Capitalist Realism: Is there no alternative? (Zero Books) [Paperback]

Mark Fisher (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: December 16, 2009 | Series: Zero Books

After 1989, capitalism has successfully presented itself as the only realistic political-economic system - a situation that the bank crisis of 2008, far from ending, actually compounded. The book analyses the development and principal features of this capitalist realism as a lived ideological framework. Using examples from politics, films, fiction, work and education, it argues that capitalist realism colours all areas of contemporary experience. But it will also show that, because of a number of inconsistencies and glitches internal to the capitalist reality program capitalism in fact is anything but realistic.

Editorial Reviews

Review

Let's not beat around the bush: Fisher's compulsively readable book is simply the best diagnosis of our predicament that we have! Through examples from daily life and popular culture, but without sacrificing theoretical stringency, he provides a ruthless portrait of our ideological misery. Although the book is written from a radically Left perspective, Fisher offers no easy solutions. Capitalist Realism is a sobering call for patient theoretical and political work. It enables us to breathe freely in our sticky atmosphere. -- Slavoj Zizek

What happened to our future? Mark Fisher is a master cultural diagnostician, and in Capitalist Realism he surveys the symptoms of our current cultural malaise. We live in a world in which we have been told, again and again, that There Is No Alternative. The harsh demands of the 'just-in-time' marketplace have drained us of all hope and all belief. Living in an endless Eternal Now, we no longer seem able to imagine a future that might be different from the present. This book offers a brilliant analysis of the pervasive cynicism in which we seem to be mired, and even holds out the prospect of an antidote. -- Steven Shaviro, Author of Connected and Doom Patrols

About the Author

Mark Fisher is a writer and lecturer who maintains a highly successful weblog. He lives in the UK.

Product Details

• Paperback: 81 pages
• Publisher: O Books, John Hunt (December 16, 2009)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1846943175
• ISBN-13: 978-1846943171
• Product Dimensions: 8.3 x 5.4 x 0.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2.9 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (8 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #85,074 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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17 of 18 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Excellent, March 4, 2010

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Paul R. Bryant "drofphil" (Chicago, Il USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Capitalist Realism: Is there no alternative? (Zero Books) (Paperback)

Anyone who believes Fisher's book is "Zizek-lite" (as in the case of the reviewer below) has clearly neither read Zizek nor Fisher. Zizek's work unfolds in and through the analysis of the cultural register or symbolic formations. While Fisher certainly has much to say about cultural artifacts, he also deftly analyzes contemporary structures of affectivity (such as the recent rise of depressive and anxiety disorders), as well as how the post-Fordist workplace is structured and what challenges these transformations entail for organizing and pursuing emancipatory politics. The reviewer below misses the key point of Fisher's analysis of students and schools today. Fisher is not setting out to *blame* students or shake his cane and declare with exasperation "these kids today!", but rather to analyze the new forms subjectivity is taking within our contemporary milieu and to analyze how the reigning apathy and ubiquitous (yet unsatisfying hedonism) that characterizes our cultural memory is a product of a social structure in which "it is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism". Just as Voltaire's Candide suggested that we tend our gardens, the new form of subjectivity, discerning no limit to the horizon of capitalism seems to resign itself to dissatisfying small hedonistic pleasures as the only way to render life tolerable within such a hopeless situation. The question, then, is that of how it might become possible to begin imagining an alternative to current historical moment.

What I appreciate most about Fisher's short little book is that it is not yet another cultural or ideological analysis of artifacts, focusing on texts and cultural artifacts like films, but that in manages to weave together this sort of ideology critique, with something like Foucaultian analysis of regimes of subjectivization and the subjectivity they produce, Jamesonian Marxist critique, Deleuze and Guattari's material analysis of desire, and good old fashioned Marxist material analysis of modes of production. Something new is brewing here that is much more than a onesided analysis of the ideological and symbolic, accounting simultaneously for concrete material conditions of production. Fisher's book is a terrific read, often illuminating obscure social, political, and cultural phenomena, proceeding in such a way that what initially seems random and without reason (apathy of students for example) becomes transformed into a genuine *symptom*, thereby opening a space of the political in response to what has been depoliticized. But above all, it is a book that aims straight at the heart of our contemporary malaise characterized by a sense of hopelessness and meaningless, at least doing some of the legwork that would help us to become engaged once again. Your ten dollars will not be wasted. Let us hope that Fisher develops his project in greater and more elaborate detail in the future.

Levi R. Bryant, Collin College

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A Call to Imagination, November 12, 2010

By 

Gerrymander (Melbourne, Australia) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Capitalist Realism: Is there no alternative? (Zero Books) (Paperback)

My brother gave me a book a couple of months ago which I've just managed to read. Interestingly, I read the book just days after being involved in an online discussion about politics. It was a late, tangential, and general contribution to a post on the issue of asylum-seekers in Australia. I began my series of reflections (or, perhaps, rants) by declaring that there was a part of me that felt `blah, blah, blah' about the issue. This was not something I wrote with a sense of sardonic superiority nor a cynicism which might have grown from such a position. Rather, I felt disappointed, frustrated and perhaps even exasperated. Moreover, it was an expression of a response to politics that has been growing for some time now; first articulated, I think, in the aftermath of the last federal election in Australia.

