Capitalist Realism, by Mark Fisher

Five more books every PPE student should read, book five.

This is the fifth in a five-part series. Read the first installment here.

One key aspect of the PPE degree that initially stood out to me was it aimed to equip students with the skills to design and affect significant structural change. We are encouraged to employ the frameworks and concepts we learn about in class to develop novel solutions to problems and imagine new political, economic, and social outcomes to improve our world. This is a noble and necessary ambition which has remained central to the way that I and many of my fellow students have approached our studies and planned our futures. However, this final book highlights a significant challenge to our ability to achieve this goal, arguing that current socio-political structures constrain not only our conceptions of specific ideas, but also the horizons of our very imagination.

Mark Fisher begins his book Capitalist Realism with a provocative and memorable statement: “It’s easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism.” Through a unique combination of philosophical investigation, cultural criticism, and biographical reflection, Fisher develops a scathing critique of how contemporary neoliberal ideology presents capitalism as the only realistic political economic system. He describes how a pervasive atmosphere that acts as a barrier that limits our actions and even our thoughts has encompassed contemporary society, and he calls this phenomenon “capitalist realism”. This ideological restriction governs all cultural, material, and social production by prefiguring and conditioning our collective imagination so that we end up behaving and believing as though Margaret Thatcher was correct, that there really is no alternative.

Fisher draws on a variety of interesting philosophical sources to support his diagnosis, including the radical post-structuralist analysis of Deleuze and Guattari, the aggressive ideology critique of Slavoj Žižek, and the unconventional accelerationism of Nick Land. But those of you who (understandably) are not so keen on diving into the confronting arena of contemporary continental political philosophy have no need for concern, because Fisher masterfully synthesises and reworks these complex ideas into a short, engaging, comprehensible text. He coins and utilises thought-provoking terms that are filled with irony and contradiction, so as to highlight these same qualities and dynamics that are so prevalent within the contemporary capitalist system. Some of the most memorable include “market Stalinism”, “depressive hedonia”, and “liberal communist”; even the titular concept is a play on the artistic genre of “socialist realism”. Fisher then takes these ideas and applies them to particular areas of concern like mental health, education, and bureaucracy that will resonate with any student of PPE.

He shows that the current ideological system privatises stress and depoliticizes mental health, thus placing the blame for increasing rates of mental illness among young people purely on individual psycho-chemical imbalances, rather than on broader structural causes. He demonstrates how capitalist realism reinforces a “business ontology” that asserts as self-evident the notion that everything, even public education, can and should be conceived of and run as a business. And yet Fisher highlights how for all the talk of small governments and efficient markets, both public and private bureaucracies have ballooned under neoliberalism to the point where targets and representations are considered the products, rather than the actual goods and services they supposedly measure. His analysis tears through the ideological blinders that capitalist realism pulls over us, calling for us to overcome these restrictions and begin collectively imagining a truly better alternative.

You can buy your own copy of Capitalist Realism on Amazon, or borrow it from UQ Library here.

These texts have played an extremely important role in challenging my beliefs and shaping the way I think about the world. Despite their disparate and diverse authors, publication dates, arguments, and perspectives, these works present countless fascinating ideas, develop a myriad of intriguing concepts, and raise many relevant questions for readers from all backgrounds. However, their provocative propositions will be most rewarding to those who are engaged in thinking about the wicked political, economic, and philosophical problems facing the world today. As such, they are certainly five more books that every PPE student should read.

This is the fifth in a five-part series. Read the first installment here.

Joseph Christensen is a fourth-year PPE student at UQ, and has read far too many books. This is his first article for Statecraft.

Thanks to Tom Watson and Daniel Quill for reviewing this article.