens the future and where all of our efforts become essentially pointless and meaningless, although we carry on regardless.
I was interested in his discussion of the difference between ‘realism’ as the ideas we ‘know’ about capitalism – that it is fundamentally opposed to bureaucracy or that it is a system where ‘the customer always comes first’ and how this is daily contradicted by our own experience of the real world of capitalism, and yet this never seems to undermine our notion of ‘capitalist realism’.
The instances given are of workplace performance systems – which he compares to Maoist versions of self-criticism and Stalinist versions of 5 year plans, where this was all more ritual and expected dance, than anything anyone literally believed.
He references this back to a film called ‘Office Space’ from the 1990s where staff were expected to wear seven pieces of ‘flair’ that would display their personality to those around them (think Myers-Briggs and so on). All good. Except one of the staff get into trouble because they are wearing exactly seven pieces of flair, which proves they are only doing the minimum of what is required of them, when they really ought to be trying to go over and above. Having worked in exactly these workplaces, this was all a little too real, barely even exaggerated. Which was also true of his discussion of the performance targets and the cult of management through numbers that, surely, is the essence of a good bureaucracy that most businesses routinely impose on staff.
And as for the truth of capitalist ‘customer service’ I have but two words, which ought to be enough to send a shiver of recognition down the spine of anyone who has had any contact with a business since 1980 – call centre. Who doesn’t feel horror of the abyss when they hear the words ‘your call is important to us’ interrupt the musak while on hold?
I liked this book – it is quite short, but has lots packed into it. He makes the point that if the left is have a future, it will need to create a positive alternative to capitalist realism, which must be utopian in the sense of providing a vision for what the world could become. He says criticism isn’t enough because capitalism criticises itself and still goes on – Wall-E, for instance, shows the impact of a corporate monopoly in destroying both the world and humanity’s ability to even move about other than with mechanical assistance. The film hardly provides a vision splendid, nor does it hide where the blame lies, but as with Bono’s Red Card, we aren’t offered a vision of a new world that threatens (or promises) to change the social structure, but rather we are offered more of the same old consumerism, but this time with a love-heart emoji painted on for good measure and the hope that perhaps this time doing the same as we have always done will produce a different result.
So, what do you do about capitalism if you live in a world where, as both Jameson & Žižek have noted, it is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism, or as Fisher puts it in the short, engaging, and entertaining book, if there is a "widespread sense that not only is capitalism the only viable political and economic system, but also that it is now impossible even to imagine a coherent alternative to it"?
First up, disagree: I can imagine a viable alternative to capitalism (Alain Badiou's The Communist Hypothesis helped me there). I like to think I am helping to build a viable alternative to capitalism, but I am aware that there are not many people on the construction site with me, and it is I admit really hard to envisage exactly what my imaginary alternative looks like – except it is collectivist, social, equal, democratic (and I don't mean there are electoral rituals that perpetuate the power of a small group, but participatory) and does not require the alienation of humans from their being to work in the service of someone else.
Then, to agree: I don't see my imaginary viable alternative as all that likely, and am acutely aware that Fisher is correct when he argues that the 'reality' of capitalism hides the Real, its actual form, so that to accept capitalism's reality is to miss its essential form and character (he does get a little Lacanian at one stage, I suspect his debt to Žižek). More notably, I am also aware that in my everyday work as an academic and as a university manager I am not only complicit in but actively perpetuate late capitalism's surveillance culture where we control and discipline ourselves.
The analysis here, of mental health as a social disease, of the dyslexia epidemic as post-lexia (the condition of life in a world where reading is unnecessary), of neo-liberalism's love of a specific type of big state – the surveillance state – but hatred of the welfare state as not a paradox but as essential to late capitalism, packs an awful lot into 81 pages. What he doesn't do, and where Fisher shows how bad we have got at imagining not only an alternative to capitalism but also ways to resist it, is suggest anything more meaningful than a call to stop bickering over the past and find ways to, as much as possible, withdraw from doing capitalism's surveillance work for it.
In short, this is a fabulous analysis – but we have plenty of them (notably Jodi Dean's Democracy and Other Neo-Liberal Fantasies, Ellen Meiksins Wood's Empire of Capital, Naomi Klein's The Shock Doctrine): by all means read this and those three titles, but look also for ways to move beyond the analysis – and for me you can't go far past Marta Harnecker's Rebuilding the Left, or in the UK the political project best represented by Red Pepper magazine.
I've been struggling with thinking about climate change. Part of the reason is that the current discourse is severely lacking. But also, given its scope, magnanimity and destructive potential, we seem to be linguistically confused too. Like with all things dealing with death and destruction, we do not have an adequate language for it. Instead, we are just arguing over signifiers and technicalities. What's also problematic is the collective blame - of course we are responsible for it in a way, but some people (read: corporations and CEOs) are much, much more responsible that others. As such, I've been increasingly drawn to Haraway's rejection of the term 'anthropocene.' Instead she proposes 'capitalocene.'
Climate change discourse, when it exists, obviously talks about humanity as a whole both in realtion to cause and effects. And this is very asymmetric, because while it effects everyone, it was caused by the capitalist elite. This to me, is an indicator of how embedded capitalist realism is - the idea that there is no alternative helps in effectively displacing responsibility while simultaneously concentrating power. TINA has numbed us down to a point where we individually just accept our depressive hedonia and sometimes even actively pursue it, while capitalism marches onwards and upwards towards collective destruction. We do not want to encounter the traumatic Real, so instead we accept capitalism which presents itself as reality.
It makes sense that this book was published in the wake of the 2008 crisis, a period of heightened psychological incoherence. The subject since then has been collective. And it made even more sense to me because I read it amidst the covid-19 crisis wherein capitalism has been laid bare again. Here we are, forced to stare at the Real. What's worrisome is that the stare of emergency invoked across various parts of the world to deal with the crisis seems like it's here to stay. I wonder what the post-pandemic world will look like. For now, it seems as though dangerous is the new normal. We live on the edge and we have been trained to passively relish it.
Pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will …
Preamble: ...Difficult to rate this short work; at first, I was hopeful that it would be both accessible and engaging with its brevity and use of pop culture. Engaging it remains. However, Fisher does not explain his brief references to political economy (“logic of Capital”) and history (esp. Lenin/Stalin), and his use of critical theory does not seem foundational (more like speculative creative writing). The key ideas are compelling, but I've heard the foundations better developed elsewhere... --I've had less success with cultural studies, but I do realize the problem with taking too rigid a position on the base (labor/production) vs. superstructure (culture) mode of analysis. My struggle has been around applying systems-thinking (esp. synthesizing micro vs. macro behaviors) to cultural theories. Fisher has not alleviated this. …As a result I am even more appreciative of David Graeber (RIP), who eloquently weaved together political economy with cultural studies (including social imagination for alternatives!): 1) Directly related to this book is Graeber’s Bullshit Jobs: A Theory and The Utopia of Rules: On Technology, Stupidity, and the Secret Joys of Bureaucracy. 2) To remedy the social imagination vacuum, there's Graeber's The Democracy Project: A History, a Crisis, a Movement. ...Note: both Graeber and Fisher fall on the idealist side (focus on human ideologies/imagination, be it uplifting or pessimistic) more than the materialist (physical conditions and how these shape social possibilities). Graeber's posthumous The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity really reflects this; see the book link which includes a materialist critique worth synthesizing. --Fisher’s cultural analysis is indeed creative; I see it more as intriguing thought experiments since the style is too sporadic to be judged as systematic (more on this later), where Fisher strings together references ranging from novelist Kafka to Disney’s “WALL-E” in a manner that makes it difficult to fully contextualize the original sources.