Essentially, I am tired of boring, lazy, uncreative, expedient, conservative politics. I am completely uninterested in a politics that is only different in respect to the story within which it locates itself (and even this can seem barely indistinguishable at time). Ironically perhaps, this lament is, I think, a pretty boring, clichéd, glib statement. Yet, the point remains that I want to see, hear and participate in a truly alternative politics. Yet, it seems any time I have a conversation with someone, it is either explicitly stated or implied that `what we have is the best of the admittedly flawed offerings'. What we have, of course, is some kind of liberal capitalism. Can we really not imagine anything else...anything better?

Mark Fisher begins his book, Capitalist Realism, at this point in the story. Chapter 1 is titled, after Jameson and Zizek, `It's easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism'. As someone who is not at all well-versed in the literature of cultural theorists such as Foucault, Lacan, Baudrillard and Zizek, I found this to be a most apt and profound premise. By capitalist realism, Fisher means `the widespread sense that not only is capitalism the only viable political and economic system, but also that it is now impossible to even imagine a coherent alternative to it' (p.2). Beginning with a brief cultural analysis of the film, Children of Men, Fisher writes that it poses questions born of anxiety: `how long can a culture persist without the new? What happens if the young are no longer capable of producing surprises?' (p.3). While one response to such anxieties might be to hold out a knowingly weak hope that change is actually on the horizon, another might be the opposite, defeatist position of despairing belief that what is now is all there will be. Furthermore, when we can only imagine capitalism as the foundational structure for society, despite its liberal rhetoric of decentralisation and the devolution of power, it becomes a force no different to the totalitarianism of modernist conceptions of dystopias. The all pervasive capitalist realism is a deep and pervasive `sense of exhaustion, of cultural and political sterility' (p.7).

Thus, despite the language of freedom and liquidity key to capitalism (think free-market), capitalist realism should, according to Fisher, be seen as something structural and, it seems to me, public. By this, I mean that, while the individual is primary in neo-liberalism (be it negative self-interest or `positive' individual responsibility for world-wide poverty), the power of capitalist realism is one that defies the very notion of the individualism its rhetoric affirms. With reference to Zizek, Fisher writes about the ways in which capitalist realism flourishes in a post-ideological world where individuals' internalised beliefs become paramount to any overarching political or cultural structure. Therefore, we may see the way in which a particular ideological foundation may be having a negative effect on the world's poor, acknowledge that it is unjust, but continue to participate in giving life to that particular ideological foundation (justifiably) because we ourselves believe it to be bad. Put another way, `so long as we believe (in our hearts) that capitalism is bad, we are free to continue in capitalist exchange' (p.13).

Essentially, all this is to say that perhaps the insidious nature of capitalist realism is that, while it purports to be free of any `big brother' or top-down totalitarian tendencies, it actually functions in a way that perpetuates heavy bureaucracy and fails to come close to eradicating economic elites through competition as the neo-liberal ideologues would like us to believe. In fact, Fisher uses the education sector in the UK as an example of the way in which, though marketisation promised to deliver `friction-free' exchanges, has only caused greater concern with measurement of performance resulting in `additional layers of management and bureaucracy' (p.42). Furthermore, these managers at the top of organisations enjoy a much greater slice of national income than in the days of democratic socialism (p.29). Yet Fisher is not suggesting that the alternative is to look back to previous political times and, indeed, return to them. He writes, `It's well past time for the left to cease limiting its ambitions to the establishing of a big state' (p.77) and instead, it needs to seek ways to actually do what neo-liberals said capitalism could do: reduce bureaucracy. The way to respond to the capitalist failures such as the global financial crisis is not return to old ways of thinking, but a `spur of renewal' (p.79).

There is much more that the book offers as an analysis of the current cultural and political malaise in which we now find ourselves. It does not seek to provide answers with any specificity. Rather, it provokes the reader to actually consider carefully the question `is there no alternative' to capitalism? Moreover, assuming that we can be imaginative enough to assume there is an alternative, Fisher invites us to be creative and speculate as to what the alternatives might be. Such questions invite us, I believe, to imagine what is the goal - the telos - to which we are directed? They invite us to indeed imagine a better alternative. My next book review will focus on the very question of to what or whom we intend our `desire' and how we do this as an alternative to the dominant systems.

4 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Yes, it might be Zizek-Lite., February 5, 2010

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K. Cole "dopefish" - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Capitalist Realism: Is there no alternative? (Zero Books) (Paperback)

I found Fisher's "Capitalist Realism" an excellent introduction to Neo-Marxist thought. Yes, it lacks a strong central thesis. Yes, it's too short to really delve deep enough. Yes, Fisher sometimes seems to be merely parroting Slavoj Zizek.

Yet overall I thought Fisher had some key insights, particularly in regard to various paradoxes within capitalism. If for no other reason, this book is worth having for its simple-yet-deadly descriptions of capitalist malaise. Fisher is also a great writer, and I couldn't help but love quotes like, "Capital is an abstract parasite, an insatiable vampire and zombiemaker; but the living flesh it converts into dead labor is ours, and the zombies it makes are us."

I would say that if you are very familiar with Badiou, Deleuze & Guattari, Jameson, Zizek, and Marx himself, then maybe this brief book doesn't have a lot to offer. But to laypeople, undergraduates, or philosophy dilettantes, I think this work will prove to be intriguing and thought-provoking. I dare to think that even "professional" philosophers will find more than a couple tidbits to mull over. And as Zizek himself said, the work is in fact "compulsively readable." Give it a shot.