Capitalist Realism Summary (Originally Written By Mark Fisher

Original PDF of Capitalist Realism: https://libcom.org/files/Capitalist%20Realism_%20Is%20There%20No%20Alternat%20-%20Mark%20Fisher.pdf

Introduction to the Book video: https://youtu.be/6Cb5XJH4NMI

Chapter 1: It’s easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism.

Fisher introduces the book by saying:

“The War on Terror [the authoritarian government surveillance of its’ citizens and other measures following the events of 9/11] has prepared us for such a development: the normalization of crisis produces a situation in which the repealing of measures brought in to deal with an emergency becomes unimaginable” — pg 1

He proclaims that authoritarian measures in the past have been a reinforcement to correct what capitalism has helped cause. He incites that our dependency on these measures to solve our problems has led to a dilemma whereby the refusal of these measures becomes unfathomable.

Fisher elaborates to say that “it is easier to imagine the end of the world than it is to imagine the end of capitalism.” -pg 2.

This is to say that there is a widespread idea that not only is capitalism the only viable political and economic system, but that it has become impossible to imagine an alternative to it.

Fisher points out that the goal of neoliberalism sought to limit the intervention of the state, however this has been made clear to not be true in practice. To substantiate this, Fisher says,

“This was made spectacularly clear during the banking crisis of 2008, when, at the invitation of neoliberal ideologues, the state rushed in to shore up the banking system.)” -pg 2

Fisher then begins to say that the world gradually falls apart and winks out. He says that right now we are witnessing this dying of culture and “new surprises” in late stage capitalism. He says that once culture cannot be modernized or looked at from a new prescriptive, it is no longer culture and is instead given a monetary value and holds as an artifact. It is only given this “iconic status” when it is deprived of its function and context. Capitalism consumes everything of the past and by this it transforms cultural objects into mere aesthetic ones to be speculated in such places as a museum.

When I think of this, I am reminded of the ideas Marxist Leninism as a whole. While Lenin’s ideas held more relevance to the social conditions of the USSR then, these ideas are dying out as they are no longer able to be seen through a new lens and be applied to modern social conditions. And as Fisher states, once these ideas are unable to be seen from a new perspective they die and soon just become monetary value or an artifact of the past.

Further in this Chapter, Fisher elaborates that capitalist realism is a shield protecting us from the perils it has imposed on itself. To give a better understanding on how we live in a contradiction with our view on capitalism, Mark references Badiou by saying,

“a brutal state of affairs, profoundly inegalitarian — where all existence is evaluated in terms of money alone — is presented to us as ideal. To justify their conservatism, the partisans of the established order cannot really call it ideal or wonderful. So instead, they have decided to say that all the rest is horrible. 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. Our democracy is not perfect. But it’s better than the bloody dictatorships. Capitalism is unjust. But it’s not criminal like Stalinism. We let millions of Africans die of AIDS, but we don’t make racist nationalist declarations like Milosevic. We kill Iraqis with our airplanes, but we don’t cut their throats with machetes like they do in Rwanda, etc.” -pg 5

Everyone living under post-fordist (end to contemporary capitalism, new wave that promotes that privatization and that neoliberal capitalism is innate, natural and “the only way”) capitalism is in the state of reflexive impotence (where people are aware that world is wrong but no one does anything to fix it). A great example of this is the growing crisis of climate change. Many recognize this issue but choose to put it off in their minds as it causes anxiety and fear as to how we are going to fix this problem in the future.

Chapter 2: What if you held a protest and everyone came?

The chapter introduces saying that anti-capitalism is often ‘widely disseminated’ in capitalism (ex. Many times the villain in a Disney/Pixar movie is actually a big, evil corporation) On the contrary of what you might think, this actually reinforces capitalism realism. Fisher references Wall-E the movie to describe how this feeds into capitalism, rather than challenges it. The film shows an earth despoiled by capitalism to the point where it is inhabitable by humans. When we finally get a glimpse of humans on another habitable planet, they are obese, immobilized, and are obsessed with and technology and they are carrying screens as big as their face. This is a very real reflection of our society right now. Rather than being the spectators, this movie invites us to participate in it as the audience is the true satire of the film. Many noticing this were mad at Disney for attacking their own audience however this just feeds more into capitalist realism. Unlike other ideas, capitalism does not need to make a case for itself, it is unnamable and subjective to beliefs, making it all the more powerful. Whether we realize it or not, we still participate in capitalism freely while recognizing its bad in our hearts, because to us, that’s all it takes to justify it, as long as we know it’s bad in our minds.

