Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative?

Capitalist Realism is a powerhouse of a book that effectively dissects, (in its very few pages) the pervasive idea that not only is Neo Liberal Capitalism the best, it is in fact the only possible option for organizing a society. Fisher has an enormous talent for condensing complexities into wonderfully pithy sentences. Below are a couple that really stuck out to me:

“What needs to be kept in mind is both that capitalism is a hyper abstract impersonal structure and that it would be nothing without our cooperation.”

“A moral critique of Capitalism, emphasizing he way in which it leads to suffering, only reinforces capitalist realism. Poverty, famine, and war, can be presented as an inevitable part of reality, while the hope that show more these forms of suffering could be eliminated, easily painted as utopianism.”

Overall a good, readable, and only occasionally dense, book that encapsulates the contradictions and pitfalls of our current economic model. show less

Reading Capitalist Realism is akin to walking unhappily through the storm of life with only one word for "water", and then hearing seventy finely tuned descriptions for the precise version of sideways-sleeting bullshit that you experience.

The core of Fisher's book is the ideology called capitalism, so successful and omnipresent that it cannot see itself. Having conquered the world with science and imperialism, socialism via force of arms, diplomacy, and public-private partnerships, and finally the last sanctums of labor, culture, and personality via the multifarious tools of advertising and public relations, capitalism is left with nothing further to conquer. And for a predator who needs continual motion and prey, that means its own show more destruction.

Fisher flashes through academic theory, psychoanalysis, media critiques, political analysis, his own life experiences. It's these last where Fisher is most trenchant, precisely describing the ennui of interaction with a consumerist-entertainment matrix which can fulfill any expected need instantaneously, but as soon as an issue becomes complex or worse, unprofitable, casts you in a Kafka-esque decentralized bureaucracy where no one has the power to do anything. Perhaps the best bit is a process of teaching self-assessment, which Fisher reads as a Maoist confession remade in the language of McKinsey Consultants. The goal is to have good numbers, but not too good, and make sure to include some failure so we know you're taking the process seriously, but don't worry, you won't be required to fix them and the won't be used against you*.

Under Fisher's analysis, culture is no longer a domain of communication, but one of endless formless "content", marked most notably by a total absence of meaning. The mental health crisis, the avalanche of discontent, is an individual manifestation of a social patriarchy that cannot set boundaries yet constantly restricts behavior, and a nursemaid state incapable of caring, only of finer gradations of punishment. The centers of power are absence and impotent, incapable of saving this world or building a better one. We see in the failures of Capitalism to make even modest political progress, in its inability to provision real social good like housing, healthcare, and education, even as the screens get better, the entertainment more entertaining, and the data-based monitoring more uncannily invasive.

The thesis is dazzling and dense, but I feel like it works in this case because the details aren't important. What is important is the rage, the despair, the grief, the bone-deep sense that we have to seize the Barricades of Imagination, even if we cannot yet see what they are, if we are to survive.

WE ARE INSIDE THE MACHINE. THE MACHINE IS KILLING US. THE MACHINE IS SHAKING APART.

*offer void if we do decide to use them against you. show less

One wonders, on a meta-philosophical/political level, whether depressed tracts like these, where allusions and metaphors that are meant to carry great theoretical weight are sourced in mere cultural artifacts like Supernanny and Heat and The Godfather etc. etc., simply carry out the reflexive impotence and interpassivity and depressive hedonia that Fisher rallies against. Ok, so I’ve spent a couple of hours re-reading this and I feel like having a cry and then a wank and then after all of that maybe another cry - is that all the Post-left postmodern blah blah theorists have to offer? Is this praxis? Is it so tyrannical and Kafkaesque that schools in England have internal controls/Maoist-esque self-criticism so as to lessen the show more frequency of OFSTED inspections? In a fight against climate catastrophe, or whatever great Capital-instigated crisis you want to point at, am I just meant to rethink the concept of general will? Get rid of bureaucracy? Come come, Mr Fisher, this is weak - leftist populism, maybe a few instances of surrealism’s most essential and despicable act (look to the second manifesto, bang bang), wouldn’t that do the trick? Or must we just endorse a Žižekian quietism, think through things and stand around until we see the light at the end of the tunnel (and being perceptive intellectuals, recognise that it is a train hurtling toward us)? Little works like this seem to only really have a call to action toward paralysis in their affective impact, and are quickly sucked up, “reterritorialised” if you want to be pedantic, by the very structure of Capital itself. I’m rambling. I still like Mark. Rest in Peace Champ. show less