The Useful: 1) “Capitalist Realism” as the end of social imagination for alternatives: --Commonly known as “Neoliberalism” (popularized in the Western public by The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism and in Western academia by A Brief History of Neoliberalism), although Fisher uses “Capitalist Realism” to distinguish the generational changes since the Reagan/Thatcher era there was still the Soviet bloc alternative, etc. --Performative anti-capitalism can actually facilitate participation in capitalism (another common example is green/ethical consumerism). --At first, I felt Fisher’s brief mentions of “capital” omits explaining any political economy (i.e. commodification, alienation, accumulation by dispossession, atomization), for intro see Talking to My Daughter About the Economy: or, How Capitalism Works—and How It Fails, and of course the source Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, Volume 1. I now see this was touched on (to varying degrees) in the main case study Fisher uses (i.e. his job as a professor and his students), which was at least vivid and relatable.
2) Mental health crisis of capitalist realism: the need to politicize the common forms (i.e. depression) as not just privatized biological issues but a manifestation of social issues (esp. capitalist relations). For more, see: -Lost Connections: Uncovering the Real Causes of Depression - and the Unexpected Solutions -In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts: Close Encounters with Addiction
3) Bureaucracy of capitalist realism: anti-production (driven by false representations, i.e. quantification of what cannot be quantified esp. in social services of education/healthcare), internalized surveillance (ex. more “flexible” work, self-reporting), how individual choice (where instantaneous satisfaction is mistaken as freedom) can coexist with political authoritarianism, etc. Once again, see the Graeber recommendations above.
The Contentious: 1) Western-centric anti-communism? --“Capitalism” is portrayed as a Western developed country phenomenon, with a singular modern timeline (esp. post-WWII boom, Cold War, Thatcher/Reagan/End of History). With all this apparent pessimism in the “advanced, developed” countries, what space is there for the global South? ...How much I wish every leftist check out Vijay Prashad’s popularization of global South perspectives: -intro: Struggle Makes Us Human: Learning from Movements for Socialism -dive into history: The Darker Nations: A People's History of the Third World ...From related comrades: -intro into economy: The Divide: A Brief Guide to Global Inequality and its Solutions -more economy: The Agrarian Question in the Neoliberal Era: Primitive Accumulation and the Peasantry -dive into economy: Capital and Imperialism: Theory, History, and the Present -Global South playlist: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list... --Probably the only “joy” in this book are the one-liners bashing communists, with cute inventions like “liberal communists”, “Market Stalinism”, describing neoliberal think-tanks as “Leninist” “intellectual vanguards”, “Maoist confessionalism”, etc. Why bother writing a book when you can join some Leftist internet flame war? See the Vijay recommendations above to escape the bi-polar Western Cold War/Red Scare defeatism and consider the framework of global decolonization.
2) Capitalist spillover too far from solutions? --One reason I have trouble with this kind of cultural analysis is that many of the observations seem like spillover effects far down river from the structural origins (to clarify, Fisher also assumes political economic structural origins: “systemic consequences of a logic of Capital”). From a systems perspective (Thinking in Systems: A Primer), such spillover effects offer such low leverage points for actual change... I suspect this spillover approach contributes to the under-development of the “solutions” ending of the book (thus, no space for optimism of the will). -I find structural analysis/systems-thinking so compelling for the desire to make changes closer to the source of the river, which can have profound spillover effects, rather than starting from the end and working backwards against the current. Another analogy would be investing more in preventative health, rather than waiting until people are already so sick that they are in the hospital. -Examples of systems thinking applied to the economy: -macro + micro: Another Now: Dispatches from an Alternative Present -Doughnut Economics: Seven Ways to Think Like a 21st-Century Economist -micro: Democracy at Work: A Cure for Capitalism
3) Anti-systematic?: -Whenever I confront anything that broadly resembles “psychology”, I first take a deep breath and slowly exhale. I next roll my eyes at any crude use of “human nature” (any action by a human can potentially be traced back to “human nature”, unless you believe in demonic possession/aliens). Thankfully, the latter does not apply to Fisher. -Finally, I think about Ben Goldacre’s critique of systemic biases and lack of rigour, with psychology reaching new heights. Now, Goldacre is coming from a scientific methodology perspective for research publications, whereas the “psychology” in this book is buried in the humanities. Still, I do wonder how systematic the humanities can be (and how/where this can even be applicable). -Goldacre’s “publication bias” point is that positive findings in observational or experimental studies (and papers deemed more interesting in general, esp. feeding our confirmation biases) are more likely published and amplified, creating bias. This is scary in the medical field, where Big Pharma hides negative findings(!), but I’m not sure how this plays out in the humanities (in this case: critical theory/philosophy/political economy). -I Think You'll Find it's a Bit More Complicated Than That -Bad Science: Quacks, Hacks, and Big Pharma Flacks ...basically, do not be like this: Outliers: The Story of Success
Mark Fisher’s Capitalist Realism (2009) is a curmudgeonly and over-determined analysis of late capitalism with little theoretical value. His utter and complete assimilation into the ideological machine of Žižek’s New Left does him an enormous disservice. Because of this, Fisher is precluded from approaching the issues present in late capitalism with the necessary finesse. Rather, for every moment of insight (of which there are a few), there are ten face palm inducing misrepresentations of contemporary culture or sanctimonious condemnations of identity politics.
Beyond the book’s inherent failure as a consequence of Žižek boot-licking, Fisher places a lot of bets that haven’t paid off in the post-2008 political landscape. As Fisher sketches his ideal, vaguely racist and culturally elitist, image of a post-financial crisis progressivism, Fisher dismisses the tendencies that have expanded to the left’s zeitgeist — most crucially the self-determining identity.
Fisher’s text occasionally brings to bear prescient points, but some are borrowed — such as Robert Pfaller’s ‘interpassivity,’ the media’s performance of anti-capitalism which creates a bystander effect in viewers and results in their atrophy. Fisher generates one useful chapter, the fifth, which provides a fruitful analysis of the relationship between mental illness and capitalism. Fisher writes, “the current ruling ontology denies any possibility of a social causation of mental illness. The chemico-biologization of mental illness is of course strictly commensurate with its de-politicization.” He continues, “all mental illnesses are neurologically instantiated, but this says nothing about their causation.” To continue down Fisher’s avenue of inquiry about the relationship between capitalism and mental illness would be enormously fruitful. However, this is the only meaningful contribution Fisher can offer in this text.
The text’s failings are far more numerous. Whether it’s the patronizing pop-culture references that are superfluous and are belied by Fisher’s cultural elitism, his contempt for youth culture, or his attempt to de-emphasize the importance of individual identity, these faults can be attributed to the frequent drawing from the poisoned well of Žižek and Jameson. The most frustrating thing about Fisher’s text is that in a short 81 pages he still manages to pack in criticisms of the priorities and processes of modern post-colonialism. It is baffling how proponents of Neo-Marxism (which departs from Marx on almost every significant point) can miss how self-defeating paternalistic lecturing about tactics and priorities. The New Left conceives of “radical energy” as something finite and thus embarks on a patronizing crusade of telling others how to spend it. If one accepts their premise, how is a leftist condescending to another a good use of said energy? But, the New Left is wrong on both counts. One can be incredibly invested in the analysis of individual experience and cultural epistemology but also be concerned about the greater structures of capitalism. In fact, both interests are necessary rather than mutually exclusive as Fisher would claim.
