Review: Mark Fisher's Capitalist Realism (2009)

Sometimes there are books on political theory that are enticing in their title and vacuous in their content. Whilst many can simply be ignored, some are so impressive in both vectors that a review is justified, if only because a reader's suffrance is sufficient that they need to warn others. One such book is Mark Fisher's, "Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative?", published by the Zero Books (2009). The author, at the time of writing, is a Visiting Fellow in the Centre for Cultural Studies at Goldsmiths, University of London. He is a founding member of the Cybernetic Culture Research Unit at Warwick University, where he earned his doctorate.

The book, cleverly, includes two references in the title and subtitle. The title is a play on the term "Socialist Realism" which, whilst the official cultural doctrine of the Eastern-bloc countries under communist rule, was thoroughly divorced from realism in any aethetic sense. "Socialist realism" was utopian, heroic, and romantic, functional rather than creative. The subtitle is a reference to the doctrine espoused by Margaret Thatcher on the alleged superiority and necessity of austerity in government expenditure for welfare. Thatcher didn't use the phrase precisely; "We have to get our production and our earnings into balance. There's no easy popularity in what we are proposing but it is fundamentally sound. Yet I believe people accept there's no real alternative.... What's the alternative? To go on as we were before? All that leads to is higher spending. And that means more taxes, more borrowing, higher interest rates more inflation, more unemployment". Clearly, Thatcher's understanding of public economics and monetary policy is flawed, promoting an old ideology that money is somehow exogenous to government.

The opening chapter certainly sets the scene for "Capitalist Realism"; a review of the film "Children of Men" (2006) with the claim that "it is specific to late capitalism", which is as nonsensical as an opening page can get. Going further, Fisher claims that somehow this is linked to the idea that "it is easier to imagine the end of the world than to imagine the end of capitalism ... it is now impossible to imagine a coherent alternative to it". Fisher is immediately confusing the capacity of productive forces with a particular political economy and is illustrating a lack of coherent imagination as a result. This should not be unexpected for a text that starts with a flawed understanding of a minor cultural product, which is then elaborated to represent an entire edifice of a world system; it's a synecdoche raised to the level of lunacy.

Perhaps the core problem of Fisher's bizarre worldview is that everything is viewed through a lens of cultural theory. Even after quoting the Communist Manifesto, "Capitalism is what is left when beliefs have collapsed at the level of ritual or symbolic elaboration, and all that is left is the consumer-spectator, trudging through the ruins and the relics". Whilst Marx and Engels would certainly see this a superstructural effect from the concrete political economy, Fisher inverts this reality, which is why "capitalist realism" is presented on its surface and superficial level rather than (as would be the case of a critique of socialist realism) as a result of a particular mode and relations of production.

Unsurprisingly, Fisher makes elaborate use of the fashionable nonsense that puts cultural psychology at the core of being. Deleuze and Guattari's "Capitalism And Schizophrenia" is referenced extensively, capitalism is compared to The Thing from John Carptener's film, and, following Jameson, postmodernism is a cultural logic, rather than "a historically new form of social organization and not a new name for the surprising vigor of an aged capitalism" as Habermas put as far back as 1973. But this is just another example of the problem; Fisher can't imagine an alternative to capitalism because Fisher doesn't even attempt to understand how capitalism is a particular set of systemic and technological relations. As a result, Fisher sees capitalism everywhere and cannot think outside of it. So when Žižek points out that "the evil corporation" is a trope, for Fisher "far from undermining capitalist realism, this gestural anti-capitalism actually reinforces it". Or maybe it could be democratic values modify capitalism from what would otherwise be a "pure" and idealised form, a more prosaic and realistic assessment of what actually happens in the world.

To assign any sort of political power to democratic agents, however, would undermine Fisher's core thesis. All beneficial reforms have to be seen as subservient to capitalism, and this leads to an astounding misunderstanding of Lacan as Fisher invokes the metaphysical Real as an alternative to capitalist realism. The entire point of the Real is that it is outside of the symbolism or imagination (c.f., Kant's noumena, the Dao). As can be expected, this follows a popular but incorrect trope that capitalism assumes a "fantasy structure on which capitalist realism depends: a presupposition that resources are infinite, that the earth itself is merely a husk which capital can at a certain point slough off like a used skin, and that any problem can be solved by the market". Popular, evocative, and completely wrong as any sober analysis of policy would illustrate.