Again to give another example about how this actually feeds into capitalist realism, let’s talk about Live Aid 1985, a concert charity that insisted that caring individuals alone could fix world famine by having corporations donate a portion of the profit received to help the cause. While the goal for the people is to end global inequality and steer away from capitalism evils, at the end of the day, their consumerism to big companies to help these goals feeds into capitalist realism. The reinstating of the point earlier that as long as people know in their hearts that capitalism is bad, it is seen as enough to justify and further continue their capitalism exchange without any guilt. 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.

Chapter 3: Capitalism and the Real

Mark Fisher states that his definition of capitalist realism has grown meaning to it. Rather than a type of art or quasi propaganda, it is a “pervasive atmosphere, conditioning not only the production of culture but also the regulation of work and education, and acting as a kind of invisible barrier constraining thought and action.” -pg 16.

Oddly enough, war, poverty, and other evils of capitalism reinforce capitalism realism instead of challenging why it’s bad. We as humans have seen these things as natural and inevitable and any attempt to fix it is portrayed as the person being ‘too naive and utopian.’

Going more into depth, Mark Fisher has said that the slew of privatization made it simply obvious that things such as education and healthcare should be run as a business. However, this has led to the widespread thinking that this is innate and natural, thus as therefore capitalism is continued to be accepted as a fact, only way of life, and natural without it ever once being challenged. This includes things related and caused by capitalism (imperialism, famine, poverty etc). Unlike socialism and fascism, capitalism doesn’t need any propaganda because it is already accepted as a fact rather than a value. Fisher later includes a psychoanalysis from Lacan which differentiates “real” from “reality” saying,

“For Lacan, the Real is what any ‘reality’ must suppress; indeed, reality constitutes itself through just this repression. The Real is an unrepresentable X, a traumatic void that can only be glimpsed in the fractures and inconsistencies in the field of apparent reality. So one strategy against capitalist realism could involve invoking the Real(s) underlying the reality that capitalism presents to us. “-pg 18

In this, Lacan says that reality is what is suppressed by what’s truly real or not. Reality is simply what is presented (emphasis on presented because what is presented to be real in our world isn’t always what’s true) to us as a biological fact, such as capitalism has been. What is actually ‘real’ is much harder to find because it involves us to look further into the inconsistencies of what is given to us. Fisher points out that a good counter to capitalism realism is to show off the ‘reals’ in the apparent reality of capitalism. Again, Fisher draws this back to environmentalism. For us, it is perceived in capitalism realism that we have an infinite amount of resources to sustain the planet due to the false marketing and advertising. However this reality doesn’t mimic what’s actually going on, which is that issues like climate change and resource depletion are inevitable voids coming soon in our lifetime. Capitalist Realism presupposes that problems like this could simply be solved through the markets. He then makes this an allusion to the movie Wall-E once more to say that it is given that resource depletion is only a “temporary glitch” that can be solved later on, when that is simply not the case.

Fisher’s last part of Chapter 3 goes over capitalist realism and how it correlates to mental health. Capitalist Realism operates to treat mental illness as a natural fact, when it has shown its correlation to worsening stress and the neoliberal mode of capitalism in workspaces. They point out how rising rates of stress and depression in places such as Britain and Australia are partly due to this. I would also like to add on to this by saying that the increasing rates of suicide in Japan have been shown to be caused by overexhausion from their jobs and little time of getting to spend with their families. Fisher also states that this realism makes it so individuals are reliant on themselves to fix their own distress rather than recognizing it ties to this system. Fisher finishes this point off by saying,

“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.”- pg 19

Mark uses this quote as a transition to talk about the bureaucracy in the neoliberal model of capitalism saying that while the top-down economy sought to end this and become a “relic of unlamented Stalinist past”, it became even worse in our everyday lives under capitalism. Fisher notes however that this is a new form of bureaucracy, which is more new and decentralized, allowing it to remain. We can see this invade workspaces everywhere, namely schools. Newer forms of teacher evaluations and longer lines of management makes it become more important to give off the mere appearance of working better. Teachers like to appear more productive in the classroom while being monitored for evaluations than they would on a normal school day. This shifts the goal from actual accomplishment to the false perception of it. This same thing can be applied for work offices as well.