Reading Fisher’s text, it feels irrelevant. It is a work of political and ideological speculation that is almost uniformly wrong, hampered by bad reasoning and a fractured ideological foundation. The trajectory of post-financial crisis progressivism that Fisher outlines is correct only insofar as the financial crisis represented a sea change. That change, rather than moving outwardly and anonymizing the individual, has shattered the barriers of entry to epistemology and allowed for the inclusion of individual experience. In that tradition, Fisher’s concerns about mental illness and their relationship to capitalism actually fit quite nicely. Fisher is at his best when he discusses these issues and takes aim at Neoliberalism, and his worst when he channels the self-importance of Žižek that includes shades of a bourgeoisie cultural elitism and white supremacy.
So. Quite recently a fellow comrade told me that she just ‘discovered’ Zizek. And I went like (insert resting condescending face) ‘where have you been hiding for the past 20 years?’. Now the same seemed to have happened to me as I just ‘discovered’ cultural theorist Mark Fisher, or rather his 2009 book ‘Capitalist Realism’ (Zero Books). Then I went down the whole YouTube and K-punk blog rabbit hole of and also ‘discovered’ the ‘Vampire Castle’ essay which seem to have divided an entire generation of US left-wingers (identity politics versus materialism) but which I somehow missed although it must have been referenced a million times in my bubble. Anyhow, I just had my Zizek moment.
Regardless, I inhaled this slim book of 80 pages and felt quite little sad at I really would have needed this book (and the Vampire Castle) in the early 2010s when we collectively realized that the global financial crisis was not the end of capitalism (at all!) and again in 2016 during the first Bernie campaign when we also fully, fully understood the commitment of the liberal mainstream (progressive neoliberals) to protecting the capitalist status quo (by 2020, I had learned to deal with it) and how difficult this would make in terms of realizing any progressive political project. I also learned that Mark Fisher, who suffered from depression, took his life in 2017 which makes the subtitle to the book ‘Is there no alterative’ a little horrible.
Here are a few take-aways from ‘Capitalist Realism’ for the five people or so on this planet who haven’t read the book yet. LOL.
The book essentially unpacks what is meant by ‘it’s easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism’. ‘Capitalism is what is left when beliefs have collapsed at the level of ritual or symbolic elaboration, and all that is left is the consumer-spectator, trudging through the ruins and relics. […] The attitude of ironic distance proper to postmodern capitalism is supposed to immunize us against the seductions of fanaticism. Lowering our expectations, we are told, is a small price to pay to be protected from terror and totalism’.
In other words, the ‘partisans of the established order’ (Badiou) cannot call the status quo, the brutal state of affairs, ideal or wonderful. Instead we are always reminded of the ‘lesser evil’. Yes, democracy is not perfect, but it’s better than dictatorships. Any challenge to the status quo, say, universal healthcare, is not only ‘unrealistic’ (sic), we are told, but also one step closer to the gulag. We have heard it all. The smug reminders that ‘capitalism is not perfect but the best thing available’ told to us by those who are not at the receiving end of a world where all existence is evaluated in terms of money alone.
Speaking of. The corona pandemic has now finally revealed the current state of affairs for the dystopia it is: as the rich folks are being vaccinated on time for the summer holidays, we are seeing quite literally a burning hell in India and elsewhere in the ‘third world’. So while there are vaccines available, ‘we’ are actually debating whether we should waive the patents so we can vaccinate all people. Of course, this would fundamentally threaten the capitalist logic and so we are told it’s better to save the logic of the market (mind you that the research going into these vaccines was mostly publicly funded) because if we now took away the patent rights ‘then the market would never again bless us with innovation and research’ (which should be public anyway, precisely to avoid a world in where the rich have access to vaccines and health care and the poor have not). Everything we are seeing right now is right from the script of a dystopian movie, down to the aesthetics. It is literally easier for people to imagine billions of people going unvaccinated than socializing health care and vaccines. It’s what Fisher calls Remember what happened when we found out that the whole pretext for going into Iraq – WMD – tuned out to be lie. Nothing. It’s the same when we find out, time and again, that ‘the market’ is fundamentally more important than human lives. We don’t even need any propaganda to belief in this ‘business ontology’, it is inside us and this is the scary part. The whole idea of ‘realism’ is precisely the sterility of imagination beyond the ‘end of history’.
I love how Mark Fisher describes this realism ‘The realism here is analogous to the deflationary perspective of a depressive who believes that any positive state, any hope, is a dangerous illusion’.
On the issue of how capital works at the level of our subconscious, there was a sentence that made me shudder "To reclaim real political agency means first of all accepting our insertion at the level of desire in the remorseless meat-grinder of Capital". A libidinal investment in high capitalism.
There follow some beautiful thoughts, including (and Zizek wrote much on this) how anti-capitalism is already part of capitalism, think about how in capitalism even anti-capitalism has become a commodity, think the whole bullshit of ‘ethical consumerism’. (Reminds me of how progressive neoliberals will ‘cancel’ a company for racist or sexist advertising but not for paying shitty wages or exploiting people and the planet otherwise. But that’s for another time.)
So what’s the way out? Fisher contends that capitalism can only be threatened if it can be shown to be in some way inconsistent and untenable (possibly what others referred to as ‘rupture’), that is to say if capitalism's ostensible 'realism' turns out to be nothing of the sort. The climate apocalypse is one those aporias but what green capitalism seems to have sufficiently sanitized from its progressive potential. Fisher, and this is something I have not spent much through on before, sees mental health (‘the privatization of stress’) as another potential area. Here he mentions the through-the-roof levels of anxiety, depression and other mental health issues in response to and a result of precarious, alienated and fundamentally lonely and atomized life in late capitalism (where we are only ‘labour costs’ and at any moment dispensable, where we are only recognized as consumers etc.) As everything in neoliberal capitalism, mental health is treated as an individual and medicalized problem rather than a political and social issue. However, it's not a dysfunction in you - it's a rational response to a fucked up system. horrible amount of stress. So this is well worth reading and there’s also quite some political organizing around this.
Just earlier this year, as a result of covid and too much time, “Postcapitalist Desire: The Final Lectures”, a collection of transcripts, recording weekly group lectures delivered by Mark Fisher to his students at Goldsmiths, University of London during the 2016/17 academic year was published and it’s among my summer 2021 reading list. So there’ll be more on this. Better late than never.
While reading this if I didn't feel confused, I felt depressed.
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I don't read many books about politics these days: it doesn't change things, I'd rather use reading for distraction and I've enough tsundoku. Mark Fisher's Capitalist Realism, however, is only 100 pages and had been well reviewed by a number of people online whose opinions I respect. Some are on Goodreads; another is in this blog post. Moreover, it was on Scribd, and in the aftermath of the election, I was particularly gloomy about being caught between necessary polite small talk with Tories and UKIPpers IRL, and the effort of refraining from argument about minutiae with online social justice warriors on the computer [love this], with only a handful of like-minded friends in between.
