Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative?

by Mark Fisher

a political system which endlessly promoted the notion that we were all ultimately alone,

“More effort goes into ensuring that a local authority’s services are represented correctly than goes into actually improving those services”.

when a community or an individual is being oppressed, there really is no more radical or necessary act than to look beyond the apparent limitations of the present in order to believe that something other than what appears to be real and pragmatic might one day materialise

What happens if the young are no longer capable of producing surprises?

Eliot’s claim was that the exhaustion of the future does not even leave us with the past.

Tradition counts for nothing when it is no longer contested and modified. A culture that is merely preserved is no culture at all.

capitalism subsumes and consumes all of previous history:

capitalist realism presents itself as a shield protecting us from the perils posed by belief itself.

Lowering our expectations, we are told, is a small price to pay for being protected from terror and totalitarianism.

‘We live in a contradiction,’

profoundly inegalitarian – where all existence is evaluated in terms of money alone

Sure, they say, we may not live in a condition of perfect Goodness. But we’re lucky that we don’t live in a condition of Evil.

The ‘realism’ here is analogous to the deflationary perspective of a depressive who believes that any positive state, any hope, is a dangerous illusion.

Accept the current reality as only way

capitalism brings with it a massive desacralization of culture.

Culture is consumption, no geniuety in action

The 80s were the period when capitalist realism was fought for and established, when 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.

so it’s as well to remember the role that commodification played in the production of culture throughout the twentieth century.

What we are dealing with now is not the incorporation of materials that previously seemed to possess subversive potentials, but instead, their precorporation : the pre-emptive formatting and shaping of desires, aspirations and hopes by capitalist culture.

Here, even success meant failure, since to succeed would only mean that you were the new meat on which the system could feed.

‘Real’ means the death of the social: it means corporations who respond to increased profits not by raising pay or improving benefits but by …. downsizing (the laying-off the permanent workforce in order to create a floating employment pool of part-time and freelance workers without benefits or job security).

it was precisely hip hop’s performance of this first version of the real – ‘the uncompromising’ – that enabled its easy absorption into the second, the reality of late capitalist economic instability,

‘To “get real” is to confront a state-of-nature where dog eats dog, where you’re either a winner or a loser, and where most will be losers’.

desensitization serves a function for capitalist realism:

Time after time, the villain in Hollywood films will turn out to be the ‘evil corporation’.

Take Disney/ Pixar’s Wall - E (2008). The film shows an earth so despoiled that human beings are no longer capable of inhabiting it. We’re left in no doubt that consumer capitalism and corporations – or rather one mega-corporation,

What we have here is a vision of control and communication much as Jean Baudrillard understood it, in which subjugation no longer takes the form of a subordination to an extrinsic spectacle, but rather invites us to interact and participate.

A film like Wall-E exemplifies what Robert Pfaller has called ‘interpassivity’: the film performs our anti-capitalism for us, allowing us to continue to consume with impunity.

The role of capitalist ideology is not to make an explicit case for something in the way that propaganda does, but to conceal the fact that the operations of capital do not depend on any sort of subjectively assumed belief.

Are often not concious to or align with capitalist motives

today’s society must appear post-ideological: the prevailing ideology is that of cynicism; people no longer believe in ideological truth; they do not take ideological propositions seriously.

Cynical distance is just one way … to blind ourselves to the structural power of ideological fantasy: even if we do not take things seriously, even if we keep an ironical distance, we are still doing them.

So long as we believe (in our hearts) that capitalism is bad, we are free to continue to participate in capitalist exchange. According to Žižek, capitalism in general relies on this structure of disavowal.

We believe that money is only a meaningless token of no intrinsic worth, yet we act as if it has a holy value.

Capital is an abstract parasite, an insatiable vampire and zombie-maker; but the living flesh it converts into dead labor is ours, and the zombies it makes are us.

Product Red’s ‘punk rock’ or ‘hip hop’ character consisted in its ‘realistic’ acceptance that capitalism is the only game in town. 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.

No ethical consumption under capitalism

capitalist realism has successfully installed a ‘business ontology’ in which it is simply obvious that everything in society, including healthcare and education, should be run as a business.

The significance of Green critiques is that they suggest that, far from being the only viable political-economic system, capitalism is in fact primed to destroy the entire human environment.

The relationship between capitalism and eco-disaster is neither coincidental nor accidental:

Mental health, in fact, is a paradigm case of how capitalist realism operates.

it is necessary to reframe the growing problem of stress (and distress) in capitalist societies.

Not normal to be under so much stress, medical system now profits off our exploitation (mental health)

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.

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 number of students who have some variant of dyslexia is astonishing. It is not an exaggeration to say that being a teenager in late capitalist Britain is now close to being reclassified as a sickness.

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...

constituted not by an inability to get pleasure so much as it by an inability to do anything else except pursue pleasure. There is a sense that ‘something is missing’ – but no appreciation that this mysterious, missing enjoyment can only be accessed beyond the pleasure principle.

this is a consequence of students’ ambiguous structural position, stranded between their old role as subjects of disciplinary institutions and their new status as consumers of services.

Deleuze distinguishes between the disciplinary societies described by Foucault, which were organized around the enclosed spaces of the factory, the school and the prison, and the new control societies, in which all institutions are embedded in a dispersed corporation.

Imbalance of how yoith understand control, discipline, systems- self

the Control societies delineated by Kafka himself, but also by Foucault and Burroughs, operate using indefinite postponement: Education as a lifelong process…

Control only works if you are complicit with it. Hence the Burroughs figure of the ‘Control Addict’: the one who is addicted to control, but also, inevitably, the one who has been taken over, possessed by Control.

The carceral regime of discipline is being eroded by the technologies of control, with their systems of perpetual consumption and continuous development.