Mark Fisher’s Capitalist Realism
11 years after its publication, this book stands the test of time and remains very much relevant to this day. Capitalist realism, Fisher writes, stems from Zizek and Jameson’s belief that it’s easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism. The world is now brimming with products and images of capitalist economic systems that it’s (practically) impossible to imagine a world without it, let alone think of an alternative to it thanks to the slogan of a woman who’s obviously failing leadership was saved by bombing an entire archipelago. The truth is, we can’t laissez faire our way to economic stability. This is what scares me, to be honest. What if we reach the point of total corruption that we become altogether indifferent and passive to the abuses of the capital? What if we actually believed that “there is no alternative”?
One thing I particularly admire in this book is its comprehensive take on various social issues despite its rather short length- from culture and tradition, to history, to environmentalism, to mass media, to education, to mental health. Fisher calls for the continuous contestation and modification of culture and tradition for it to really matter. If the goal is only to “preserve” a certain culture by turning it into mere objects of aesthetic display for the eyes and therefore deny it of any material progress, that’s not culture, that’s the collapse of symbolic interaction in the face of capitalism. As Fisher claims, “No cultural object can retain its power when there are no longer new eyes to see it.”
“… subjugation no longer takes the form of a subordination to an extrinsic spectacle, but rather invites us to interact and participate.” Have you ever considered the wide spread of anti-capitalism under capitalism? Have you ever wondered why anti-capitalists are guilt-tripped to using any products mass produced by capitalism? Have you also ever considered how flawed and lazy that argument was? The available products and resources are owned by the few elites because they have monopolized and privatized everything. Any ordinary citizen, no matter the urge to withdraw from capitalist exchange, would have no choice but to participate to, uhhh, survive. Fisher straightforwardly writes that we are free to participate in capitalist exchange so long as we know that capitalism is bad.
Far from being the only viable option, capitalism also puts the entire environment on the brink of total destruction by thinking that our resources are infinite. Capitalism is just outright and utterly opposed to any form of sustainability in the name of mass production and profit.
Fisher also writes about how mental health operates in the capitalist realism paradigm. “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.” Corollary to the institutionalization of mental health is its privatization. People with mental health problems are treated as if they are suffering from internal and chemical imbalances and never as a cause of any social disparities beyond one’s control. Fisher suggests that instead of being treated as medicalized conditions, mental health problems must be transformed into effective antagonisms.
“Education, far from being in some ivory tower safely inured from the ‘real world’, is the engine room of the reproduction of social reality, directly confronting the inconsistencies of the capitalist social field.” With the commodification of education, are students consumers or products?
In the last part of the book, Fisher quotes Adam Curtis when he attacked the internet for facilitating communities of egocentric individuals who only confirm and do not even bother to challenge each other’s assumptions and prejudices. To some extent, this claim is true, but in his essay Exiting the Vampires’ Castle, Fisher also posits the growing disparity in the internet, aka “Cancel Culture” and how it has been staining the left movement.
So how do we actually defeat capitalism? According to Fisher, critiques of suffering do little to nothing (he even claims that they reinforce capitalism) since suffering is an inevitable part of life. What then? It’s if we prove that there are/is alternative/s and capitalism is anything but realistic. An effective anti-capitalism is a solid and consistent alternative and not a mere reaction to it. The 2009 stock market crash did not spur the collapse of capitalism but the framework that provided for the creation of capitalism in the first place- neoliberalism. Fisher, however, notes that neoliberalism did not disappear entirely. To this day, as many would realize, it actually continues to dominate the political economy, but only as an “undead default.”
“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. This involves, naturally, resuscitating the very concept of a general will, reviving — and modernizing — the idea of a public space that is not reducible to an aggregation of individuals and their interests.”
Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism: Is There Any Alternative?