Chapter 4: Reflexive impotence, immobilization and liberal communism

Fisher starts off Chapter 4 by talking about the differences of British and French students by saying while french students are still protesting neoliberalism, students in Britain who seem more discontent and disengaged. This is because they recognize the effects of neoliberalism and have accepted that there’s nothing they can do about it. Fisher refers to this mindset as reflective impotence. He continues to say that this knowledge is not a passive observation of existing conditions, but a self fulfilling prophecy (when you believe something will come true so therefore it happens because of your mindset you give to it). These British students are an example of depression hedonism, in which constant distraction and stimulation is the only solution to hopelessness.

This constant distraction is found in schools but generally in life. Students use technology and things like youtube and texting as a distraction from the bigger things going on at school. Fisher sums this phenomenon by saying,

“The consequence of being hooked into the entertainment matrix is twitchy, agitated interpassivity, an inability to concentrate or focus. Students’ incapacity to connect current lack of focus with future failure, their inability to synthesize time into any coherent narrative, is symptomatic of more than mere demotivation.”-pg 24

Fisher notes that while we recognize that mental illness is linked to neurological effects, this doesn’t cover the cause of this. Our environment of stress, tiredness, and anxiety can be attributed to the capitalist forms we live in. Fisher states that things like ADHD can be a consequence of “being wired into the entertainment-control circuits of hypermediated consumer culture” -pg 25. He points out that now our ability to process image dense data is very effective, however not so much to read or write. In my mind, I can relate this to the fact that, nowadays, the easiest way we are taught to understand things is through easy to graph pictures and graphs, that do not take as much attention and focus to understand compared to a wall of writing. Consumer culture and marketing relies on people having short attention spans and something to lure them in to grab their attention. This is why many commercials use this to their advantage and use graphs and illustrations to demonstrate what they are selling, rather than focus on making people read. We are now more equipped to understand this ‘data processing’ than reading long lines of texts which explains why students ‘shut down’ when being asked to do anything besides processing images.

Mark Fisher proceeds to say how our education system and the roles teachers have confront the inconsistencies of capitalist realism to say,

“Teachers are caught between being facilitator-entertainers and disciplinarian-authoritarians. Teachers want to help students to pass the exams; they want us to be authority figures who tell them what to do. Teachers being interpellated by students as authority figures exacerbates the ‘boredom’ problem, since isn’t anything that comes from the place of authority a priori boring? Ironically, the role of disciplinarian is demanded of educators more than ever at precisely the time when disciplinary structures are breaking down in institutions. With families buckling under the pressure of a capitalism which requires both parents to work, teachers are now increasingly required to act as surrogate parents, instilling the most basic behavioral protocols in students and providing pastoral and emotional support for teenagers who are in some cases only minimally socialized. “ -pg 26

In here, it talks about how teachers are stuck between being the discipline to students while also being the facilitators. They need students to pass exams but in order to do this, they are required to listen to what students want and will listen to because students and their grades decide partially the success of the teacher. This therefore requires teachers to be flexible in their activities and what they get out to students to do. However, in the new age where teachers feel constantly monitored by more levels of management to show progress, they feel more and more pressured to give off the appearance of work, rather than work itself during things such as evaluations and test scores. They constantly feel like they are now required to be a parent figure for most of the day and to deal with the boredom problem in students. Their expectations are now rising to be more flexible and unique with students to be able to get them to grasp the importance of lessons to prepare them for tests.

Chapter 5: October 6, 1979: ‘Don’t let yourself get attached to anything’

In this, Fisher points out when the Post Fordism world began and how it is different from our Fordist society. Our Fordist society is where a lot of Marx’s alienation theories have derived from, however what we are living in now is more different. During the industrial age, workers were required to do one simple task over and over again (we can see this with the Ford Motor factory production line). These workers were encouraged to not communicate with others and had very strict regulations in the workplace (ex. Bathroom and lunch breaks, socializing with others was not normally encouraged). However, now our workspace is more decentralized, and relies on being multitasked, and being flexible. Instead of focusing on learning one skill and repeating it, employees are required to constantly be learning new skills as they go from job to job, role to role. They also require a set of communication skills and togetherness with other people. Fisher explains this with a quote saying,

“Like Sennett, Marazzi recognizes that the new conditions both required and emerged from an increased cybernetization of the working environment. The Fordist factory was crudely divided into blue and white collar work, with the different types of labor physically delimited by the structure of the building itself. Laboring in noisy environments, watched over by Capitalist Realism managers and supervisors, workers had access to language only in their breaks, in the toilet, at the end of the working day, or when they were engaged in sabotage, because communication interrupted production. But in post-Fordism, when the assembly line becomes a ‘flux of information’, people work by communicating.” pg 33–34

Fisher also states how this reorganization in the workplace (going from an organized and central production from a decentralized and casual one) has changed us. This has prepared us for uncertainty for the future and for our jobs as it is now normal to just go from job to job instead of working at one place all your life.

