Mark Fisher

After 1989, capitalism has successfully presented itself as the only realistic political-economic system - a situation that the bank crisis of 2008, far from ending, actually compounded. The book analyses the development and principal features of this capitalist realism as a lived ideological framework. Using examples from politics, films, fiction, work and education, it argues that capitalist realism colours all areas of contemporary experience. But it will also show that, because of a number of inconsistencies and glitches internal to the capitalist reality program capitalism in fact is anything but realistic.

Is There No Alternative?

Capitalist Realism

Is there no alternative?

nhu ⋆𐙚₊˚⊹

Nevertheless, 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. In a seeming irony, the media class's refusal to be paternalistic has not produced a bottom-up culture of breathtaking diversity, but one that is increasingly infantilized. By contrast, it is paternalistic cultures that treat audiences as adults, assuming that they can cope with cultural products that are complex and intellectually demanding. The reason that focus groups and capitalist feedback systems fail, even when they generate commodities that are immensely popular, is that people do not know what they want. This is not only because people's desire is already present but concealed from them (although this is often the case). Rather, the most powerful forms of desire are precisely cravings for the strange, the unexpected, the weird. 

On Spinoza's account, God does not condemn Adam for eating the apple because the action is wrong; he tells him that he should not consume the apple because it will poison him. For Zizek, this dramatizes the termination of the Father function. An act is wrong not because Daddy says so; Daddy only says it is 'wrong' because performing the act will be harmful to us. 

For this reason, it is a mistake to rush to impose the individual ethical responsibility that the corporate structure deflects. This is the temptation of the ethical which, as Zizek has argued, the capitalist system is using in order to protect itself in the wake of the credit crisis -the blame will be put on supposedly pathological individuals, those' abusing the system', rather than on the system itself. But the evasion is actually a two step procedure -since structure will often be invoked (either implicitly or openly) precisely at the point when there is the possibility of individuals who belong to the corporate structure being punished. At this point, suddenly, the causes of abuse or atrocity are so systemic, so diffuse, that no individual can be held responsible. 

Scapegoating an impotent government (running around to clean up the messes made by its business friends) arises from bad faith, from a continuing hostility to the Nanny State that nevertheless goes alongside a refusal to accept the consequences of the sidelining of government in global capitalism - a sign, perhaps, that, at the level of the political unconscious, it is impossible to accept that there are no overall controllers, that the closest thing we have to ruling powers now are nebulous, unaccountable interests exercising corporate irresponsibility.

As production and distribution are restructured, so are nervous systems. To function effectively as a component of just-in-time production you must develop a capacity to respond to unforeseen events, you must learn to live in conditions of total instability, or 'precarity', as the ugly neologism has it. Periods of work alternate with periods of unemployment. Typically, you find yourself employed in a series of short-term jobs, unable to plan for the future. 

This pathologization already forecloses any possibility of politicization. By privatizing these problems -treating them as if they were caused only by chemical imbalances in the individual's neurology and/or by their family background -any question of social systemic causation is ruled out. Many of the teenage students I encountered seemed to be in a state of what I would call depressive hedonia. Depression is Usually characterized as a state of anhedonia, but the condition I'm referring to is constituted not by an inability to get pleasure so much as it by an inability to do anything else except pursue pleasure.

While French students can still be found on the streets protesting against neoliberalism, British students, whose situation is incomparably worse, seem resigned to their fate. But this, I want to argue, is a matter not of apathy, nor of cynicism, but of reflexive impotence. They know things are bad, but more than that, they know they can't do anything about it. But that 'knowledge', that reflexivity, is not a passive observation of an already existing state of affairs. It is a self-fulfilling prophecy. 

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. Considering mental illness an individual chemico-biological problem has enormous benefits for capitalism. First, it reinforces Capital's drive towards atomistic individualization (you are sick because of your brain chemistry). Second, it provides an enormously lucrative market in which multinational pharmaceutical companies can peddle their pharmaceuticals (we can cure you with our SSRIs). It goes without saying that all mental illnesses are neurologically instantiated, but this says nothing about their causation. If it is true, for instance, that depression is constituted by low serotonin levels, what still needs to be explained is why particular individuals have low levels of serotonin. This requires a social and political explanation; and the task of repoliticizing mental illness is an urgent one if the left wants to challenge capitalist realism.

