Mark Fisher's Capitalist Realism

The Left at the End of History

It’s hard not to be moved by Fisher’s passion even if his prescriptions leave something to be desired.

Fisher is the howl of outrage of the Left at the end of history. In the context of the “Intellectual Bootcamp” programme, he is an arresting counterpart to Deleuze’s “Postscript on the Societies of Control” and Fukuyama’s “End of History.” If Fukuyama is, famously, positive about the arrow of history culminating in capitalism and liberalism — although with the enormous caveat that “the end of history will be a very sad time” — and if Deleuze is wry and French about the emergence of “the new monster,” Fisher is, simply and entirely, horrified by the new state of affairs.

For Fisher, the domain he is contending with isn’t particularly economic systems — he seems to have little nostalgia for the Left’s dream of a Big State. It’s more in the vein of Fredric Jameson’s late capitalism — of capitalism as a globe-spanning hyper-institutional entity hoovering up all possible values. He notes: “Jameson used to report in horror about the ways that capitalism had seeped into the very unconscious; now, 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.” He opens up with a long description of the movie Children of Men in which an apocalyptic landscape preserves all the machinery of capitalism, and even the symbol-subsuming capacities of late capitalism, and he concludes, “The widespread sense is 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.” Much of Capitalist Realism is a litany of failed efforts to imagine an alternative. Kurt Cobain — Fisher has a Žižekian liking for pop culture references — knew, as Fisher put it, “that he was just another piece of spectacle, that nothing runs better on MTV than a protest against MTV.” The anti-capitalist movements of the late ‘90s turned into “a series of hysterical demands which [they] didn’t expect to be met” and formed a “kind of carnivalesque background noise to capitalist realism” — it’s one of Fisher’s main points that capitalism is adept at absorbing all of its critiques. And he reserves particular scorn for the Live 8 concerts — “a strange kind of protest that everyone could agree with” where celebrities temporarily pretend to cross the picket line and join with the people in calling for “politicians to legislate away poverty” and in which the pretense is that “caring individuals could end famine directly, without the need for any kind of political solution or systemic reorganization.”

The totalization of capitalism is what Fisher is grappling with and that leads him into a series of paradoxical, if not entirely logical, inversions. Capitalism, in Fisher’s telling, is a very strange beast — a great deal like Deleuze’s serpent. It is of course not strictly economic. In neoliberal ideology it pairs itself with the state, and actually with all power bases in the society, in a system of total control. But that system doesn’t quite resembles what Fisher calls “Fordism” with all-consuming production. It’s more of what Delueze calls “a gas” and what Fisher calls “a pervasive atmosphere” — it is nimbly able to absorb its own dissents and to use the very ubiquity of dissent as a way of both validating itself (the dissent as proof of ‘free speech’) while incapacitating any meaningful alternative (the dissent also seems to reify the permanence and irreplaceability of capitalism). To illustrate what he’s talking about, Fisher has a vivid account of the film WALL-E, which is an excruciating critique of capitalist consumerism that nonetheless was produced by Disney/Pixar and that is entirely emptied out of any call to action. “The film performs our anti-capitalism for us, allowing us to continue to consume with impunity,” Fisher writes.

This is the genius of the ‘system of control,’ that it is everywhere and nowhere, that there is no particular need for propaganda — “capitalism can proceed perfectly well, in some ways better, without anyone making a case for it,” he writes — and that all of its participants seem to willingly choose it, if only because they are incapable of thinking of, or even imagining, an alternative. Fisher seems to have not been very happy with his job at a further education college where his students are like pantomimes of Deleuze’s essay, with one particular boy (who really got on Fisher’s nerves) insisting on wearing headphones to class no matter that the phones didn’t connect to anything but gave him the “reassurance that the matrix was still there, within reach.” Fisher spends a great deal of time updating Kafka to the modern workplace environment and arguing that it is the capitalist office, with its “mixture of shirtsleeves-informality and quiet authoritarianism,” its perverse insistence that employees be motivated and “express” themselves, its layers upon layers of cheery bureaucracy, that is more Kafkaesque than anything the totalitarian states devised.

But at the same time that he is insisting on capitalism’s totalizing hegemony, Fisher is equally adamant that cracks must appear, that there is, contrary to all appearances, an alternative out there. Part of Fisher’s argument is historical — capitalism is the “dark potentiality which haunted all previous social systems” and that other systems were adept at foreclosing, whether by adopting laws against usury or advancing systems of belief or placing various social and communtarian ties first ahead of what Marx and Engels called the “icy water of egotistical calculation.” That line of thought presupposes that there is a choice, that capitalism doesn’t exactly win out through the logic of history but through societies, essentially, letting their guard down. The tougher argument, and what Fisher is really contending with, is “capitalist realism,” that egoistical calculation and the pursuit of money represent the deeper truth of human relations and the thing to do is just to embrace it. Fisher, needless to say, finds that idea intolerable, and he seems to run himself ragged to find the cracks in the system.