Fisher draws this post-fordist society back to the incline of mental illness, saying that things such as schizophrenia and bipolar are influences of capitalism’s system. He says that our mode of production is constantly reflecting our social culture and makes us more stressed in general. In here, he cites several studies to show this correlation to capitalist countries to say,”

“Another British study James cites compared levels of psychiatric morbidity (which includes neurotic symptoms, phobias and depression) in samples of people in 1977 and 1985. ‘Whereas 22 per cent of the 1977 sample reported psychiatric morbidity, this had risen to almost a third of the population (31 per cent) by 1986'. Since these rates are much higher in countries that have implemented what James calls ‘selfish’ capitalism than in other capitalist nations, James hypothesizes that it is selfish (i.e. neoliberalized) capitalist policies and culture that are to blame. “- pg 36

James blames some of this on the unrealistic standards and expectations given to us by capitalists which is that success and upward economic mobility is guaranteed through hard work and that anyone can be the next Elon Musk or Bill Gates. This false reality excludes social, class, family, or ethnic background and how these play a role in a person’s success. Therefore, it is the mindset that if you do not achieve economic success, then you yourself are the only one to blame for it.

Fisher then goes on to say how the. de politicalization of mental illness is what makes it possible to deny any social causation to mental health. And because mental illness is only looked at through the lense of chemical biology, this makes it that much easier to privatize mental health through pharmaceutical drugs instead of answering the question on why this happens.

Chapter 6: All that is solid melts into PR: Market Stalinism and bureaucratic anti-production.

Fisher starts this chapter again with an allusion to symbolize the increased expectations and dependency of “hyper individuality” in the workplace by using the movie ‘Office Space”. In this movie, workers are required to decorate their uniforms with “seven pieces of flair” to show their creativity and individuality. Fisher goes further in depth to describe these symbols and “flairs” to say this,

“a handy illustration of the way in which ‘creativity’ and ‘self-expression’ have become intrinsic to labor in Control societies; which, as Paolo Virno, Yann Moulier Boutang and others have pointed out, now makes affective, as well as productive demands, on workers. Furthermore, the attempt to crudely quantify these affective contributions also tells us a great deal about the new arrangements.” pg 39

I think what Fisher is trying to say here is that workers here are more and more being relied on to be more than just average. Capitalism constantly is upholding an unspoken set of rules to follow if you want to have better success. One of these “unspoken rules” is called “going above and beyond instead of just doing the minimum.” Fisher goes back to talking about Office Space to say,

“The flair example also points to another phenomenon: hidden expectations behind official standards. Joanna, a waitress at the coffee chain, wears exactly seven pieces of flair, but it is made clear to her that, even though seven is Officially enough, it is actually inadequate — the manager asks if Capitalist Realism she wants to look the sort of person ‘who only does the bare minimum” pg 40

All too often, the official minimum of something is never satisfactory enough to employers and the increasing expectations require workers to go beyond what the bar is. Even if it’s not officially stated as a requirement to do so, workers must adhere to these “hidden expectations” if they want to come out on top.

Originally, neoliberalism sought to destroy this bureaucracy in Stalinism with the appearance of doing work, rather than the actual achievement of work itself. In Stalinism fancy symbols and PR was the center image of production, however these things overminded the achievement itself (take the PR of the white canal from Stalin that was practically useless but was used to show the accomplishments of the Soviet Union). While people like Reagan and Thatcher sought to get rid of this “illusion of work and progress” they ironically reinvested it into capitalist societies through more hyper bureaucracy.