I have very mixed feelings here. This book is an engaging entry point to contemporary left theory (which, caveat emptor, I am not well-versed in, so take this review with that in mind) and makes valuable arguments with respect to mental health as well as the titular relationship between ideology and imagination, but I felt like much of the remainder of the work is imprecise or impressionistic in ways that I found lacking.

To be specific, many of the arguments in the latter half of the book seem to me to conflate several different diagnostic factors as roots of the "audit culture"/bureaucratic expansionism that are core to the felt experience of "centerless" corporations and purely symbolic work culture. Despite the book's title, my sense show more is that Fisher is arguing more specifically that these arise from the particular expression of capitalism circa 2008, not about capital-C Capitalism as an economic system. I say this because many of his diagnoses of audit culture and bureaucracy have a host of interrelated causes. One could point to, for example, financialization and the requirements of public companies to "perform work" as part of their duty to shareholders; the rise of managerialism as a practice in the latter half of the twentieth century, which went well beyond shareholder-driven corporations to happen in schools, hospitals, and so on; or even just look at natural ossification and bureaucratic development of most large organizations as complex technologies require similarly complex organizations to develop them.

What I mean to say is that while Fisher's diagnosis of these problems is accurate, his arguments for the mechanism is unclear and often touted simply as "contemporary capitalism" when it is likely more accurately a whole variety of causes that should be teased apart. One shouldn't come to such a short volume and expect it to hash out the whole scope, but we should also be clear in what this work is: an entryway to future developments. show less

"The fact that capitalism has colonized the dreaming life of the population is so taken for granted that it is no longer worthy of comment." (p. 8f)

This book explores the many ways capitalism has shaped us and the world around us. Musicians who rebel against the mainstream are also exploited by the market: "you were the new meat on which the system could feed" (p. 8). Authenticity itself becomes a commodity. The harsh capitalist reality is accepted as an objective fact, as something unquestionable. Have we normalized capitalism so deeply that we can no longer imagine its end? "It’s easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism."

Many of us have a strange relationship to capitalism. "We believe that money is only a show more meaningless token of no intrinsic worth, yet we act as if it has a holy value. Moreover, this behavior precisely depends upon the prior disavowal. We are able to fetishize money in our actions only because we have already taken an ironic distance towards money in our heads." (p. 13)

The central argument is that capitalism has successfully framed itself not as a chosen ideology, but as the only realistic way to organize society, a simple fact of life, like the weather. This is why a moral critique often backfires. For instance, if you point out that capitalism leads to poverty or that a pharmaceutical company is price-gouging for a life-saving drug, the system's defenders don't have to argue that these are good things. They simply frame them as inevitable, sad realities. They say, "That's just how the world works," and paint anyone who believes we could eliminate such suffering as a naive dreamer.

This creates a powerful, self-reinforcing logic. If capitalism is the only "realistic" system, then its rules must be the best rules for everything. This is how we arrive at the now-commonplace idea that even core social services like healthcare and education should be run like businesses. We don't even question it anymore; it seems "simply obvious." We accept that a hospital must focus on its profit margins and a university must operate like a brand, because the alternative, imagining a world not governed by market logic, has been made to seem utterly impossible.

Mark Fisher questions our faith in capitalist reality, a system that mostly benefits a few at the expense of many. The COVID-19 pandemic exposed the catastrophic failure of market-based healthcare in numerous countries, while the chronic underfunding of our future is evident in the wave of school bankruptcies. These aren't isolated failures; they are the logical outcomes of a system built on a foundation of inequality.

Capitalism rests on the impossible premise of "always more", as if resources were infinite. But they are not. For that reason, capitalism is an ideology doomed to death.

