Capitalist Realism

It’s an audacious rhetorical move to blame the failure to conceive of a realistic alternative to capitalism on capitalism itself, although in fairness Mark Fisher doesn’t absolve the anti-capitalist movement of blame either. Fisher’s aim here is to give an account of how the spectrum of political possibility shrunk in the 80s and 90s to exclude alternatives to capitalism, and also identify areas where the workings of capitalism become absurd and unrealistic, as a way to wedge open new possibilities. The second effort is less successful than the first, mainly because there is already a well-established understanding of what “market failure” is and the need for regulation and state provision to correct it, which Fisher doesn’t engage with at all. The problem may be that in adopting Deleuze and Guattari’s expansive definition of capitalism as this all-encompassing and mutable system, the problem becomes so ill-defined as to be impossible to convincingly argue against. Capitalism becomes the evil animating all other evils, and if you don’t already subscribe to this demonology, this book will not persuade you.

Which is a shame, because the two issues Fisher investigates are important. His account of mental health, and particularly the role of social media in making it worse, is prescient. And the distortions created by targets in public services is now well accepted. But politics can confront these problems without demanding the end of capitalism (or to put it in Fisher’s terms, capitalism can metabolise these critiques and neuter them).

It is very telling to me that at the end of the book, Fisher argues for the resuscitation of the concept of the “general will” – as if the conflicts in society can all be resolved if such a thing can be found. In fact, Rousseau, who first suggested the idea, thought it could only be realised in very small republics where everyone knew each other personally, and large states would have to settle for Hobbesian oppression to crush the clashing interests of individuals. In the very last pages Fisher proposes that the question of collective management is to be resolved “practically and experimentally”, when arguably the failure of collective management in the 20th century is the single greatest cause for alternatives to capitalism to appear so unrealistic in the 21st. With that short aside, Fisher skips over the main issue, which is that anti-capitalists have failed to come up with practical way to collectively manage our resources that can convince a large enough majority to try the experiment again.