Fisher lists off many examples of how this hyper bureaucracy has been able to stay alive in such places as work and school. The data and information itself has been more accessible to managers to track their workers and students progress and achievements. This is a part of the ‘control society’ Fisher talks about. Fisher mentions that,

“ All students’ marks have to be graded against a ‘matrix’. This auto-surveillance is complemented by assessments carried out by external authorities. The marking of student assignments is monitored by ‘external examiners’ who are supposed to maintain consistency of standards across the university sector. Lecturers have to be observed by their peers, while departments are subject to periodic three or four day inspections by the Quality Assurance Agency for Higher Education (QAA). If they are ‘research active’, lecturers must submit their ‘best four publications’ every four or five years to be graded by panel as part of the Research Assessment Exercise (replaced in 2008 by the equally controversial Research Excellence Framework).”

This is noting that the progress and improvement of students and their lecturers is highly monitored by higher forms of power. (In this scenario, students are being graded and accumulated by external authorities and auto surveillance on things such as tests to track progress via state tests.) On the other hand, teachers are not off the hook from this either. Teachers are also subject to evaluations from higher levels of management such as the QAA to test their ability to teach. To sum up, we have gone from a pyramid structure of governance to a more decentralized and complex form which involves more levels of management to be brought in. Going back to my first point, the goal of neoliberal capitalism tried to seek an end to this wave of anti-production, however they brought it back through more regulations inside of capitalism. Fisher draws on to say how to say how the roles of extra management in capitalism make it very confusing to tell whether students are the consumers of education or the product of it by saying,

“This is in part a consequence of the inherent resistance of certain processes and services to marketization. (The supposed marketization of education, for instance, rests on a confused and underdeveloped analogy: are students the consumers of the service or its product?) The idealized market was supposed to deliver ‘friction free’ exchanges, in which the desires of consumers would be met directly, without the need for intervention or mediation by regulatory agencies. Yet the drive to assess the performance of workers and to measure forms of labor which, by their nature, are resistant to quantification, has inevitably required additional layers of management and bureaucracy.”

In the process of trying to measure the performance of workers and measure the forms of labor which can’t be quantified through a simple number, it becomes more of a goal to give off the representation of work, rather than the actual work itself. Some examples I like to think about to create this illustration of what Fisher means is how students tend to cheat on tests or how teachers tend to look more productive in class when they are being assessed. More effort goes into making a good representation than it does actually learning or improving a service.

If those two examples were not sufficient enough to create an idea of this, take the example Fisher uses of the Canal built in the Soviet Union that worked like a PR stunt. This is meant to be a jab at the anti production going on under the Soviet Union with Stalin:

“Stalin seems to have been so intent on creating a highly visible symbol of development that he pushed and squeezed the project in ways that only ret**ded the development of the project. Thus the workers and the engineers were never allowed the time, money or equipment necessary to build a canal that would be deep enough and safe enough to carry twentieth-century cargoes; consequently, the canal has never played any significant role in Soviet commerce or industry. All the canal could support, apparently, were tourist steamers, which in the 1930s were abundantly stocked with Soviet and foreign writers who obligingly proclaimed the glories of the work. The canal was a triumph of publicity; but if half the care that went into the public relations campaign had been devoted to the work itself, there would have been far fewer victims and far more real developments — and the project would have been a genuine tragedy, rather than a brutal farce in which real people were killed by pseudo events. “ pg. 43

This gives a better idea of how even under modes of socialism under Marxist Leninist regimes, there was still a problem with faking the appearance of production and progress. Stalin spent more time working on how this Canal was going to be represented by the media and looked upon by the people than the actual work itself of building an efficient canal to transport cargo.

Mark Fisher ends this chapter off by saying that again the work slogans such as “work smarter not harder” perfectly represents post-fordism, the shift from working hard in a factory for more hours to a new society where teamwork, efficiency, and communication are more common themes in modern capitalism.

“The invocation of the idea that ‘there is no alternative’, and the recommendation to ‘work smarter, not harder’, shows how capitalist realism sets the tone for labor disputes in postFordism. Ending the inspection regime, one lecturer sardonically remarked, seems more impossible than ending slavery was. Such fatalism can only be challenged if a new (collective) political subject emerges.” pg. 53

Chapter 7: ‘…if you can watch the overlap of one reality with another’: capitalist realism as dreamwork and memory disorder

In capitalist realism, there would be no other possible form of life than the acceptance of the existent, without questions that, if asked, would expose the subject to madness:

Fisher quotes Jameson to say, “what begins to emerge as some deeper and more fundamental constitution of postmodernity itself, at least in its temporal dimension — is henceforth, where everything now submits to the perpetual change of fashion and media image, that nothing can change any longer.”