A common ideological trick is to individualize and privatize problems instead of examining their systemic roots. Climate catastrophe? Lower your Carbon Footprint! Bad grades? Buy tutoring! Mental health? It is framed as your personal failure rather than a symptom of a broader systemic crisis. The privatization of problems is something we all recognize.

Interestingly, I recently spoke with two people who said their memory has worsened. Mark Fisher theorizes that under the new capitalist system "the old disciplinary segmentation of time is breaking down. The carceral regime of discipline is being eroded by the technologies of control, with their systems of perpetual consumption and continuous development." (p. 23) He describes "a generation (...) for whom time has always come ready-cut into digital micro-slices." (p. 25) "Cyberspatial capital operates by addicting its users." (p. 25) I wonder if today’s patterns of consumption have something to do with this. Do we need to reintroduce a sense of temporality into our everyday lives, in a timeline fragmented by social media?

Fisher also writes about managerialism and bureaucracy, which have not decreased under capitalism (as was often criticized in the Soviet Union) but perhaps even increased. There are endless "hallmarks
Fisher questions the hierarchies that come with capitalist realism. "For Harvey and Badiou, neoliberal politics are not about the new, but a return of class power and privilege. (...) Harvey argues that neoliberalization is best conceived of as a 'political project to re-establish the conditions for capital accumulation and to restore the power of economic elites' (...) class war has continued to be fought, but only by one side: the wealthy." (p. 28f) The rich keep getting richer. Covid, ironically, was a golden age economically for the wealthiest of the wealthy.

Corporations outsource responsibility - yet turn to the state whenever needed (for example, the 2008 banking crisis, when vast public funds flowed into private companies). Ironically, the state is also used as a scapegoat by capitalists. The state holds an essential, almost ontological position for capitalism, even as capitalists demand more "freedom". The irony here exposes the fiction that capital could exist without the state.

This book is a call to question the "reality" we live in today and to consider whether it should endure. Capitalism is not a destiny carved in stone. At times, however, I felt Fisher could have expressed some ideas more clearly. The writing seemed at times pretentious and elitist. Morever, Mark Fisher ignored exploitation of the global South in his discussion of capitalism.

Are we, perhaps, the "governed citizen(s) who look to find solutions in products, not political processes"? (p. 61) show less

“It’s easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism” (p. 1) - well, yes. Some days I think that capitalism will definitively end because capitalism will end the world.

Fisher, of course, argues that we can have a post-capitalist society, and we can help it along by accentuating its inner contradictions - how neoliberalism promised to get rid of bureaucracies, but did the opposite. How capitalism can’t deal with climate change because it depends on endless economic growth.

To me personally, the call for a repoliticizing of mental illness was the most interesting, like, it shouldn’t just be something pharmaceutical companies can sell you pills for, but you continue to be on your own. “If it is true, for show more 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.” (p. 37).

The book is really short. It assumed that the reader was already deep into both current (2008 financial crash) political debate, political theory and movie and literature. But I am here for the mix. show less

This work of Western Marxist cultural theory is, if can you believe it, quite touching. Most such works lack a personal dimension. Fisher, on the other hand, wants you to know how neoliberalism wrought havoc in the soul of man.

This approach lets something peek through that usually doesn't: a yearning for moral authority. It’s there in the classroom vignettes where Fisher lacks the authority to be heard with respect. It’s there when he evokes the Marxist supernanny which would tell people what they really desire and provide it for them. He seems, in fine, to echo Gillian Rose's insight that Marxists have failed to create a morality and a culture capable of contending with the culture of Capital. Perhaps "seems" isn't the right word, show more since he studied at Warwick, where Rose taught, in the years just before and after her untimely passing...

Yet he never admits his yearning. To admit it would be to acknowledge that Marxism can't provide the yearned-for moral authority, an admission Rose eventually made, scandalizing her die-hard Marxist colleagues. To follow this insight means searching for the sources of Western morality and culture and the causes (long-predating neoliberalism) of their decline.

As a description of the devastated social and psychic landscape of the early 21st century, Capitalist Realism is compelling. Its framework and hence its solutions? Not so much. show less