107: Is there no alternative?

by

Mark Fisher’s Capitalist Realism is a grim thesis, but a tough one to argue with right now

Pinetop, Arizona

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And we are back. I have missed you all I hope everyone had a decent if not great holiday and got to spend some time with loved ones and look at some pretty snow. If you have COVID and there is a not small chance you do I hope it is as mild as government and industry assure us that it is. That is to say it has been not a great start to the new year. For me there’s been some good news and good times here and there, but also bad stuff. Where to even begin let’s do our little recap of immediate crises before getting into the main newsletter.

The big thing is that America thought we could half-ass our way through a pandemic and now everyone has COVID, hospitals are filling up, kids are sick, schools have no teachers. With perfect timing, the conservative Supreme Court blocked a vaccine mandate for large employers, in a decision full of Fox News antivax talking points and bizarre logic that because a pandemic exists outside of work too it is not a workplace hazard, though as Adam Serwer points out, OSHA regulates all kinds of hazards with the same quality like, say, fire. So, as with most of the US response to the pandemic, government has left it up to businesses to manage public health. Another bad one yesterday is that, coming as a surprise to nobody, the two worst Democrats signaled that they believe the Senate filibuster is more important to the health of democracy than the right to vote, enabling Republican efforts nationwide to make it harder for people to participate in democracy and lock in minority rule.

So that’s the news and now I will try to shake off some of the cobwebs slash depression and write about this book I read over the break about how capitalism is awful.

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Mark Fisher was an English scholar, teacher, philosopher, etc., who gained recognition through his 2000s-era blogging about music, pop culture and politics under the name k-punk. Sadly, he passed away in 2017 after struggling for years with depression, but leaves behind a beloved collection of books and essays. My friend Doug recommended that I read some of Fisher’s work so I started with 2009’s Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative?, a short, very powerful collection of essays about “the widespread sense 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.”

Fisher describes a congealed state of societal consensus similar to Wendy Brown’s description of neoliberalism in Undoing the Demos, but whereas Brown is depicting a market-fixated mode of reason that guides all of our political and economic systems, capitalist realism is more like the resulting cultural state of being. It’s not quite the right analogy, but I kind of think of it like neoliberalism is a projector, and capitalist realism is a movie blasted onto every surface we can ever view, nonstop, until eventually we just stop trying to look anywhere else. In fact, one of the things I like about Fisher’s writing, which I think contributes to his popularity, is the way that he folds pop culture into politics and philosophy, using movies and music as cultural reflections of the heavy ideas he explores.

For example, in the introduction to Capitalist Realism, Fisher uses as a springboard for his argument the quote, “it is easier to imagine the end of the world than it is to imagine the end of capitalism,” attributed to Fredric Jameson and Slavoj Žižek, and points to Cuaron’s 2006 film Children of Men to show what that looks like. What makes the movie so powerful, and a reason it is a favorite of mine, is that it takes place in an authoritarian dystopia accelerated by science fictional global sterility, but it’s a dystopia that does not look systemically different from our own. It doesn’t rely on the depiction of a concocted tyrannical regime swooping in, but rather a capitalist world very similar to ours in which things just got worse and worse over time, and as a result, people are mostly hopeless.

Once, dystopian films and novels were exercises in such acts of imagination – the disasters they depicted acting as narrative pretext for the emergence of different ways of living. Not so in Children of Men. The world that it projects seems more like an extrapolation or exacerbation of ours than an alternative to it. In its world, as in ours, ultra-authoritarianism and Capital are by no means incompatible: internment camps and franchise coffee bars co-exist.

This is a kind of dystopia that feels even more familiar today, a time when tactical police squads in military vehicles deploy to protect Targets and Starbucks from citizen uprisings. It’s how we can live with such enormous luxury and convenience in some aspects of our lives, but in others feel like such helpless subjects.

The pop cultural elements in the book are also important because, just as Brown does toward the end of Undoing the Demos, Fisher argues that a characteristic element of capitalist realism is the death of imagination, a kind of stagnation of culture. He attributes this malaise in part to the power of capitalism to reduce all of history’s culture into mere artifacts with assigned monetary value. But also the narrative that capitalism, while imperfect, is better than any of the scary alternatives, and therefore, we must lower our expectations for a better version of something to come, something beyond the principle of self-interest.

Just as Brown writes that neoliberalism “wholly abandons the project of individual or collective mastery of existence,” Fisher tells us that capitalist realism is a form of insulation from ideology. “Capitalism is what is left when beliefs have collapsed,” he writes, and it “brings with it a massive desacralization of culture.”

So while he doesn’t put stock into the idea that with the fall of the Berlin Wall, we have reached “the end of history,” referencing Francis Fukuyama’s argument that the spread of free market capitalism is the final stage of human society, he argues that under capitalism, we are living in a culture where that is assumed to be the case. Thatcher and Reagan told us there was no alternative and that markets are the best case scenario, and it was a self-fulfilling prophecy that froze us in amber. As a result, things are the way they are, and all there is from here on out is marginally changing versions of the same consumerist society, like a never-ending succession of barely different iPhone models.

This is where, for me, Capitalist Realism really shines—in its description of how it feels to be living in the world as it is, as in the emptiness that is depicted in Children of Men. In another section, he uses examples like Jason Bourne’s form of amnesia in the Bourne Identity to describe an untethered, plastic nature of day-to-day experience that feels very relevant today, whether a result of the disloyal gig economy, a shrinking social safety net, always-changing careers, individuals behaving as corporate firms, the second-to-second news cycle peppered with advertisements. He describes an unrooted Jason Bourne’s “transnational nomadism” and “vertiginous ‘continuous present'” as representative of how we experience time now. Constantly on the move, but nothing really changing.