In addition, Fisher gives an example of a movie in which a woman becomes frightened by the earth around however shortly after, returns to normal and compares this to how we are in late capitalism by saying,

“ Heather Lelache accepts the ‘new’ world as the ‘true’ world, editing out the point of suture. This strategy — of accepting the incommensurable and the senseless without question — has always been the exemplary technique of sanity as such, but it has a special role to play in late capitalism, that ‘motley painting of everything that ever was’, whose dreaming up and junking of social fictions is nearly as rapid as its production and disposal of commodities. “

Our conditions in capitalism are constantly being conformed to and accepted to. We become so startled by the horrors of the world, and to comfort ourselves we accept the immensity of these things (war, famine, poverty, environmental disaster) as a natural fact. This coping mechanism plays a special role in late stage capitalism.

Fisher goes on to talk about the ‘Nanny State’, or the government regarded as overprotective or as interfering unduly with personal choice to describe Neoliberalism. Fisher elaborates to say,

“Despite evincing an anti-statist rhetoric, neoliberalism is in practice not opposed to the state per se — as the bank bail-outs of 2008 demonstrated — but rather to particular uses of state funds; meanwhile, neoconservatism’s strong state was confined to military and police functions, and defined itself against a welfare state held to undermine individual moral responsibility. “

This elaborates that once again neoliberalism, despite posing as being against the state unless for basic functions, has reinforced the state during crisis and switches the moral imperative onto the state to fix things that capitalism helped to cause (ex. bank bailouts of 2008).

Chapter 8: ‘There’s no central exchange’

The ‘Nanny State’ previously used to describe the practice of neoliberalism and neoconservatism. continues to haunt capitalist realism. The role the nanny state has in capitalist realism is that it is there to be blamed for it’s failure to act as a centralizing power. There have been many examples in Britain where the government gives companies the powers to do things, and when companies misuse and abuse these powers, the government is blamed instead of the companies who misused their power. In capitalist realism, the government acts as an escape goat to shift blame from the capitalists that allow bad things to happen by abuse of power to the government that gives these freedoms to the companies. For the example Fisher gives, it refers to the public’s hostility towards the government after the 2007 flood even though the problem was actually caused by house builders and the privatization of water companies. To sum up the public view of this catastrophe, a reporter writes,

“In general there is more hostility towards the government, the council and the Environment Agency for not stopping house builders than there is towards house builders for building houses, or buyers for buying them. When insurers raise their premiums, more blame is directed at the government for not spending enough on flood defences than at insurers for raising the premiums, or at people who choose to live in a flood-prone valley but don’t like paying extra for it.”

Again, Fisher alludes back to the Banking crisis of 2008 and points out that this same ‘scapegoating’ happened but on a larger scale. What does he mean by bigger scale? Well, instead of just the government being used to put blame, the media framed the government AND the individual actions done by private bankers. Fisher points out that while both of these things played a part, to merely blame the entirety of this economic crisis on individuals rather than the bigger system of global capitalism is deflecting. Individual actors and those who “abuse the system” can only be held responsible for so much before people realize that this is a bigger issue of capitalism, a systemic problem that nobody could be put in charge of.

Fisher makes an example of recycling saying,

“ In posing the question, ‘who is the subject supposed to recycle?’ Jones denaturalizes an imperative that is now so taken for granted that resisting it seems senseless, never mind unethical. Everyone is supposed to recycle; no-one, whatever their political persuasion, ought to resist this injunction. The demand that we recycle is precisely posited as a pre- or post-ideological imperative; in other words, it is positioned in precisely the space where ideology always does its work. But the subject supposed to recycle, Jones argued, presupposed the structure not supposed to recycle: in making recycling the responsibility of ‘everyone’, structure contracts out its responsibility to consumers, by itself receding into invisibility. “ pg 68

To sum this up, blame is shifted from the system to the people. By saying every-one should recycle this makes a presumption that the system itself should not be held accountable for its effects to the environment, and leaves all responsibility to clean this environmental mess to consumers. This is another way that capitalism becomes all the more powerful as it is unnamable and fails to be tracked down to mean one specific thing, it is an invisible force.

Chapter 9: Marxist SuperNanny

To start off with a bang, Fisher makes an analogy to show us how the supernanny plays a role in capitalist realism using the family structure saying,

“Supernanny is a Spinozist insofar as, like Spinoza, she takes it for granted that children are in a state of abjection. They are unable to recognize their own interests, unable to apprehend either the causes of their actions or their (usually deleterious) effects. But the problems that Supernanny confronts do not arise from the actions or character of the children — who can only be expected to be idiotic hedonists — but with the parents. It is the parents’ following of the trajectory of the pleasure principle, the path of least resistance, that causes most of the misery in the families.”

