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Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative?

(Futuros Próximos #8)

Mark Fisher

4.24 · Rating details · 11,061 ratings · 1,035 reviews

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 a ...more

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Paperback, 81 pages

Published December 16th 2009 by Zero Books (first published November 27th 2009)

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Dec 02, 2018 Trevor rated it it was amazing

Shelves: economics, social-theory, work

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 th 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. ...more

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Jul 24, 2011 Malcolm rated it really liked it

Shelves: marxism-and-the-left

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 then 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 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 then 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 the 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. ...more

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Nov 01, 2020 julieta rated it it was amazing

Shelves: brits, non-fiction

So this book leaves me with many unanswered questions. But I loved it. It is the first book I have read by Fisher, and I find it to be a great introduction to what he is about. Politics and culture come together here, and his reading of capitalism through films and fiction is a pretty great guide. You see things in a por perceptive way after reading this. I take this: responsibility, which capital culture takes away, so we don't really need to see that everything we do has a consequence. The pro ...more

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Aug 06, 2014 Miguel rated it it was ok

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 contem 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. ...more

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Nov 13, 2020 Emily B rated it really liked it

This is definitely worth reading

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Nov 09, 2020 Kevin rated it liked it

Shelves: theory-psych, theory-postmodern, critique-postmodernism

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 is hardly introductory. Its key ideas are compelling, but I've heard them better developed elsewhere...
--I've h ...more

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Oct 24, 2019 Wee Lassie rated it it was ok

While reading this if I didn't feel confused, I felt depressed. ...more

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Aug 13, 2014 Antonomasia rated it really liked it

Shelves: 2015, politics, scribd, british

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 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.] ...more

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Oct 11, 2020 Vartika rated it it was amazing

Shelves: favourites

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, Fi 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! ...more

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Nov 05, 2012 Liz rated it liked it

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! ...more

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May 17, 2017 Emma Sea rated it it was amazing

Shelves: paperback, neoliberalism, cultural-theory, economics

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. ...more

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Feb 01, 2018 Philipp rated it really liked it

Shelves: non-fiction, on-living, essay

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’ ...more

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Oct 11, 2016 Anna rated it really liked it

Shelves: nonfiction, economics, theory

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 compre 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. ...more

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Aug 21, 2017 David M added it

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

...more

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May 26, 2020 Ipsa rated it really liked it

Capital, capital, everywhere,
And all the will to live did shrink;
Capital, capital, everywhere,
In an ideological rubble we sink.

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Dec 11, 2018 sologdin rated it it was ok

Shelves: leftwing-theory

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-ide ...more

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Jul 23, 2020 Murtaza rated it it was amazing

Shelves: best-of-2020

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 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." ...more

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Jun 09, 2020 Eren Buğlalılar rated it it was ok

Shelves: sosyalbilim

"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 ...more

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Sep 01, 2019 Jonfaith rated it really liked it

Shelves: theory

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 alternat ...more

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Feb 27, 2017 Wendy Liu rated it it was amazing

Shelves: owned-ebooks, capitalism-etc

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 ...more

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Dec 12, 2018 Daniel rated it liked it

I think it's important to preface this with a few comments on the difficulty of reading a book like this - intended more as an intervention than a piece of worked through theory - almost a decade after it was published. Firstly and most obviously, it can't help but seem a little out of date - both in its pop culture references and in its analysis, the world of 2018 being quite different from a world where David Cameron was still called Dave and Gordon Brown was still Prime Minister (although som I think it's important to preface this with a few comments on the difficulty of reading a book like this - intended more as an intervention than a piece of worked through theory - almost a decade after it was published. Firstly and most obviously, it can't help but seem a little out of date - both in its pop culture references and in its analysis, the world of 2018 being quite different from a world where David Cameron was still called Dave and Gordon Brown was still Prime Minister (although some of what unfolded after is pointed to in the book's closing pages). Then the book is burdened by a mammoth reputation which I think would make it hard for any reader to entirely avoid disappointment. Further to this, there is the curse of any really influential book: that the ideas which remain most relevant have become banal, repeated and repurposed in thousands of articles and tweets. This is worsened by the quaintly 2009ness of it all, right down to the ludicrous Zizek endorsement on the back cover and the routine parading of Badiou-Harvey-aforementioned Slovenian philosopher. But that those became cliches is hardly Fisher's fault, and no doubt the book was understandably important for a very large number of people who are now active on the left. If parts now read to me like a Verso catalogue spliced with a cyberpunk zine, that's not to say that wasn't once useful and necessary - the same sort of lessons just happened to be communicated to me via YouTube and the iconic zizek_ebooks, or indeed the different but still important lessons communicated by a liberal book like 'The Spirit Level'.