Instead of treating it as incumbent on individuals to resolve their own psychological distress, instead, that is, of accepting the vast privatization of stress that has taken place over the last thirty years, we need to ask: how has it become acceptable that so many people, and especially so many young people, are ill? The 'mental health plague' in capitalist societies would suggest that, instead of being the only social system that works, capitalism is inherently dysfunctional, and that the cost of it appearing to work is very high.

No, the aim was only to ensure that some of the proceeds of particular transactions went to good causes. The fantasy being that western consumerism, far from being intrinsically implicated in systemic global inequalities, could itself solve them. All we have to do is buy the right products.

Marco Cavallaro 

isabella

It’s well past time for the left to cease limiting its ambitions to the establishing of a big state. But being ‘at a distance from the state’ does not mean either abandoning the state or retreating into the private space of affects and diversity which Žižek rightly argues is the perfect complement to neoliberalism’s domination of the state. It means recognizing that the goal of a genuinely new left should be not be to take over the state but to subordinate the state to the general will.

the affects that predominate in late capitalism are fear and cynicism. These emotions do not inspire bold thinking or entrepreneurial leaps, they breed conformity and the cult of the minimal variation, the turning out of products which very closely resemble those that are already successful.

Not to say that neoliberalism has disappeared overnight; on the contrary, its assumptions continue to dominate political economy, but they do so now no longer as part of an ideological project that has a confident forward momentum, but as inertial, undead defaults.

In claiming [...] to have 'delivered us from the "fatal abstractions" inspired by the "ideologies of the past"', capitalism realism presents itself as a shied protecting us from the perils posed by belief itself. 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 for being protected from terror and totalitarianism.

madina

An idealist academic who is trying to create something new out of issues which have exhaustive literature on them already. A philosophers wet dream, a marxists nightmare.

Adam Arif-Pardy

An idealist academic who is trying to create something new out of issues which have exhaustive literature on them already. A philosophers wet dream, a marxists nightmare.

Read July 16 2023

chris

Jason Lo

Capital is clearly the reason why Mark Fisher’s students keep leaving him poor reviews. 

Closer to a 4.25.

jack

i really enjoyed this! fisher had some really great insights, a lot of things that left me thinking "oh shit... yea." his proposition for a new left is so full of hope, and something that is very much encapsulated by the new dsa/sanders/aoc movement. he would have been really happy to see where things seem to be headed.

ngl a fair amount of the more in depth passages went over my head bc i am not well read in zizek/spinoza/most philosophy.

Alexander Enriquez

Must read if you are concerned with critical theory/marxist thinking in the 21st century.

jess

basically says welcome to capitalism 101 : a crash course in the failure of post-modernism; good entry level critique, so to speak..

Where was this book all my life. It's so short that by the time I've figured out how to write something that might do it justice, you could have just picked it up and read it. Which you should do at all costs. I want to kiss him on the mouth for this one. 

Kaye Barnett

the ideas and considerations presented in the first part are certainly essential, especially the emphasis on the all consuming quality of late stage capitalism but i feel like an approach more tied to historicity or case studies would've helped to expand and solidify it. reducing most of the critic in the second part to an extremely particular scenario like an university wasn't ideal, in general I'd inquire what do these statements and new dynamics interact with the working class, instead of just the reality of middle-upper class universities?

regardless of that, it's a much needed book for leftists and with an even more needed thesis for our society in general.

the ideas and considerations presented in the first part are certainly essential, especially the emphasis on the all consuming quality of late stage capitalism but i feel like an approach more tied to historicity or case studies would've helped to expand and solidify it. reducing most of the critic in the second part to an extremely particular scenario like an university wasn't ideal, in general I'd inquire what do these statements and new dynamics interact with the working class, instead of just the reality of middle-upper class universities?

regardless of that, it's a much needed book for leftists and with an even more needed thesis for our society in general.



ellis

Gavin

Fisher was strange. He's a very clear thinker who nonetheless devotes most of his writing to extremely unclear people, the Hegel/Baudrillard approach to society, existence, and pop culture. He is humane, focussing on why we might think we need these Theorists.

