Capitalist Realism
In early January, the writer Mark Fisher sadly took his own life at the age of 48. I mention this at the start of my review because although I was aware of Mark and his work before this, it was hearing of his untimely death that finally urged me to begin reading the body of work he had left behind.
His seminal work is his first book, Capitalist Realism. He takes as a starting point the “widespread sense that not only is Capitalism the only viable political and economic system, but also that it is now impossible to even imagine a coherent alternative to it”.
Fisher makes heavy use of cultural reference as tool for approaching his theories and he begins by exploring Capitalist Realism through a discussion on one of my favourite films — Alfonso Cuaron’s 2006 masterpiece — Children of Men, in which the human race has become infertile.
Unlike most dystopian works of fiction, Children of Men distinguishes itself by existing in a political system not entirely unlike our own, if an admittedly exaggerated version. The harsh authoritarianism of V for Vendetta or 1984 is instead replaced by a slow stripping back of the state, down to its core military and police functions.
The catastrophe in Children of Men is neither waiting down the road, nor has it already happened. Rather, it is being lived through. There is no punctual moment of disaster; the world doesn’t end with a bang, it winks out, unravels, gradually falls apart.
What’s frightening about this comparison is that whilst we tend to look for shocks and other significant events as the harbinger of an oncoming doom, Children of Men posits that the end may have already arrived, without us realising it. The real shock then, is that there will be no more shocks.
Whilst I don’t wish to turn this into a review of Children of Men, its well worth pointing to some other analysis of the film to back-up what Fisher is saying here. In his own analysis, Evan Puschak makes many similar points about the way in which this dystopian world mirrors our own, particularly in relation to migration and the refugee crisis, where as Fisher notes “internment camps and franchise coffee bars co-exist”:
Whilst this is the key message of the book, Fisher then expands upon this to allow us to see how pervasive Capitalist Realism can be.
Something explored in some depth in Adam Curtis’ most recent film Hypernormalisation was how in the old corrupt Soviet societies it was taken for granted by most citizens that what their leaders were saying simply wasn’t true. Yet the populace played along, partly because nobody could imagine any alternative.
However Fisher sees this same logic and rationalisation in play within capitalism (p46). We dislike certain corporations such as energy companies, we think tax dodging is wrong, we hate corrupt politicians. These aren’t controversial opinions on the left or the right of the spectrum. We know there is corruption today in the same way citizens in the USSR knew the state was corrupt and their leaders spouted nonsense, but as we cannot imagine any alternative to the system, here it remains, unchallenged.
As much animosity as we may hold for rail operators, Fisher notes that we blame the government for privatising them more than we blame the firms themselves (p62-63). We can’t seem to cope with the decentralisation which Capitalism has brought. We’ve been slowly changed into consumers rather than citizens, yet we don’t seem to be able to make sense of it.
It also sometimes feels like we’re wasting our time simply by getting up in the morning. Four years after Fisher’s book, David Graeber wrote about the phenomenon of “Bullshit Jobs” for Strike Magazine:
It’s as if someone were out there making up pointless jobs just for the sake of keeping us all working. And here, precisely, lies the mystery. In capitalism, this is exactly what is not supposed to happen. Sure, in the old inefficient socialist states like the Soviet Union, where employment was considered both a right and a sacred duty, the system made up as many jobs as they had to (this is why in Soviet department stores it took three clerks to sell a piece of meat). But, of course, this is the very sort of problem market competition is supposed to fix.
Bureaucracy feels ubiquitous. The kind of crushing, pointless and monotonous work depicted in films such as Office Space seems to be an almost universal experience in society. Everyone recognises the feeling of being paid to do something which we feel has little to no value.
Fisher takes the call centre as a perfect example of just how badly we are getting things wrong. The boredom and frustration of both the callers and the call-takers, exists in an unresponsive, impersonal and rage-inducing system, where nobody really ever gets what they want.
And yet we continue to think of capitalism as an efficient system despite all of this, because it tells us it isn’t bureaucratic. These days it may only take one person to sell you a piece of meat rather than three, but you can bet that the Butcher has instead occupied two other workers in writing reports, producing PR and tracking sales targets.
So what does our popular culture have to say about all this? Well for the most part it refuses to challenge or educate us and has “fallen back on ‘user generated content’ as a salvation”. Fisher quotes from a 2007 interview with Curtis, where he talks about the kinds of shows currently getting commissioned on television:
It’s a time of great technical invention but it’s a time of [artistic] stagnation. We need to take this [innovation] and create something imaginative out of it. These people are paid a lot, they have a lot of influence, and they could do wonderful things. It’s time they got on with it.
They lack the sort of ‘oomph’ to say, “No, our job — as you said — is not to talk down to the people but to construct something that is just awesome, that makes them look at the world in a different way”.
What people suffer from is being trapped within themselves — in a world of individualism everyone is trapped within their own feelings, trapped within their own imaginations. Our job as public service broadcasters is to take people beyond the limits of their own self, and until we do that we will carry on declining.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/Print/2007/11/20/adam_curtis_interview/
There is no longer a contested public debate on the majority of topics. Populists on both the left and the right have been pushing mediocre, inoffensive broadcasting. In the same way, endless movie sequels and reboots represent a strangling of new cultural concepts. Again, we return to Children of Men’s proposition that there is perhaps no new culture, only a basic re-hashing of the same old concepts, until the world ends.
So what conclusions does Fisher draw from all this. He suggests that there is indeed space for a new anti capitalism. Though effects needs to be connected to structural causes. The bail outs of 2008 were capital reasserting itself, in an acceptance by the political class — and us — that there really is no alternative (p77).
Whilst reading this wonderful book I found myself casting my mind back to similar calls to action following the banking crisis and the hope that the world could be changed. Watching as the anti-austerity movements sprung into life and then quickly fizzled out again, it feels slightly anachronistic to read Fisher’s suggestions of what to do next. As disheartening a conclusion as it is, it feels to me that of all the talk of a new wave of anti-capitalism following the 2008 crash, “business as usual” is thoroughly back in business.
So we have to now ask whether the left can really succeed in reducing bureaucracy, increasing worker autonomy, tackling the housing crisis and even new challenges like the gig economy of Uber. This will prove difficult, particularly in a world where dangerous, isolationist, authoritarian populism feels like it has overtaken capital as the biggest and most pressing threat we face.
Do we really have one more shock left in us?