Nevertheless, I do think there are problems which go beyond the book's age. As others have noted - and as he was undoubtedly at least partly aware - Fisher remained trapped by precisely the phenomena which he describes. This is clearest (as pointed out in a useful meta-review by Moufawad-Paul, rebuking a terrible piece by the laughable IMT) in the bizarre and uncritical use of terms like 'Stalinism' and 'totalitarianism'. It's also the reason behind the book's brevity - a calculated acceptance that, for Fisher, literacy and attention spans have both been constrained.

Behind this, however, there is a desire to take people at their word which I found surprising - perhaps the worst example is an anecdote about a student using headphones who claims not to be listening to them, which Fisher takes at face value. It does not seem to have been considered that the student might be lying - having had at least a little experience working with young people in similar situations, I would have interpreted that conversation quite differently! That anecdote is then followed by a paragraph outlining ADHD and dyslexia as 'a pathology of late capitalism' - a claim seemingly not evidenced by more than a reference to Neuromancer and a quote from Deleuze and Guattari. I think a lot of what Fisher has to say about mental health is good and useful, but I fear these sort of sweeping statements are fraught with danger - a social pathology can lead to much the same conclusions as a biological one. The sections which rely on Fisher's personal anecdotes of teaching came across to me as weakest, and his frustration at the system which produced his students seems constantly at risk of brimming over into frustration at the students (or, indeed, call centre workers) themselves. Here, Fisher's antipathy towards bureaucracy seems telling - after all, at least some reforms in education have genuinely made it more accessible (albeit within definite limits) and we would not want to dispense with them out of a grouchy academic resentment towards filling in forms. I was also disappointed in a maneoeuvre which is sadly characteristic of a certain type of Marxist academic at that time - the conflating of the precarious (we would now probably add 'zero hours') worker and the mortgaged-owner daily checking on the performance of their pension fund. It doesn't take much in the way of political economy to know that we are then probably talking about different workers! Weirdest of all, Fisher saw fit to quote a colleague who compared (Fisher notes, 'sardonically') Ofsted inspections to slavery - I just don't see why anyone would consider this appropriate or helpful, joke or not.

There are times here where Fisher reminds me of Angela Nagle - confirming the problems identified by the people they describe, if differing (and Fisher certainly differs more than Nagle would) over the conclusions. This is clearest in the chapter which talks about Supernanny (which I had, I admit, not thought about for a decade!), coupling a criticism of the role of the Supernanny-as-Spinozist with an apparent endorsement of the show's conceit that "the 'paternal' concept of duty has been subsumed into the 'maternal' imperative to enjoy". The Marxist Supernanny is different from her television counterpart - on cue, Adam Curtis enters to explain what it might look like - but there's never an effort to interrogate whether the problem identified by the show really exists at all.

Another problem arising from the book's age is that it's hard not to see the early warning signs of what was to come: Russell Brand and the People's Assembly and a certain castle. Still, there are points here which hint at all of these - the dismissal of teacher/lecturer strikes (how strange in the light of the last year) and Palestine activism are particularly troubling. So too the lamenting (via James Meek) of attacks on the government as a deflection from attacks on business - at the risk of falling foul of Fisher's injunction against rerunning Kronstadt et al, it's hard not to think that he might have seen attacks on the Tsar as a deflection from attacks on the bankers and industrialists! The success of Jeremy Corbyn, for all its limitations, points I think towards a sharper kind of politics than the ineffective attempt to invent a general will that exercises like the People's Assembly would later prove.