Thesis here is the usual one, that capitalism has mind control powers somehow.

Taylor

"Besides, in a classic example of interpassivity, if the music was still playing, even if he couldn't hear it, then the player could still enjoy it on his behalf. The use of headphones is significant here - pop is experienced not as something which could have impacts upon public space, but as a retreat into private 'OedIpod' consumer bliss, a walling up against the social." [28]

This book brings up some good points in its synthesis of leftist philosophers of the last century or so. As more than a synthesis, there's not much there. Other than the quote above, which, ugh. I could have gone my whole life without thinking about the phrase "OediPod" but here we are.

elif sinem

The Twitter screenshots could've never prepared me for how amazing that book was and how dense it ended up being. So amazing and I think if Fisher was around today he'd be overjoyed to see the events of last year and the socialist wave in south America in particular.

i can write a whole response essay that basically corroborates the conceptions & situations described in this book to the cultural reality of indonesia. pat recommended me this book following our conversation about robin sloan's "An app can be a home-cooked meal", & the tech industry inside capitalist realism  - thank uuuu pat - and i am so, so grateful that i read this.

i've long been uncomfortable with the idea of living life just for work, just for profit, & the notion that "that's just how it's always been". that we just have to accept this brutal machinery we have that is this system. the book provides a background, sebuah landasan untuk pemikiran itu dan referensi untuk this defeatism and mental fatigue that permeates the middle-upper class indonesians IMO. the fact that we have been demonizing the left so much yet we think we perform anti-capitalism just by *being* a representation of "budaya timur", when we've never healed from the cultural trauma that US intervention left us with. our obsession with "personal branding", turning everything into a small business in instagram, the illusion of upward socioeconomic mobility being something achievable - that's not semangat ketimuran, that's capitalist realism. i flip-flopped between the 4.5 and 5 stars rating (due to me losing it a bit at the end - but it's because i don't have the intertextual understanding for the uhh paternalism & family structure stuff), but this shit is in my personal canon bro. it gave voice to my formless thoughts. it illuminated the shadows that were collecting in my mind.

i actually don't get why some of the reviews say this book is depressing and offers no actual solutions/alternatives. like.. that was the point? we as a collective being make it. you can't expect a single author to posit a solution to literally the problem he says has to be a collective effort. this was a springboard. an illuminator, as i said. we have to radically imagine a different future rather than the inevitable end capitalist realism requires us to believe in, and hold each others hand to barrel towards it.

more relevant and vital during these times. a fast, passionate read.

Erfan Abedi

Consider this my very inecstastic turn to the left.

Lily

Ryan Nylander

This book is it. It is an absolute banger. I'd recommend it to anyone who has noticed how often young people on the internet complain (and meme) about how much they hate capitalism, and wondered, what exactly is the ideological position that so many people are expressing?

There have been several popular thinkpieces in recent years (ugh) regarding a so-called "Great Awokening" that has taken place on the internet over the last decade; my favorite of these is from The Cut, in which Molly Fischer reflects: "[in 2017] A racist reality star was in the Oval Office and actual neo-Nazis were claiming Taylor Swift as their Aryan princess... It was the perfect year to take pop culture very seriously." https://www.thecut.com/2018/01/pop-cu...

In Capitalist Realism, one thing is certain, which is that pop culture is serious business. Fisher backs up his claims with references to Children of Men, Kurt Cobain, classic 90's rap, Goodfellas, Pulp Fiction, Memento, Jason Bourne, Heat, and Supernanny. (Like so much pop-culture writing of the 2010's, the Prestige-television-era figure of the white male Auteur looms large over the book.) It's pop philosophy, a Sparknotes on Zizek (without the accompanying sliminess). It is fun to read, and best of all, succinct.

It also has a colossal problem; that of actually answering the question of an alternative to Capitalism. Supporting his critique of late-Capitalist cultural logic is a rich intellectual tradition of critical theory that analyzes the artifacts of consumer culture, beginning with the Frankfurt School, Debord, Deleuze, Baudrillard and Lacan (all of whom Fisher dutifully namechecks). Even with this pedigree, however, one still has to wonder: if the goal is to abolish capitalism, how will applying Lacanian psychoanalysis to our favorite movies help? Is it the best starting point, or is it just the one that sells the most books?