I must have highlighted about a fifth of the book. Going through the notes would have made an arduously long review, so I've ignored them and am writing this off the top of my head a week later.
The starting point (courtesy of Slavoj Zizek & Frederic Jameson) is that in Britain and many other countries, it's nowadays almost impossible to imagine any alternatives to capitalist neoliberalism. The obviousness of this and the rarity with which it's stated - at least anywhere I look at - is what interested me in the book. I have a pessimistically adaptive side, and if it hadn't been for two or three friends who have regularly reminded me of other ways - believers in the Citizen's Income, and someone living in a Scandinavian social democracy - I too would now probably be somewhat bewildered by trying to imagine anything else. Fisher does a lot of stating the obvious, but as above, it's an obvious that isn't heard enough, and about the big things like how the economy and the country run (not the rabid twitterstorms about some minor celebrity's accidental possibly slightly racist utterance that too often pass for left wing discussion on the internet), and it was good to hear as reinforcement.
Fisher is a lecturer in FE colleges and many of his examples come from his observations at work. About targets culture and the time-wasting and pointless treadmill it puts people on. About capitalism and the effects of its demands on mental health, via impossible demands for productivity and ever greater availability, increased debt for education and consumer goods without which life is made increasingly inconvenient, and a culture of job insecurity increasing depression and anxiety. There are more ostensibly conservative points about declining educational standards among disadvantaged young people who've been left to bring themselves up using the internet, and the concept of the 'hedonic treadmill' of easy screen-based distractions - which are likely to rankle with those of the relevant age group (NB he's not talking about the sort of teenagers who use Goodreads or who fret about narrowly missing an A*) yet which even slightly older generations will recognise. (The 2011 riots would have been worth citing re. some of the points about consumer culture, but they hadn't happened yet.)
I was glad to find the book never hints at the violent revolutionary angle. I've occasionally been made to feel quite conservative around far left types, because I'm opposed to the disruption and damage of full on revolutions and smashing shit up: for one, that sort of thing makes life even more difficult for vulnerable people whom they say they want to help by disrupting food, medicine, care etc. And it makes life more difficult for all the ordinary people who have to clear things up.
Down sides:
- I'm not sure Fisher is always sufficiently critical of mental health criteria when looking at increased numbers of sufferers. One survey cited looks at reported symptoms over decades and looks highly valid and relevant, but there may be other instances where criteria created for the American health insurance industry are labelling people as having problems who wouldn't have been 20-40 years ago.
- There are intimations of a socially (rather than economically) collectivist ideal of society. This sort of thing is always a turn-off to me as there are a lot of circumstances where I consider individualism a good thing. However, one of the rallying cries at the end is that the left needs to formulate and push for a less bureaucratic society, which sounds promising and definitely not like the New Labour 'database state'. Nor like the talking-to-no-end that has characterised the handful of political meetings (from New labour to Green to Trots) I've attended in the past with friends who were heavily involved in these things. One of Fisher's suggestions is for strikes in which workers do the actual substance of their work but reject target monitoring and similar bureaucratic form filling tasks. This sounds like something that the public and priggishly productive workers would approve of. (I once worked somewhere that held a couple of strikes, but had no respect for the action as most of the strikers routinely spent half their working days on personal calls, whilst temps like myself did the actual work and didn't racially discriminate against certain service users either.)
The BIG problem with this book isn't its fault, it's just out of date. It was written in 2009. Just after the crash (so it acknowledges how neoliberal capitalism suddenly becomes a fan the state when it's useful - i.e. to prop up the banks.) But before the Tory coalition, before austerity and death by a thousand cuts; before even fewer people had anywhere near enough to live on; before dying and severely disabled people were routinely found "fit for work"; before the massive increases in food bank usage; before rapid increases in the gap between rich and poor and a London increasingly stuffed with international super rich who can toss away a spare million on hideous tacky jewellery as fast as blinking; and before a lot of reasonable people started saying that the 1970s were pretty damn good actually, and not the decade that time forgot, because society was at its most equal then*. There's not a great deal wrong with what's in this little book, it just doesn't go so much into the issues of poverty and inequality, for some life-and-death issues, which are the most urgent now.
- [The last two bits are from a BBC documentary season on the super-rich shown earlier this year.]
In this succinct exposition on the forceful and all-pervasive ideological apparatus, Mark Fisher uses cultural and political artefacts alongside theories from Žižek and Jameson to analyse and deconstruct the ways in which capitalist realism has managed seemingly to transform Late Capitalism into a system sans alternatives. The following synopsis attempts to explain what makes this book a must-read:
Hook Whereas socialist realism was primarily an artistic movement set to reflect social reality, Fisher, echoing Nietzsche, defines capitalist realism as the acute fragmentation of reality and ensuing ironic distance brought about by postmodernity, which have replaced involved engagement with desensitisation and detached spectatorialism—both an unwillingness and an inability to take action.
Moreover, by monetising and aestheticising all existing culture (notice how stores have mainstreamed ‘vintage’ and ‘indie’ as fashion staples?), Capitalism has co-opted the performance of criticism, so that the public can continue consuming with impunity. By placing responsibility on individual action, it has erased the idea of systemic change. Having thus eliminated and undermined the political to the extent that people look for solutions in products rather than democratic or subversive action, it is now pre-empting and shaping desire for people (targeted advertising on social media is the simplest example).
Line These are not novel observations, but that is precisely the point that Fisher makes: it is possible that many of us have made such realisations about the moral decline in the world around us, but we can nevertheless do nothing about it, and even see it as “natural” or simply as “the way the world is,” even though that was not the case merely two decades ago. However, Capitalist Realism points out that the greatest faults in capitalism lie not in its immorality, which we all know of and act oblivious to, but that it is inconsistent with its own promises of stability and freedom.
Although both its neoliberal and neoconservative components are opposed to bureaucracy in favour of privatised decentralisation, in practice capitalist realism involves the normalisation of bureaucracy and the creation of additional and unnecessary labour. Although pyramidal hierarchies are flattened, the increase and establishment of constant communication through technology has led to people at the same level surveilling each other. Moreover, since the security of long-term work has given way to a more 'flexible' (or unpredictable) gig economy, the dominant emotion is not of freedom but of stress and fear, which leads to self-monitoring, conformity, and a tendency towards replicating already successful ideas instead of the creative innovation that capitalism claims to incubate.
Fisher also points that these conditions expose within capitalism the kind of practice it (rightly) criticised Stalinism for: decentralisation leads to an increased focus on auditing, so that eventually the work becomes geared towards generation of messages and representations instead of accomplishing of the task itself—public relations become more important than the actual function being performed; appearances trump essence. This is not all: the 2008 financial crash shows that capitalism isn't really opposed to the presence of the State by establishing a trend where the system requires governments to bail it out in times of crises and take blame for it in the event that something goes wrong. Accountability, therefore, is also a myth.
Sinker One of the most important features of this book are its spot-on analysis of mental health as a crisis created by (and profitable for) capitalism, and its analysis of capitalism as paradoxically enforcing and loosening discipline at the same time. Additionally, Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? also distinguishes itself from other expositions on the topic by providing not only a critique of late capitalism but also suggestions for development of an effective anti-capitalism that would be a rival to the state and not a mere reaction to it.
