Mark Fisher: Capitalist Realism and Business Ontology

"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. " - Mark Fisher "And capitalist realism isn't just there  being pushed by neoliberal ideologues; um it's in us as well, and I think nothing  illustrates this more clearly than the real widespread failure of so-called left if we  if there was any such thing anymore in, in um in parliamentary terms you know, in the  in Europe to have taken advantage of the most spectacular failure of a political  project ever probably. You know which was the financial crisis and the Bank Bailouts  of 2008.

" Living in a contemporary global capitalistic world, one that has siphoned out  any radical economic dissent. The question looms: are we able to escape capitalism? Is there  anything past it?

Is any such endeavor even possible? To an arguable majority, they  understand the looming issues with capitalism. Even if it's something painful to admit. 

But, this supposedly post-ideological world, a world with the end of the Soviet Union; of an  actual Communist Chinese government, is there any coherent vision past global capitalism? This  is a central ethos of this book. Can we escape capitalism?

What is capitalism? And what is this  capitalist realism that Mark Fisher talks about? It should be noted before the body of the  video, I have been told numerous times to read this book in it's whole and I regret I  have not done it sooner.

After reading this, this is hands down one of my favorite works  of theory, and the greatest visualization of American Capitalism I have ever seen. It is  bleak, it is depressing, but more than anything, it is beautifully relevant. A relevancy from an  author who fundamentally lived what he wrote, and who understood these very conditions to his  core.

I want these core points to be accessible to all. If possible, for these ideas to  work into the collective unconsciousness and to help break and understand this weird  matrix that we are in. There has been numerous videos on Capitalist Realism but I want this  one to be the absolutely most ambitious one.

I want it to completely encompass this book  in its whole and with an accessible form for all. More than anything, I want to do Capitalist  Realism justice. This video is Capitalist Realism just in video form.

"When after 1989, when  capitalism loses its visible antagonists, in the sort of Soviet Empire then Capitalism doesn't  have to defend itself as such. It just becomes the; you know, horizon of the imaginable. It  doesn't have to be, you know, it doesn't have to be named anymore, it's all the more powerful  because it's not named.

" Right from the start, Mark Fisher comes out swinging with the phrase:  "it's easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism. " A phrase widely attributed  to Frederick Jameson and Slavoj Zizek. As shocking as this phrase is, it's undeniably true in almost  every way.

That capitalism isn't a mere economic system, it's an imposed psychological reality and  condition that has permanently altered our being. If post-mortem consciousness existed and  we collectively destroyed our existence at the whims of capital, the very idea of  restricting capitalism would possibly scare more than a very real apocalyptic scenario. In  this context, capitalism isn't a mere system, it is us.

This is why when the impending threat  of climate change is brought up, the reasonable response is: I just simply try not to think about  it. To end capitalism is to end our contemporary human subjectivity today. But, given the nature of  this book, we must closely define what capitalism is, and how it molds to us.

Mark Fisher does just  that with a whole host of prior theory. From the start he elaborates on the traditional ethos of  capitalism with a quote from Marx and Engels in the Communist Manifesto: "[Capital] has drowned  the most heavenly ecstasies of religious fervor, of chivalrous enthusiasm, of philistine  sentimentalism, an icy water of egotistical calculation. It has resolved personal worth into  an exchange value, and in place of the numberless indefeasible chartered freedoms has set up that  single unconscionable freedom - Free Trade.

In one word, for exploitation. Veiled by religious  and political illusions, it has substituted naked, shameless, direct brutal exploitation. " Capitalism  is the human condition that is left after culture, ritual, and symbolic elaboration is dead.

The  new culture is now consumption and spectacle. It moves into the aesthetic realm. And as  aesthetics and rational ideation go, we see capitalism as the ultimate purveyor.

Humans do not  merely go on military conquests like Genghis Khan, we do not merely kill and burn down villages for  fundamental power and control. Instead, we set up camp in foreign countries and systematically set  up shop and exploit human labor. With the shiny facade of progress.

But, only when the exploited  recognize the game they are being subjected to they revolt and fight back. Then extreme brutality  emerges. A brutality that is arguably worse than prior forms.

Brutality like we saw in King  Leopold II's Free State of Congo; plantation slavery in Cuba and in the Caribbean. Brutality  doesn't cease to exist, it's simply masked, it's a more efficient and systemic endeavor.  Capitalism sucks up culture, it sucks up history; turns the very things that often made us human  into museum pieces.

Everything is objectified, it's commodified. With Fukuyama's idea that we  have reached the apex with Liberal Capitalism; after the fall of the Berlin Wall, Mark  Fisher believes that critical insight into late capitalism is often Nietzschean rather than  Marxist. Nietzsche wrote about the overflow of history into the human condition.

We have replaced  human engagement in life; culture and politics into spectatorship. We retroactively learn what  it is to be human. We retroactively examine truth, rather than engage into activities that make it  so.

Fisher quotes: "Nietzsche's most prescient pages are those in which he describes the  'over-saturation of an age with history'. It leads an age into a dangerous mood of irony in regard  to itself, he wrote in Untimely Meditations. 'and subsequently into the even more dangerous mood  of cynicism', in which 'cosmopolitan fingering', a detached spectatorialism, replaces engagement  and involvement.

