Capitalist Realism: Another Work of Wasted Opportunity

Mark, like so many “alternative left” thinkers came from a background of culture and philosophy rather than political economy, having a BA in English & Philosophy and a PhD with the dissertation title of Flatline Constructs: Gothic Materialism and Cybernetic Theory-Fiction, and was also a founding member of the Cybernetic Cultural Research Unit. He started a blog on cultural theory, i.e. theory stripped of historical materialist insights, called K-punk. He later became a lecturer on Aural and Visual Cultures at Goldsmiths College.

He coined the phrase “capitalist realism” which in effect meant exactly the same as the bourgeois cultural hegemony that Gramsci proposed, and then quoted Frederic Jameson / Slavoj Zizek with “it is easier to imagine the end of the world than it is to imagine the end of capitalism”. An utterly Western-centric defeatist attitude that excludes the actually existing socialisms of nations such as China, Vietnam, and Cuba. The classic “Western Marxist” internal navel gazing academic ideology that is either blind to actually existing socialism or denigrates it as “authoritarian”. He utilizes the film Children of Men as a representation of a disaster capitalism where the state had been “stripped back to its core military and police functions” (p. 1) when he could have simply visited parts of Africa, South America or even the United States to see such a thing in the flesh. But pontificating about a theoretical future far away from material reality equivalents in the present is so much less discomfiting.

[su_pullquote align=”left”]Refreshingly, Boyd smashes the preposterous pretensions of  “post modernists” and “post structuralists” as arbiters of a good understanding of political reality.[/su_pullquote]

He then writes about the work of Deleuze and Guattari, two Continental post-structuralist and post-modernist philosophers whose work was utterly disconnected from material realities and used the usual colossally over-complex and obscurantist language of such writers. That Fisher thought that their account of capitalism was “the most impressive since Marx” is quite astounding to me, and shows the utter lack of linkage to the historical materialism of giants like Gramsci. Deleuze and Guattari are the classic “clever children”, just like Derrida, Foucault, Hardt and Negri, that play “clever” but career-safe philosophical word games utterly disconnected from material reality. As part of my own politics course, I was forced to grind through Hardt’s Empire, a “masterpiece” that I considered was one of the most over complex, self-indulgent, and utterly uninformed and naive works that I have ever read. Of course, it was a sensation in the Western academy. Only with such a limited perspective can Fisher state with a straight face that “Capitalism is what is left when beliefs have collapsed at the level of ritual or symbolic elaboration” (p. 4). No mate, it’s when a small elite own the means of production and exploit the rest.

The spendthrift utilization of many rich words in “clever” sentences pervades the work, for example when the author states that “The most Gothic description of Capital is also the accurate. Capital is an abstract parasite, an insatiable vampire and zombie-maker; but the living flesh it converts into dead labor is ours, and the zombies it makes are us”. No mate, it’s when a small elite own the means of production and exploit the rest, which is most definitely not in the abstract. Philosophy without a grounding in historical materialism can be oh so clever and oh so far off the mark. One can be “critical” without threatening the societal power structures that are embedded in materialism. Then he delves into the misuse of psycho-analytic metaphors for societal issues so “cleverly” used by the likes of Lacan and Zizek which have been so corrosive to the understanding of the natural sciences and empirical validation.

The author then opines on the “reflexive impotence” (p. 21) of the youth which is much more about the destruction of the social institutions through which they can be politically educated and active. An “impotence” that was not much on display when the youth of Britain so enthusiastically responded to the socialist optimism of Corbyn. The role of the “critical theorists” is not just to redirect energies for real change into ideological and activist dead ends but also to sow the very feelings of impotence in the face of capitalism that the author complains about. His designation of the capitalist oligarchs George Soros and Bill Gates as “liberal communists” (p. 26) shows an utter confusion about the two opposites of liberalism and communism. Again, perhaps “clever” but deeply flawed.

Then the next “cleverness”, the invented term “Market Stalinism” which values the symbols of achievement over actual achievement; showing an utter lack of basic historical knowledge. Stalinism turned a backward nation into the industrial powerhouse that defeated the Nazi armies of invasion in only a decade, and then bounced back from the utter destruction of WW2 to build a nuclear bomb while rebuilding the shattered infrastructure of the nation. Stalinism was the very opposite of meaningless bureaucracy. It was Khrushchev who removed the pay incentives for performance and it was Khrushchev and his successors that embedded the bureaucracy within the nation. And even then, the Soviet Union outgrew the West into the 1970s. Here, Fisher is repeating the classic Trotskyist garbage so redolent among both Western capitalist propagandists and such “critical” scholars. The same ones that mention the “bread lines” which only appeared after the corruption and profiteering hoarding in the late 1980s after Gorbachev’s “reforms”.

There are many good insights in Fisher’s work, but like so much of the output of the “left” it is marred by a not required philosophical and rhetorical cleverness, which is divorced from the real materialist world and rejects the very socialist successes that point the way forward while also wasting so much energy that could be spent on actual change. Lenin, Stalin, Mao, Castro, Ho Chi Minh, Ortega etc., were successful because they understood that although there was of course a need for an alternative ideology, that ideology needed to be in terms that the average person would understand and be based in political activism and when required pragmatism. Gramsci understood that in the 1920s, the vast majority of people who quote his work do so very selectively as they spin post-modernist and post-structuralist word games and disconnected from reality “critical” theories.

Fisher had struggled with depression and unfortunatley took his own life in 2017 at the age of 48. The “left” Trotskyist journals such as Tribune celebrated his work, work that had so much promise if only Fisher could have properly come to terms with Gramsci and eschewed the capitalism-serving dead ends of post-modernist cultural theory and the likes of the capitalist court jester Zizek.

In my politics course I was provided with a CD of “great thinkers” called Examined Life which included so many of the capitalist-serving court jesters such as Slavoj Zizek, Judith Butler, Cornel West, Micheal Hardt, Avita Ronell and bourgeois progressives such as Martha Nussbaum, Peter Singer, Kwame Anthony Appiah; all directed by the bourgeois progressive Astra Taylor. So many people being “clever” in a very obscurantist way rather than being insightful. I agree with Rockhill that the clarity of one’s writing reflects the clarity of one’s theorizing.

At the intentional community that I studied at there was much love for the failed but “perfect” doomed rebellions, with the “media-savvy” doomed-to-fail Zapatistas very much celebrated. A general hatred of the state as “bad” was evident together with a general commitment to the kind of non-violent resistance which the capitalist oligarchy will happily tolerate until it becomes a little too obstructive; then the non-violent protestors will find out what state coercion and violence is. The Cuban revolution was certainly not seen as a good example!

Overall, a completely self-defeating set of attitudes. But there was no real revolutionary fervour anyway, as so much of the focus was on “the change within”. Many great and beneficial societal changes have been brought about by people who were not so “great within”, just look at the philandering of MLK. This focus on “the change within first” is really just bourgeois progressive “new-agey” stuff dressed up in different clothes. Yet more comfortable performativity. There are just so many avenues through which real energies for change can be dissipated within modern capitalist societies.