Fisher here argues for the Left to let go of its atavistic obsession with historic debates and their failure, and instead to re-organise and modernise the public consciousness towards a future we can believe in. He also talks about the need for re-conceptualising the nature of work, as well as shifting from protests as spectacle to those which specifically affect the managerial classes whom the movement is set to rebel against. There are also some very specific suggestions as to how this can be made possible—to know what they are, read the book!
This was okay. Very Žižekian, if we may coin a new style. The great thing about a Žižekian work is that you get the fireworks. There is no shortage of insights, zingers, and bon mots to go around. In the audio version, Russell Brand lets out an audible laugh when he reads the line that Blair had little trouble adjusting to neoliberalism because he had no previous beliefs to dispose of. And the show is fun for the whole Oedipal family, if you are already versed in the inside baseball of cultural criticism running from Deleuze & Guattari to Fredric Jameson to Žižek. In a sense, it's a late entry into the old debates about postmodernism and the "end of history." One main thrust of the argument is levied against the "end of history" and the saying that neoliberal capitalism represents the only way with "no alternative" (Thatcher) as were the common refrains right after the Berlin Wall fell. Perhaps the most interesting analysis is on the logic of postmodernism. Combining Adorno and Jameson, Fisher sees the once revolutionary formal energies of modernism turning in on themselves (Adorno) and now becoming subject to the almost immediate cooption by capital (Jameson) rather than projecting out towards discovery and the future, as was their (once believed) potential. As compared to the student and civil rights protests of the 60s, the purveyors of modern culture and their products serve as revenue streams and pose no real threat to the people and companies promoting them: think of Live Aid, rap music at its most Darwinian and opportunistic moments, and much of modern art becoming big money, with their underlying protests (if they have any) being embraced and receiving a bearhug by the system. The problem with this work, though, as with Žižekian works at their weakest, is that Fisher goes for the fireworks displays at the expense of analysis and depth. The depth of the arguments where it enters into the picture comes from Adorno, Deleuze & Guattari, and Jameson. Fisher digests them, popularizes their critiques, and updates their insights to the 2010s in England, France, and the US. Like structuralism, poststructuralism seemed to run into a dead-end methodologically. While there continues to be value added from their arguments, it seems necessary to recognize agency at a lower level of generality than the structures or systems. Fisher in the last analysis was not able to depict an alternative to postmodernism, late-stage capitalism, or capitalist realism as he calls it. Perhaps though we should not just be looking for alternatives, but also ways to ameliorate and mitigate the most deleterious effects, for example by learning from and adapting and adopting Scandinavian style social reforms; anyway that is food for thought.
I could've done without the "the wired society is killing us, get off my lawn" vibe of the chapter on young people and depression -- fisher basically needs to not talk about hip-hop ever, my god, that was cringeworthy. but overall it was good: succinct, super readable, thought-provoking, helpful in organising my thought around a lot of other stuff, and convincing w/r/t its key thesis (though I retain significant reservations about the specifics of fisher's revolutionary program). thanks, max!
2,174 reviews1,037 followers
Excellent. This is 8 years old now so I'd love to see an updated version with an essay reflecting on the exacerbation since original publication.
Highly recommended.
Capital, capital, everywhere, And all the will to live did shrink; Capital, capital, everywhere, In an ideological rubble we sink.
613 reviews179 followers
Such an interesting book - in spite of its 80 pages it took me three days to read it, there is a lot to digest and think about. I'm pretty sure I underlined half the book, and what's the point of underlining so much?
Living in 2018 it is hard, if not impossible, to imagine an alternative system to capitalism. This feeling, this sense, is what the term 'capitalist realism' is about. Capitalism engulfs anything and makes it its own ('Witness, for instance, the establishment of settled ‘alternative’ or ‘independent’ cultural zones, which endlessly repeat older gestures of rebellion and contestation as if for the first time. ‘Alternative’ and ‘independent’ don’t designate something outside mainstream culture; rather, they are styles, in fact the dominant styles, within the mainstream.'), so how are you supposed to protest this?
Fisher learned from Zizek to use items of current pop culture, especially movies, to make his points., which makes this so readable.
He doesn't stop at a 'simple' critique of capitalism, he delves into mental illness (I'm again reminded of Fromm's The Sane Society, which Fisher doesn't cite - was he aware of it? Likely!), Fisher suffered from depression so it makes sense that he looks at late capitalism as a causative agent of mental illness (to him, the chemical and structural changes in the brain are (of course) real and can be 'solved' with medication, but does having to live in an insane system cause these changes? Fromm again!)
Fisher looks at the counter-intuitive proliferation of bureaucracy in organisations and how almost magical it seems. Nobody knows what is required, the directives make no sense, so entirely new structures come into being, there is no final authority to appeal to anymore, workers have to become their own auditors and stress increases manifold, while nobody 'outside' cares about the auditing results.
This thought of a visible system, impossible to understand, with nebulous interests, with no overall controllers or rules, that's what makes this book so interesting to read, the 'centerlessness of global capitalism'. Fisher has this neat example where, during the 2008 bank crisis, people complained about the privatising government but not about the bungling companies, he interprets that as a coping mechanism. It's easier to blame a few politicians than an incredibly complex system nobody has oversight over, and nobody understands, and nobody can map. The disavowal [of the government] happens in part because the centerlessness of global capitalism is radically unthinkable.
Here comes my favorite quote in this context:
At the end Fisher begins to map out how a 'new left' could react to and work with late capitalism. New ascesis could be needed, since unlimited freedom breeds only misery. The bank crisis has discredited neoliberalism so now there is an ideological hole that can be filled. Bring back the idea of the 'general will' and take back the public space from the state. The 'new left' can start by working with the desires that neoliberalism has generated, such as a reduced bureaucracy, by starting a 'new struggle over work and who controls it'. Mental illnesses should be transformed 'outward', into antagonisms against Capital.
Overall extremely interesting, lots of food for thought, highly recommended if you like to think about our entire system of being.
Sadly Fisher never got to develop these ideas into a full framework, he took his own life one year ago.
P.S.:
Now this book is a little bit older, by now Elon Musk's Tesla has perfected this approach: make a ton of PR, sell very little, miss production targets. His popularity alone somehow makes everyone ignore horrible working conditions as well as firing workers for trying to unionize. Edit 8th Feb 2018: Musk shot a car into space to the great elation of everybody, it was mostly ignored that his company quietly announced its biggest quarterly loss ever a day later.
P.P.S.:
Does he predict the rise of the current garbage neo-reactionaries/alt-right? Maybe, but it also goes without saying that uncertain times breed nationalism and xenophobia, we've had that a few times in history now.
1,647 reviews611 followers
I’ve been meaning to read 'Capitalist Realism' for years, but only now that I’ve moved to Scotland do I find a library that has a copy. The University Library in Cambridge did not, outrageously enough. I’ve come across references to it in various other books criticising capitalism, plus it is only 81 pages long, so inevitably there wasn’t a great deal in it that felt new to me. Instead, I’d call it an impressively concise synthesis. Fisher picks certain bits of Žižek to interpret (ie make comprehensible), as well as drawing on Jameson and various older theorists. His discussion of bureaucracy brought to mind The Utopia of Rules: On Technology, Stupidity, and the Secret Joys of Bureaucracy, which examines a similar thesis in considerably greater depth, and Present Shock: When Everything Happens Now, which focuses on the eternal now in which we find ourselves. The personal anecdotes about working in higher education made me think that perhaps I was too harsh on Deschooling Society.