He finds them in two places, one is in the Lacanian distinction between the “Real” and “reality,” reality being an all-pervasive socially-determined system like the Matrix and the Real being Zion, the place of actual physical horrors and of stark truths. In Fisher’s scheme, global warming and environmental catastrophe are the Real — the antidote to capitalism, the proof that “far from being the only viable political-economic system, capitalism is in fact primed to destroy the entire human environment.” That may well be, but Fisher is less than a fully-convincing environmentalist. He seems interested in environmental movements solely as a critique of capitalism, as a way to find a locus of real resistance outside of ‘reality.’ The next crack he finds is in Jameson’s analysis of how the signs and symbols of capitalism are constantly shifting. He describes a former manager of his — ‘a model of beaming mental health, his whole being radiating a hail-fellow-well-met bonhomie” — who managed, with Orwellian bravura to contradict himself from day to day on various company projects. What he was doing, Fisher concludes, was “good management,” but it could only be so in a world of constant fungibility, of “subordinating oneself to a reality that is infinitely plastic, capable of reconfiguring itself at any moment.” That constant bending seems to create the possibility of a moment of O’Brien and Winston locking eyes in the movie theater, of being able to remember that only last week Eurasia was the enemy, not Eastasia as the propaganda films are currently proclaiming, and to develop a wry sort of resistance built around a rediscovery of the Real and outside the constantly shifting symbols.

To me, all of that sounds a little hopeful though. It’s not really clear what the resistance is supposed to anchor itself on, if not a rival economic system, and it would seem that any other economic system (this is what we learned from the failures of Communism) is survivable only if it generates growth, which, as far as we can tell, seems to be really achievable only with capitalist investments. What Fisher proposes is a bit fanciful: “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.” But this seems to be the impasse that the Left always finds itself in — what exactly is a general will? how is it ever manifested except in some famous, and very transitory, moments of revolutionary fervor? why would we assume that the “general will” is left-leaning, or radically left, when electoral politics shows no sign of that being the case? His other prescriptions — the Graeberite idea that “the left should argue that it can deliver what neoliberalism signally failed to do: a massive reduction of bureaucracy” and a new attitude towards mental health, seeing craziness as a rational response to capitalist totalization — are less than convincing. It’s far from clear why the left should have any unique gift for cutting away at bureaucracy (what Fisher calls “market Stalinism’), and the best that can be said is that Fisher, like Graeber, is gesturing towards some sort of utopic anarchism without having a programme in place for what that might look like. And, meanwhile, if Fisher is moving at a personal level in discussing “the privatization of stress” and writing “it is not an exaggeration to say that being a teenager in late capitalist Britain is now close to being reclassified as a sickness,” it’s hard, outside an Antonioni movie, to imagine that throwing out the meds and letting all the disorders loose is really what the society needs to heal.

As with so many books like this one, Fisher is better in critique than in solution-dispensing. When he writes, “What did happen in 2008 was the collapse of the framework which has provided ideological cover for capitalist accumulation since the 1970s. After the bank bail-outs neoliberalism has, in every sense, been discredited,” that actually is somewhat compelling. Neoliberalism — or the presumption that the markets are perfectly efficient — does seem to have given way to a more cynical “capitalist realism” where the society looks around and simply claims that there is no alternative and then the state serves as banker to the banks in a way that is not supposed to happen in the pure-market model and speaks to the way that capitalism really is just a marriage of big business and the state and serves simply to reify power. Not exactly convincing in his plans for a jailbreak, Fisher does at least manage to fairly accurately measure out the dimensions of the cell. Capitalism truly is a totalization, he concludes. The fact that there is no ‘other,’ nothing for it to compare itself to, or to demonize, means that we least have the ability to lay the social failures we experience at the doorstep of capitalism and to decide for ourselves if we are willing to tolerate the system or to opt for anything — anything at all — that offers something different. “The long, dark night of the end of history has to be grasped as an enormous opportunity,” he writes. “The space has been cleared for a new anti-capitalism to emerge.” What that anti-capitalism is, Fisher seems to have no real idea — any more than Graeber does. But at least its adversary — and the full, totalizing capacities of its adversary — is sharply identified.