Another unsettling aspect is akin to what Elizabeth Anderson writes about in Private Government, in which abuses of individual freedom often attributed to the state appear just as readily within corporate structures, but we give them a pass because we’ve come to automatically equate freedom with commerce. Anderson argues that the way our employers control our lives should be viewed as another form of governance, and that if we did so, we’d recognize most of modern existence as living under totalitarian dictatorship. Similarly, Fisher writes that the dystopian bureaucracy Kafka described exists today, not within a government regime, but in the black hole of faceless corporate governance (Amazon and Google come to mind), experienced in the day to day, for example, through customer service interactions:

…the crazed Kafkaesque labyrinth of call centers, a world without memory, where cause and effect connect together in mysterious, unfathomable ways, where it is a miracle that anything ever happens, and you lose hope of ever passing back over to the other side, where things seem to function smoothly.

All of this contributes, by Fisher’s hypothesis, to a world in which some staggering percentage of us are plagued by anxiety, depression and other mental health problems. This feels plausible to me, although it’s the section of the book I liked least, as it relies a lot on the academic writing trope of “let me tell you about some of my messed up students.”

But I do think the unsettled state of being he described way back in 2009 is just as relevant today, and plays a big part in the growing disenchantment with capitalism among young people. The slipperiness, pointlessness, and futurelessness of a world in which the lone virtue is free trade. (Among older people too, as 73-year-old sci-fi writer William Gibson has recently said he finds it increasingly difficult to envision, much less write about, a hopeful future.) It rings even more true as the constant growth and absorption of new markets and resources that allowed capitalism to generate such enormous wealth is hitting hard walls and inescapable consequences. What’s left is this sense that we have nothing better ahead and we’ve been led to give up on anything but self interest—an inability to imagine what might be beyond it as a guiding principle.

Maybe the biggest gutpunch of the book for me is the section that poses that even recoiling at the system in disgust actually benefits, or at least it doesn’t weaken the system. Fisher points out that even a wildly popular Disney movie like Wall-E can bring with it an unmistakeable anti-capitalist message, with no consequence: “the film performs our anti-capitalism for us, allowing us to continue to consume with impunity.” In other words, capitalism doesn’t need you to love it, so long as you do it, and you have no choice but to do it.

In the same manner, global charity to fight poverty, liberal philanthropy, social enterprises offering responsible consumer products, serve to make this all seem OK. Like we’re trying. “So long as we believe (in our hearts) that capitalism is bad, we are free to continue to participate in capitalist exchange.”

Along with Undoing the Demos, this book has been on my mind in the context of COVID regulations, and continued atomization of public well-being into individual decisions and consumer products. The notorious Jen Psaki press conference when she sneered at the concept of government directly providing COVID tests because all things come from the store, dummy. More recently, Vice President Kamala Harris was asked what she’d tell people who can’t find COVID tests, and she said to Google it, just the same way you’d find a good restaurant. And now a Supreme Court decision punts public health decisions to individual business owners. Capitalist realism is a grim thesis, but it is a tough one to argue with right now.

A criticism of the book is that is very heavy on the doom, with a distinct sense of resignation running through it. When I read essays like this, one thing I’m always hoping for is not just a criticism of the way things are now, but some kind of path forward, which I find anti-capitalist writing often under-delivers. Here too, there is only a sketch of the possibilities. Fisher does criticize the left for too often rehashing old arguments, despairing over the failure of previous anti-capitalist forms of government, and “limiting its ambitions to the establishment of a big state.” Instead, he argues, the left needs to resuscitate and modernize the idea of a public that subjugates the state, and exists beyond a collection of individuals, offering something that can rival, not just react to Capital. And here is where I find some optimism in the book, which insists that in all things, we look forward instead of backward, clearing space for something new to emerge from the “ideological rubble.”

This called to mind one of my favorite of adrienne maree brown’s assertions that the next system will be built on the foundations the economic experiments of socialism and capitalism. That capitalism will become a fossil, and we’ll “turn the soil” to grow something new.

Fisher seems less optimistic in Capitalist Realism, but does believe there is hope yet.

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.

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bell hooks passed away recently, which is very sad. I thought I would link back to an issue I did about The Will to Change, which is a beautiful book that I think about all the time.

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Reading/Watching/Playing Video Games

The Witcher. When I was in high school I worked at Blockbuster Video and would, before it was a thing, binge a particular genre or franchise like one time I watched every Bruce Lee movie they had in the store and my friend said to me you know you’re very compulsive which I guess is true. On that note, I recently watched season 2 of The Witcher, am reading Sword of Destiny the second book in the series, and playing Witcher 3: The Wild Hunt on Switch. It’s almost as though I’m trying to escape some disturbing reality or something.

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Links

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Listening

Tamar Aphek.

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OK there’s another one. It’s been too long my friends. Last week I skipped because I just got back from a perhaps ill-advised trip to a cabin in Pinetop, Arizona with some good friends, in which we left a path of at-home COVID tests behind as omicron swelled all around us. When we got back we discovered that a group of five anti-vaxxers now protest loudly outside the new mayor’s house, which happens to be across the street from our house, every morning starting from 7 a.m. so that has been a fun way to wake up all week.

Meanwhile, several friends and loved ones currently have or have had it, old and young, all vaccinated, and while nobody’s gone to the hospital yet, I don’t know that I would call most of the cases mild. It is very scary and upsetting and frustrating and I might go so far as to say this last week, after all this time, was a personal low pandemic-wise. It’s just a bleak ass time right now and my brain feels like mush.

Still we did get to look at some pretty snow. I think I’ll go rewatch Children of Men now. Or maybe just play The Witcher.

Tate

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