In short, I was reminded of many things I’d already read without necessarily coming across anything strikingly novel. The nearest to that was the chapter titled ‘All that is solid melts into PR’, which talks about corporate language and the ‘hidden expectations behind official standards’. These certainly seem to be prevalent in academia: a clear expectation that you should work unpaid overtime, in pursuit of a more senior job that will require even more unpaid overtime. Ugh, why should I bother. The mere prospect leaches any career ambition out of my body (cf How to Be Idle and The Freedom Manifesto).
Fisher shares Žižek’s habit of referencing a fairly eclectic set of films, novels, and TV, which made for an enjoyable, readable non-fiction-equivalent-of-a-novella on anticapitalist critical theory. However, such eclecticism tends to result in somewhat uninspiring concluding chapters, and so it was here. Fisher suggests revitalising the Left by fighting bureaucracy, without articulating this nearly as well as Graeber in The Utopia of Rules: On Technology, Stupidity, and the Secret Joys of Bureaucracy. I’m also unsure what he can mean by, ‘We must convert widespread mental health problems from medicalised conditions into effective antagonisms’. I’m all for carbon rationing, though, which is also mentioned. Although it was worth reading, ‘Capitalist Realism’ already feels slightly dated to me. The book I think best captures the systemic weakness of current capitalism is still Postcapitalism: A Guide to Our Future.
664 reviews3,402 followers
The characteristic of a truly successful ideology is that it makes those under its spell unable to even conceive of a universe without it. For a long time religion filled this role. But the advent of secularism seems to have shattered its self-assurance forever among the masses. Today the system that truly reigns as universal and natural is capitalism in various different forms. To put it another way, as others have, today, "it is easier to imagine the end of the world than to imagine the end of capitalism." This sentiment is what led to the questions in this book, grappling from a Marxist perspective about whether we now find ourselves trapped in an inevitable situation, following the crushing victory won by Capital over Labor last century.
I'm not sure whether our situation is inevitable or not and Fisher doesn't seem to know either. But his book is packed with incisive and haunting reflections on the nature of life under capitalism which help "disenchant" us from its seemingly totalizing spell. One of the wonders of capitalism is how it manages to subsume every other mode of existence or possibility into itself, including various forms of anti-capitalist rebellion that it is capable of absorbing and repackaging as more capitalism. Religion, nationalism, family – everything can be fundamentally drained of meaning and the husks used as raw materials for the system. What is left over in the wake of all this destruction is simply irony, which happens to be one of the last potent coins of political language today.
Even the obvious ill-effects of exploitative capitalism are capable of being turned into more grist for the mill. Fisher argues that the “realist” culture of rap and gangster movies promoted by capitalism actually seeks to normalize the harsh conditions of neoliberal capitalism in peoples minds. It normalizes the image of a certain type of anthropological product, the gangster. But this person could not in fact exist outside the economic system that gave rise to them. In that sense our images of humanity are manufactured for us, and we inevitably come to imitate these cultural products created by capitalism as well. The circle is completely closed.
The 1960s modes of liberal revolt against the system were based on the subconscious image of a distant, malevolent father, (literally: "The Man") who had access to unlimited resources and could solve everyone's problems but for some insensible reason won't do it. Our modern protests, periodic carnivals which are in fact a part of the system rather than deviations from it, continue to express this underlying sentiment. They're not about organizing alternate structures or communities as much as continuing to out in anger against the malevolent father, usually making hysterical demands that no one seems to actually expect will be met. The sentiments behind them are often just but given the wholesale eradication of intermediate institutions under neoliberalism they emerge in inchoate forms and dissipate once again. Corporate charity is even worse, very quickly subsuming itself in the system from which it emerged.
Power under capitalism somehow lacks a center, an experience that Fisher hauntingly compares to the centerless nature of a call center. There is no one who can actually help, no one truly knows where help resides, and those on both sides of the system are struck in a frustrating relationship structured by a remote bureaucracy of which both are victims. As someone who, like almost all of us, lives under capitalism but also worked a considerable time in an actual call center I absolutely understand where Fisher is coming from. If only there were really "The Man" somewhere that people could yell at and get help from! But the nature of power and conspiracy in capitalism, like Capital itself, is much more amorphous. No one knows for sure the address where power lies. It's not even clear if there is one.
You can say a lot in a short book. I noted Fisher's connection between how rising rates of mental illness are characterized under capitalism as personal events rather than structural ones caused by the nature of our society. Given his later tragic death by his own hand, after a lifetime of battling depression, this reflection was even more poignant. A great book by the author of the amazing essay on social media politics, "Exiting the Vampire Castle."
338 reviews112 followers
"Market Stalinism", "postmodern capitalist version of maoist confessionalism", "fascism or Stalinism". You can smell that Fisher hated the previous socialist experiments, so much that he grounds his entire critique of capitalism on anti-socialist jargon.
You find plenty of Deleuze, Lacan, Zizek, of course Kafka, plenty of psychologising and references to the popular movies. And a brilliant policy plan for a post-capitalist state: Broadcasting avant garde movies and documentaries to "perplex and delight" the audience.
The spirit of the heartbroken postmodern humanities of the early 2000s, with its literary heroes, popular movies, its passion for mental disease metaphors, its anti-Sovietism which is on par with its anti-capitalism...
Please be aware of scholars who are posing as political radicals. Consult to your nearest revolutionary movement if you see someone quoting large blocks of texts from avant garde novels to "analyse" the dynamics of capitalist societies.
1,827 reviews1,337 followers
The closest that most of us come to a direct experience of the centerlessness of capitalism is an encounter with the call center.
This was the first effort by Zero Books that left an impact. I was disappointed by the lack of footnotes. That said Fisher follows Jameson and Zizek in exploring our paradoxical reality where we can’t even imagine an existence without capitalism. My dismay did bubble on occasion, especially when events are recognized as undisputed evidence of a reality without alternative. My (now) ancient reply/sigh asks, even this book?
Fisher offers the glib illustration of what constitutes Post-Fordism: the difference between Scorsese’s Goodfellas and Mann’s Heat. My immediate thought, obviously Val Kilmer is the Devil.
That said this a powerful screed, appropriate for Labor Day weekend and an endless season of political debate.
Read
We are not living in an age of unbridled innovation. The sad fact is it's becoming increasingly difficult to even create new humans
https://www.theguardian.com/science/2...
RIP Mark Fisher.
The task of repoliticizing mental illness is an urgent one if the left wants to challenge capitalist realism
292 reviews97 followers
"The call center experience distils the political phenomenology of late capitalism: the boredom and frustration punctuated by cheerily piped PR, the repeating of the same dreary details many times to different poorly trained and badly informed operatives, the building rage that must remain impotent because it can have no legitimate object, since—as is very quickly clear to the caller—there is no-one who knows, and no-one who could do anything even if they [did]. Anger can only be a matter of venting; it is aggression in a vacuum, directed at someone who is a fellow victim of the system but with whom there is no possibility of communality. Just as the anger has no proper object, it will have no effect. In this experience of a system that is unresponsive, impersonal, centerless, abstract and fragmentary, you are as close as you can be to confronting the artificial stupidity of Capital in itself."