Spinoza says that it is the path the parent follows that decides the future outcome which in most cases this is the path of what is the easiest and of least resistance. However this can cause problems because the easiest life often leads to parents having to fulfill their child’s every desire, which can become tyrannical. It is the job of marxist supernanny to look into the structure that allows this to happen.

In here Spinoza uses this paternal right to duty and the maternal want and relates this to late stage capitalism and poses us a question:

‘The problem is that late capitalism insists and relies upon the very equation of desire with interests that parenting used to be based on rejecting. In a culture in which the ‘paternal’ concept of duty has been subsumed into the ‘maternal’ imperative to enjoy, it can seem that the parent is failing in their duty if they in any way impede their children’s absolute right to enjoyment. Partly this is an effect of the increasing requirement that both parents work; in these conditions, when the parent sees the child very little, the tendency will often be to refuse to occupy the ‘oppressive’ function of telling the child what to do. The parental disavowal of this role is doubled at the level of cultural production by the refusal of ‘gatekeepers’ to do anything but give audiences what they already (appear to) want.’ pg. 71–72

Spinoza states that due to the increasing requirement for both parents to work, therefore creating more time away from the child, causing the parents to become less ‘oppressive’ in telling their kid what to do. The question is however:

“The concrete question is: if a return to the paternal superego — the stern father in the home, Reithian superciliousness in broadcasting — is neither possible nor desirable, then how are we to move beyond the culture of monotonous moribund conformity that results from a refusal to challenge or educate?” pg. 72

Spinoza says that we are in some ways living through capitalism without the paternal structure to tell us what to do. Many people do not necessarily smoke because they know it is wrong, they don’t do it because they know that it will cause dangerous repercussions and give us a less enjoyable life. However this still does not apply to things such as mental health, which I think

Spinoza goes on to say that we have replaced morality with feelings. The most common example of this is that TV teaches you to know what to feel rather than what to think. In new forms of online spaces such as new media, it has become a close minded agreeal, because people conform to others ideologies and are too scared to challenge this authority.

“Freedom, Spinoza shows, is something that can be achieved only when we can apprehend the real causes of our actions, when we can set aside the ‘sad passions’ that intoxicate and entrance us. “

He mentions that ironically new forms of media that refuse the paternal function (think social media) are actually not a place of diversity of ideas, but rather many people who conform to the same one out of fear. These emotions do not breed new ideas and diversity, they feed into conformity, To better sum this up, Fisher says,

“Curtis attacks the internet because, in his view, it facilitates communities of solipsists, interpassive networks of like-minded people who confirm, rather than challenge, each others’ assumptions and prejudices. Instead of having to confront other points of view in a contested public space, these communities retreat into closed circuits.” pg. 75

From this, FIsher makes clear that it is far too late to impose an authoritarian state to save these measures of capitalism, however this also does not mean that we should embrace private space’s effects of diversity caused by abandoning the state either. The state should be focused around the general will of the people. We should focus on modernizing the left and enforcing new politics that treat everything before as artificial and not natural such as the privatizations we saw in the 80’s. We also must learn from this to not undermine capitalism, what we see now in our modern world is grim. Marx’s analysis from 100 years ago cannot save us now, we are on our own.

Mark Fisher’s message here is not defeatist, although it does sound like there is nothing that can be done now, he provides solutions to help push forward with better changes. He calls on us to spread counteraction, spread new politics, try to push for things that neoliberalism sought and failed to do. I leave you off with this final quote from Fisher and here so ends the book.

“ In any case, rationing of some sort is inevitable. The issue is whether it will be collectively managed, or whether it will be imposed by authoritarian means when it is already too late. Quite what forms this collective management should take is, again, an open question, one that can only be resolved practically and experimentally. The long, dark night of the end of history has to be grasped as an enormous opportunity. The very oppressive pervasiveness of capitalist realism means that even glimmers of alternative political and economic possibilities can have a disproportionately great effect. The tiniest event can tear a hole in the grey curtain of reaction which has marked the horizons of possibility under capitalist realism. From a situation in which nothing can happen, suddenly anything is possible again.” pg 81–82

Thank you for reading.