This is actually one of the very few references to the environment that one finds in the entire text, by the way. Without a doubt, the environment represents the most pivotal point where a shared common and natural resource is in conflict with property relations and the international order, and one where enormous costs in lives and livelihood, both human and nonhuman, are at stake. One would be forgiven for thinking that a thorough analysis of the technological, economic, and political issues would have a certain priority in a book such as this. But evidently, for people who want to engage in social psychanalysis for their favourite films of a perceived zeitgeist from the comfort of the living room - ironically in advanced capitalism - life on the planet receives only a few throwaway references.

Of course, sometimes Fisher does it get it right, such as identifying a marked correlation in mental health issues and growing economic inequalities in advanced capitalism. This, of course, is well-recognised academically, but the political will is insufficient in even nominal democracies to address this anomie; that issue is just another part of "capitalist realism". Fisher follows this with a claim that youth in contemporary societies have reflexive impotence and depressive hedonism as opposed to political protest. Keep in mind this was written during the period of protests against the invasion of Iraq in 2003, among the largest recorded in history, which would lead to a partial withdrawal in 2007 and a full withdrawal in 2011. But it's the kids who are at fault, as Fisher condemns university students for slumping, snacking, chatting, listening to music, and not being subject to discipline for non-attendance. I wish I could say this is an exaggeration.

With a language that would satisfy extremist "cookers", to use a contemporary phrase, Fisher claims that liberal capitalists such as Soros and Gates are actually "liberal communists" and that flexible work arrangements, rather than being an empirically grounded means of both improving productivity and life satisfaction, are - you guessed it - another manifestation of capitalist realism designed to control "far from constituting any kind of progressive corrective to official capitalist ideology, liberal communism constitutes the dominant ideology of capitalism now. 'Flexibility', 'nomadism' and 'spontaneity' are the very hallmarks of management in a postFordist, Control society." This is, by the way, expressed without any attention or concern to those who are unstable and low-paid workers, the precariat class; the negatives of workplace flexibilities are ignored and the positives are reframed as negatives, and once again, the impoverished are forgotten about by Fisher's cultural psychoanalytic criticism, as he complains against increased reporting requirements for academics.

Do you imagine that the developing world is even mentioned in this opus? That among this totalising version of "Post-Fordist capitalism" that there is any mention whatsoever of the people who live in India, in South and Central America, in Africa, or even anywhere in Asia? Of course not; it is one thing to be writing from the perspective from the Anglophone academic (as this reviewer also does) who draws upon fashionable European philosophers, it is quite another to lack the self-awareness that this represents a minority worldview and perhaps, just perhaps, that the voices of other people who are not in such a position of privilege should be listened to an included when one is making an argument about a supposed global and totalising cultural, political, and economic system. The focus on British politics by Fisher is understandable and excusable given his context; ignoring the result of the world whilst making claims of universality is not.

In "Capitalist Realism", one doesn't receive a thorough criticism of capitalism in terms of political economy, relations of production, or public economics, or its manifestations in law and politics. Even as we are confronted with the most basic contradictions of our time; e.g., a global and shared enviroment damaged by industrialised productive processes that do not incorporate responsibility for the damage caused, or the conflicts and violence in the international order from rapacious and opportunistic states, Fisher steadfastly refuses to even give a useful definition of what capitalism is and, as a result, the conclusion illustrates his original and ironic claim that he lacks the ability to imagine an alternative. Psychologising everything that he sees as a function of capitalist realism, he is entrapped within a Foucauldian prison of his own making, and unable to step outside of it. As more critical psychologists would point out, this is a WEIRD book ("Western, Educated, Industrialised, Rich, and Democratic") and, like all patriarchal imperialists, assumes that what he sees is what everyone sees.