A compelling little book by an author who was clearly impressively informed and perceptive about the day-to-day functions of capitalism in the contemporary western world. This was my introduction to Fisher, a figure whom I gather has accrued a cult following online, and it was certainly enough to make me wish that he were still with us and still writing.
Like many leftist texts which have proved significant in hindsight, Fisher's is rather unassuming at face value. Little more than pamphlet-length and published back in 2009—after the Crash but well before more current emblems of late capitalist decline like Trump or the endless and endlessly-fumbled pandemic—Fisher's book is neither a comprehensive analysis of something previously unanalyzed nor a rousing call for revolutionary action. In some ways it reminded me of Arundhati Roy's similarly short Capitalism: A Ghost Story , but whereas that work uses its few pages to paint an apocalyptic picture of mass neoliberal devastation in modern India (natural resource depletion, paramilitary violence, flagrant wealth inequality), this one draws upon a much more subdued set of images from the modern U.K.: the feedback loops of university evaluations and call center transactions, the growing epidemic of depression and attention-deficit disorders among British young people. (You could easily use these two books as the start of a paper about the effects of global capitalism as felt by former colonizers vs. the formerly colonized, but I'll leave that to someone more qualified.)
Fisher takes as his jumping-off point a sentiment uncertainly attributed either to Slavoj Žižek or Frederic Jameson: "It is easier to imagine the end of the world than it is to imagine the end of capitalism." This is, as I understand it, the "capitalist realism" of the title: the means by which capital pervades every aspect of (post)modern life and successfully renders all other realities inconceivable, and thereby unattainable. While Fisher is a lucid writer, his more theoretical passages—frequently in dialogue with other philosophers, sociologists, and political scientists—sometimes went a bit over my head. As a result, I'm not sure I can say much about his actual conclusions or their place in the broader conversation he's engaged with, other than to say that his proposals towards the end (mostly pertaining to changes within university programs) struck me as cautiously, if a little disappointingly, miniscule in comparison to the global reach of the capitalist system he's just been describing to us.
On the other hand, what I think Fisher really does well here is evoking what he terms (in a different context, quoted in my epigraph) "the political phenomenology of late capitalism." With the assistance of references from literature, philosophy, headline news, and pop culture (the first chapter starts with an analysis of a scene from the film Children of Men), Fisher effectively renders a vision of modern capitalism impressive and despair-inducing in both its sprawl and its mundanity. While difficult to confront, it's a portrait of the world which should be all too recognizable to anyone who's been paying any attention at all in recent decades: a world in which capital is decentralized and bureaucratized to the point it's almost impossible to trace to its source, let alone confront it in any meaningful way, even as the planet itself and the people on it suffer the destructive consequences.
This picture is an undeniably bleak one, and as I said above, Fisher doesn't offer any particularly convincing idea of how to change the course we're on. But in this case I think such bleakness is both warranted and, possibly, required. I found Capitalist Realism a thoroughly depressing book, one which altered my mood for the whole week or so I was reading it; but I also found it bracing. Rather than being compelled to wallow in that depression forever, it inspired me to think of ways to act, or at least react, against the colossal wrongness of the world I have no choice but to live and die in. If this book can inspire that response in other readers as well, then—at risk of sounding grandiose—I think it will have served its small purpose in a way perhaps even Fisher himself could not, in the end, quite bring himself to envision.
Author 1 book90 followers
As I previously noted, Fisher was preaching to the converted here. Nevertheless, it was a stimulating read.
Fisher draws a useful parallel between socialist realism, upon which the title is a play, and the "reality" to be found under capitalism. Under communism there was a reality gap between the official version of "actually existing socialism" and life/reality as people actually experienced it. Fisher eloquently demonstrates that the same reality gap exists under capitalism, between the efficient ideal and the broken system that operates in reality. The subtitle plays with Thatcher's mantra, "there is no alternative" - no alternative to her inhuman, neoliberal dogma. What a lovely thought. The analysis here has universal relevance throughout the Western world where the neoliberal "experiment" has been applied to a greater or lesser extent and where the same arguments have played out.
Drawing on the ideas of Foucault, Jameson, and Deleuze and Guattari, Fisher skewers some of the absurdities of capitalist realism. One is that capitalism/the market will abolish the bureaucracy associated with socialism and the state. The bureaucracy generated under capitalism is described by my favourite term in the book, "market Stalinism". This applies particularly in the public sector under neoliberalism where the auditing culture keeps health workers, police officers and teachers/lecturers away from their actual jobs and busily employed with utterly pointless paperwork. Fisher also looks at the idiocy of call centres, a phenomenon he considers a metonym for neoliberal capitalism. He notes the similarities between the torments suffered by K. in Kafka's 'The Castle' and those experienced by the capitalist consumer trying to get sense on the other end of the line to one of those centres. Writing in 2009, he points out that the representatives of capitalism were perfectly happy for the state to play a huge role in saving the banking system, despite their supposed disdain for it. Might there be a slight parallel with 2020 here? It's all very acute.
Another of the Iron Witch's rallying cries was "there's no such thing as society". Fisher also explores the privatisation of personal life and the impact of neoliberalism on family life and mental health (from the increase in hours worked, job/housing insecurity, etc.). It calls to mind the irony of post-Credit Crunch PM Cameron, declaring that he was going to fix the "broken society", which the very policies he espoused had helped to foster in the first place. Needless to say, Cameron fixed nothing, merely turbocharging the neoliberalisation of the UK.
In the grand tradition of left wing critique, this book is very good at pointing out what's wrong with capitalist society but not so good at suggesting what should replace it, what the alternative is. A further objection is that the lexis deployed requires a level of literacy that will inevitably prove beyond many of those who might benefit from reading it. Nevertheless, it has gifted me a term I shall be making much use of. Market Stalinism - ha ha!
257 reviews157 followers
'If you are thinking that you can get rid of caste easily you are very badly mistaken. Caste is an institution of prodigious strength and it will take a lot of beating before it will die,' said M.N. Srinivas, an Indian Sociologist, 'It is so powerful and pervasive, and its appeals are so strong that the first step in the struggle is to have a precise measure of Its strength.' It's not like caste is the only social evil that has to be sorted as if it is only evil inherently in itself. It has been with us for millenia and it's implications have been deep-rooted in our ways of behavior, psychological and social. It's necessary to step out of one's certainty because of the very hardly refutable statement by Jiddu that we are, after all, the products of 10,000 years of propaganda.
I think it wouldn't be an exaggeration to say that with the kind of technological advancement, it might seem like we are moving towards a Consumer Utopia. That we are accelerating towards a society of spectacles where more emphasis and efforts are shown in showing the effectiveness of the functioning rather than the effective functioning itself in almost all 'democratic' institutions.
Mindfulness has been oversold and reduced to a technique for just about any exchange value giving inner-city kids, or stock traders a break, or helping cope up with the PTSD of soldiers and army generals without any role of moral compass or ethical commitments to the collective part which is a serious contributor to the problems in the first place. It's like the Brave New World as they say.
Intersectional is a recent vogue word these days as much as the word sapiosexual in tinder. Yet understanding of it is very feeble and often overtaken by our need for material and spectacular consumption of and for spectacles.