The book ends on a familiar note to anyone who has spent some time reading leftist theory. Fisher never has any intention of answering the titular question; the real question that the book sets out to answer is, more broadly, "what is to be done?" We are treated to a few modest suggestions, including, as expected: "write more leftist philosophy books." 

The cynic in me wonders, does theory of this sort achieve anything more than reflexively justifying the theorist's career? In a way, this can all start to feel a bit like religion. There is a promise of a heaven (a utopian economy in which capital is abolished, so that, among other things, movies won't suck as much), and a man at a pulpit, who has read a number of books that we have no interest in actually reading ourselves, telling us that as long as we believe, or work hard enough, or even just "stay woke," all of our suffering will eventually end. Like religion, the message is mostly at odds with what a reasonable person can expect to materially come from all our faith; that is to say, effectively, nothing.

Or something. Maybe. Leftism on the whole has more going for it than mere faith. Regardless of one's belief in the viability of a socialist alternative, as Fisher demonstrates here, a great number of people genuinely hate capitalism, even if they have not yet been trained to recognize it as the source of their malaise. If our current economic situation is indeed, as Thatcher and countless others will claim, as good as it gets, then we have to at least wonder: why are we all so unhappy?

It is impossible to read Realism, especially in light of Fisher's suicide in 2017, without wondering at times if the titular question betrays a feeling of desperation, or even hopelessness. He struggled openly with mental illness and depression throughout his life. The most poignant passages of this book touch on the prevalence of mental illness among members of capitalist society, locating depression as a symptom not merely of chemical imbalance, but of alienation from one another. He forecasts the emergence of a new collective subject under capitalism -- those who suffer from mental illness as a consequence of the Kafkaesque conditions we are all subject to.

This all brings us back to the sizeable Internet subculture of teenagers and young adults who complain, often in the same breath, of capitalism and their struggles with mental illness. The sentiment can be generalized to the progressive movement in the American Democratic party that challenges the private healthcare industry. It can also feel hyper-specific, as just the other day I applied for a popular social group on Facebook, and one of the entry questions was, literally: "Who was Mark Fisher?" Read Realism ten years after it was published, and the answer is clear: he was a man who saw the future.

Landen Angeline

There’s no alternative, at least not a coherent one from Mark Fisher. 

Tim Vos

A pretty depressing read, but still a very rewarding and insightful one. Mark Fisher was uniquely capable of analysing both the economic reality of modern, neoliberal life and the culture this oppressive and ultimately inescapable-seeming reality produces. Though reading this might do more harm than good to one's mental state, it might just be the pharmakon you need.

K. Mike Merrill

this book was too intellectual for me, but i still liked it a lot.

Ronas K

One of two books that I have ever read twice, which is to say, it is probably one of the best books I have ever read. It draws heavily from Žižek and Fredric Jameson, both excellent political theorists in their own right, but what emerges from Fisher's writing is a much more cogent and powerful sociocultural critique of modern-day "late" capitalism. (Although, admittedly I have yet to fully acquaint myself with Jameson's work, I am very familiar with Žižek and I find much of his writing mildly enigmatic and also strangely self-plagiarized.)

It is an incredibly dense book that I have obsessively highlighted every single page of, but if I were to pick one thing that really stuck with me, it would be his reflections concerning the glaring impotence of the university strikes in the UK, that I myself have witnessed on my bike rides to and from my own university the past year. He uses this example as well as others to highlight that the traditional strategies employed by organized labour against capital are no longer sufficient for the post-Fordist workplace. Instead, organized labour should seek to disrupt the inefficient Stalinist bureaucracy that Neoliberalism has, despite its ideologues' persuasive criticisms of state inefficiencies, ended up reinvigorating to an almost cartoonishly absurd extent. This endless, Kafkaesque bureaucracy forms the very foundation of the post-Fordist workplace and only by dismantling it can organized labour once again become a powerful force for good.

The book is crammed with compelling insights about this rather nebulous, yet all-encompassing idea of "Capitalist Realism". It is also a very depressing read until you get to the last chapter. However, it remains the best explication of "Capitalism" as a cultural entity that I have read.

Capitalist Realism Is There No Alternative?

Reviews

Highlights