I have been critical here, I think it's fair to say, because all of the book's insights - and it would be churlish to pretend they weren't considerable - are already by now widely known. Works like this aren't intended to stand the test of time, and nor should they be - politics is fleeting and, as Fisher suggests towards the end of the book, risks have to be taken. If in places Fisher fell short of the mark - confined in a way which I think he hinted at without necessarily quite acknowledging here - then in falling short he still succeeded in inspiring a great many people who will make interventions which will come closer. It is also, I'd suggest, still challenging in useful ways - helpful in understanding the different trajectories of those who have responded to it. ...more

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Nov 28, 2020 muthuvel rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Shelves: politics, psychedelic-stuffs, anthropology-cultural_studies

'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 '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 ...more

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Oct 07, 2018 Laryssa rated it really liked it

"the marxist supernanny would not only be the one who laid down limitations, who acted in our own interests when we are incapable of recognizing them ourselves, but also the one prepared to take this kind of risk, to wager on the strange and our appetite for it."

where do i sign to buy the rights of "the marxist supernanny" motion picture? ...more

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Jan 25, 2019 T rated it really liked it

"What exemplifies the failure of the neoliberal world to live up to its own PR than the call center?" (64) ...more

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Mar 06, 2019 Hind rated it it was amazing

This brilliant and fascinating little book contained sagaciously written chapters trying to evince reality as it really is under capitalism, how cavernously rooted it is in our lives, and how it has infiltrated within every single aspect, be it the world of academia, work, mental health (it was rather shocking to know of the role capitalism plays in it), and every sort of entertainment.

It is dejecting to be cognisant of all that and to try to go through life knowing there is possibly no solutio ...more

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Aug 25, 2017 Sian Lile-Pastore rated it liked it

This is a short and super readable book. I was interested in lots of the things discussed, in particular about depression - which is a political rather than a personal/individual issue?, management, job reviews in work - where 'satisfactory' isn't actually satisfactory .... And other stuff too.

So it's interesting, it got me thinking, but alongside this, it felt like this wasn't the book for me. It has a very male narrative - pretty much all the references are from men - lots of Zizek, Deluze an ...more

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Apr 01, 2020 Em Laurent rated it really liked it

Shelves: at-capacity

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 fail ...more

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Feb 20, 2020 Griffin Alexander rated it really liked it

Shelves: all-school-crit

My first foray into the work of the late Fisher. A good (and entertaining) summation of our current predicament of the ongoing (and therefore non-detectable-as-such) cataclysm of capitalism. There were a lot of interesting asides left unexplored in full (e.g., looking to institutions/economics as primary causes of mental illness; various pop-culture reads on the evolution of sci-fi and gangster movies since the 80s as indicative shifts in economic/power models), but also a lot of synthesizing an ...more

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Jun 08, 2020 Mila rated it it was amazing

Alright so this might be one of the best books I have ever read. It says so much in so few pages. We truly lost a real one, RIP

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Dec 13, 2020 Ksenia rated it it was amazing

Shelves: re-read

I've had this up on my work computer all year, reading and re-reading a chapter or a page or two at a time all year long. I love Fisher's writing and analysis, and I feel a deep sadness that we're without him particularly keenly while COVID seems to be another ripe ideological shift in the world. Time to close this too-short tome for while again I think and find some current voices looking at the rifts and potential for healing and construction now. ...more

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About Mark Fisher

Mark Fisher

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Mark Fisher (1968 – 2017) was a co-founder of Zero Books and Repeater Books. His blog, k-punk, defined critical writing for a generation. He wrote three books, Capitalist Realism, Ghosts of My Life and The Weird and the Eerie, and was a Visiting Fellow in the Visual Cultures department at Goldsmiths, University of London.

Librarian’s note: There is more than one author in the Goodreads database wit ...more

Other books in the series

Futuros Próximos (1 - 10 of 20 books)

Books by Mark Fisher

Ghosts of My Life: Writings on Depression, Hauntology and Lost Futures

K-punk: The Collected and Unpublished Writings of Mark Fisher

Flatline Constructs: Gothic Materialism and Cybernetic Theory-Fiction

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“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. 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 SSRls). 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.” — 121 likes

“Capitalist realism insists on treating mental health as if it were a natural fact, like weather (but, then again, weather is no longer a natural fact so much as a political-economic effect). In the 1960s and 1970s, radical theory and politics (Laing, Foucault, Deleuze and Guattari, etc.) coalesced around extreme mental conditions such as schizophrenia, arguing, for instance, that madness was not a natural, but a political, category. But what is needed now is a politicization of much more common disorders. Indeed, it is their very commonness which is the issue: in Britain, depression is now the condition that is most treated by the NHS. In his book The Selfish Capitalist, Oliver James has convincingly posited a correlation between rising rates of mental distress and the neoliberal mode of capitalism practiced in countries like Britain, the USA and Australia. In line with James’s claims, I want to argue that it is necessary to reframe the growing problem of stress (and distress) in capitalist societies. 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?” — 91 likes

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