The point here is that one got to realise, if at all they have the luxury to do so, not comprehend over the verbosity of it but realising as if seeing the world for the very first time, that we all are in prisons and in surveillance with and without agencies. Books like these can help.
Capitalist Realism: Is there no Alternative? (2009) ~ Mark Fisher
1,809 reviews460 followers
Starting from the fact that it is "Easier to imagine the end of the world than that of the capitalist", the late English theorist, philosopher and music critic, Mark Fisher, offered this short book, containing a handful of subtle and often dazzling. A deconstruction of the effects of capitalism on our lives, just to put words to the continual suffocation that most of us know well—an essential book.
Written while he was still with us, the late Mark Fisher's Capitalist Realism is an affirmative polemic. Rhetorically, the text posits the question: is there no alternative? I think this text offers many salient points of analysis, from the disappearing public, to the bloating bureaucracy of academia. Fisher draws from the pop and literati to demonstrate how the affective narcissism of the empire of the self, coupled with total business ontology has created a broken, unreflexive demos, that fails to imagine alternatives, because it is either too depressed or focused on reductive, hedonic pleasures to suspend judgement. From students to public intellectuals, capitalist realism has thwarted imagination is a serious way...yet there remains an opening: to think, to imagine, to hope (without optimism).
Perhaps the pandemic zeitgeist is a moment of pause, a disruption of the haptic trance of consumer life, from alienated labour and economic first principles. I recommend this text for it is ever-relevant.
Author 1 book493 followers
So good.
My favourite quote:
"There are certainly conspiracies in capitalism, but the problem is that they are themselves only possible because of deeper level structures that allow them to function. Does anyone really think, for instance, that things would improve if we replaced the whole managerial and banking class with a whole new set of ('better') people? Surely, on the contrary, it is evident that the vices are engendered by the structure, and that while the structure remains, the vices will reproduce themselves."
1,705 reviews603 followers
Post-modernized marxist assesses the continued failure of capitalism to eat itself. Plenty of involvement with Jameson, Foucault, Baudrillard, D&G, Lyotard. But also some interest in the Frankfurt School and Harvey.
This text attempts to define ‘capitalist realism,’ summarized as “Margaret Thatcher's doctrine that 'there is no alternative' - as succinct a slogan of capitalist realism as you could hope for - became a brutally self-fulfilling prophecy” (8). It “takes the form of a kind of super-identification with capital at its most pitilessly predatory,” but also, per Zizek, “anti-capitalism is widely disseminated in capitalism” (12).
Much of the argument here proceeds through reference to mass culture products, such as how
a film likeWall-E
Further, “the interpassive simulation of participation in postmodern media, the network narcissism of MySpace and Facebook, has, in the main, generated content that is repetitive, parasitic and conformist” (75).
The argument adopts a fairly expansive theory of ideology: “The fundamental level of ideology, however, is not of an illusion masking the real state of things but that of an (unconscious) fantasy structuring our social reality itself” (13). This allows the primary cappy realist practice of “So long as we believe (in our hearts) that capitalism is bad, we are free to continue to participate in capitalist exchange” (id.). This is why a “moral critique of capitalism” will not work: “Poverty, famine and war can be presented as an inevitable part of reality, while the hope that these forms of suffering could be eliminated easily painted as naive utopianism” (16). Accordingly, an “emancipatory politics must always destroy the appearance of a 'natural order', must reveal what is presented as necessary and inevitable to be a mere contingency” (17).
Part of the process is that consumers “process capital's image-dense data very effectively without any need to read - slogan-recognition is sufficient to navigate the net-mobile magazine informational plane. ‘Writing has never been capitalism's thing. Capitalism is profoundly illiterate'” (25). Trump is accordingly the archetypical exemplar of cappy realism, inheriting not only the necessary wealth but also the requisite abject idiocy.
Another part of the process, citing Harvey: “neoliberals were more Leninist than the Leninists, using think-tanks as the intellectual vanguard to create the ideological climate in which capitalist realism could flourish” (29).
Substantial interest here in the notion that post-fordist economics and their consequent precarity cause systemic schizophrenia: “The current ruling ontology denies any possibility of a social causation of mental illness. The chemico-biologization of mental illness is of course strictly commensurate with its depoliticization” (37). Points out that “the flattening of pyramidal hierarchies has actually led to more surveillance of workers” (40). Consistent with these last two points is “a system which can be characterized without hyperbole as 'market Stalinism'. What late capitalism repeats from Stalinism is just this valuing of symbols of achievement over actual achievement” (42-43).
It would be a mistake to regard this market Stalinism as some deviation from the 'true spirit' of capitalism. On the contrary, it would be better to say that an essential dimension of Stalinism was inhibited by its association with a social project like socialism and can only emerge in a late capitalist culture in which images acquire an autonomous force. (44)
This produces a “bureaucratic libido,” “the enjoyment that certain officials derive from this position of disavowed responsibility ('it's not me, I'm afraid, it's the regulations')” (49).
Author asks therefore “what of Really Existing Capitalism?” He answers: “Postmodernism can be construed as the name for the complex of crises that the decline in the belief in the big Other has triggered, as Lyotard's famous formulation of the postmodern condition - 'incredulity towards metanarratives' – suggests” (45). In the end, however, “capitalist postmodernity is not quite as incredulous as it would appear to be” (46). Within that fake incredulity,
the concept of the Nanny State continues to haunt capitalist realism. The specter of big government plays an essential libidinal function for capitalist realism. It is there to be blamed precisely for its failure to act as a centralizing power, the anger directed at it much like the fury Thomas Hardy supposedly spat at God for not existing. (62)
This may seem abstract, but author has a ready anecdote: “The closest that most of us come to a direct experience of the centerlessness of capitalism is an encounter with the call center” (63).
The call center experience distills the political phenomenology of late capitalism: the boredom and frustration punctuated by cheerily piped PR, the repeating of the same dreary details many times to different poorly trained and badly informed operatives, the building rage that must remain impotent because it can have no legitimate object, since - as is very quickly clear to the caller - there is no-one who knows, and no-one who could do anything even if they did. (64)
This phenomenon shows how “Kafka is poorly understood as exclusively a writer on totalitarianism; a decentralized, market Stalinist bureaucracy is far more Kafkaesque than one in which there is a central authority” (64).
The text has time for clever readings of films such as Children of Men and Office Space, as well as thoughtful commentary on the education system in the UK, say, or increasing pathologization of political problems. Some bakhtinian interest. Cappies as the undead (“the most gothic description is the most accurate” (15), or so). Lovely commentary on Kafka. Zizek on the Supernanny program is great. Plenty more.
Recommended for those who inherit the theme of sterility from 'The Waste Land,' privatizers of stress, and readers sclerotized by administrative anti-production.
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It seems ridiculous to assign this a rating. It's a brief polemic with an air of ephemerality to it, though Fisher is certainly articulate and even eloquent at times. It's too bad he isn't around now to offer commentary on the effects of Covid on 'capitalist realism,' as I think it would have stimulated some interesting jumping-off points related to his thinking here. When he was writing this in the late 2000s he named 'flexibility', 'nomadism', and 'spontaneity' as 'the very hallmarks of management in a post-Fordist, Control society'; the pandemic has since virtually etched these into stone as essential qualities for the modern worker.
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