This is the condition of Nietzsche's Last Man, who has seen everything,  but is decadently enfeebled precisely by this excess of self-awareness. " This quote absolutely  hit me to my core. Think about what we are doing right now.

We are learning about something very  abstract. Theory orientated while simultaneously ignoring the very woes that we are learning about  in reality. This learning, this education, this self-awareness, simultaneously pacifies us.

If  this isn't one of the most scary insights I have no clue what is. Moving on, Mark Fisher visualizes  this living from history with Kurt Cobain. Kurt Cobain understood this new society of historical  life.

Kurt Cobain knew as a star of MTV he was just a prop, a prop that will eventually collapse.  He was a spectacle. A newer mimic of stars like Kim Morrison and Hendrix.

"There's nothing more  embarrassing than a group of people walking up to you and and shaking and clamoring. And you know;  and praising you like you're some kind of f*cking god or something. It's embarrassing!

" Further,  even understanding this phenomenon to Cobain was a cliche. These anxieties he expressed further  resulted in the nihilistic facade he portrayed. Why does it matter if I will be replaced by  something greater?

Why does it matter if I am just another spectacle? Another object of desire? It's  not fundamentally me anyway.

This abundance of history creates a weird new form of nihilism. If  we know the results of our actions, how time will repeat itself, why do anything at all? This is a  nihilism that works perfectly within post-modern capitalism.

This is often not a conscious  nihilism either. The nihilism of the past, the very Nietzschean anxieties around the loss of  culture, the loss of things that make us human, is child's play to this new form of nihilism today.  And in many ways, it isn't just nihilism.

It's a new pernicious form of it. One that convinces you  of the opposite. Fisher showcases this in the film Wall-E.

A movie that shows an uninhabitable world  from radical human consumption. A movie that actively decries the forms of capitalism we are  subjected to and face right now. This movie isn't just spectacle, it invites us in to interact and  participate in it; gauge the world around us how we are contributing to global disaster.

Because  of this there was a mass outcry from right-wing observers for quote-unquote: "attacking its own  audience", in many ways Wall-E is a Marxian-like film. But, there is one thing, there's one huge  caveat at hand, this film ironically feeds this capitalist realism. The very film performs our  anti-capitalist activism and education for us.

We can consume this film with impunity, this  corporate activism does all the work for us and perfectly pacifies us. Pacifies the very  innate threat of human destruction into an ideal that we can pervasively enjoy. Where in other  societies propaganda is needed to cover up repressive acts.

The exact opposite is true  with contemporary capitalism. Capitalism is strengthened by its own critiques. These corporate  anti-capitalist critiques ironically act as a very reinforcement and an unconscious  pacifying agent.

As reinforcement goes, Fisher brings up the mode of mental health and  contemporary capitalism mirroring the work of Eros and Civilization by Herbert Marcuse. Link right  up above if you are interested. We see that mental health is a radically individualistic and internal  problem.

Psychology and mental healing are purely partitioned into an interpersonal thing: you have  a chemical imbalance, you are super stressed, etc. Yet, we recognize that external  events play a role in this regardless: you go to therapy after a family member dies,  after you are having a rough time in life, but, the medical apparatus never touches work. It never  touches economics.

That is purely off-limits. It's off-limits because of capitalist realism.  The idea that neoliberal contemporary capitalism is simply innately us, therefore it presents a  depth that even psychology hasn't even been able to systematically penetrate.

This moves us into  the newer economic working conditions that affect the western subject. We used to live in a Fordist  world, a capitalist framework that mirrored Henry Ford's production model. Lineworkers doing the  same menial task over and over and over again.

This is where traditional Marxists derive much of  their ideas around alienation and the modern state of industrialized work. Yet, today, we are living  in something more pervasive and totally different. We are now in a very post-Fordist economic  world.

We see that in this post-Fordist world, flexibility nomadism, and spontaneity are  absolutely essential. You must be flexible willing to stretch yourself to the absolute max.  Hyper individuality is now favorable, you must follow unfounded rules that are constantly made  up on the spot.

The main character of this film is in a constant state of useless menial tasks,  sent from hyper bureaucracy. Yet, the Reagan and Thatcher promises that neoliberalism, market  capitalism, would eliminate the very bureaucracy and false appearance of progress found in Stalin's  Soviet Union; a bureaucracy that was supposedly only found in the public sector is ironically  worse in today's post-modern capitalism. Today's capitalism has found itself in the same dilemma of  ex-Soviet states.

The pursuit of symbols and the appearance of productivity and progress. More  than the actual progress itself. Teachers and professors are now tasked to adhering to strict  curriculum where administrators will watch their lectures, these educators are now more concerned  with fulfilling the appearance of education, rather than the education itself.

But this isn't  a phenomenon found because education is within the public sector, this is a new phenomenon posited  by neoliberal right-wing and hyper-capitalistic governments. A strategy that originally took place  in private schools, but then subsequently found its home in public schools from a neo-liberal  government. Mark Fisher quotes: "This is in part a consequence of the inherent resistance of  certain processes and services to marketization.

(The supposed marketization of education, for  instance, rests on a confused and underdeveloped analogy: are students the consumers of the service  or its product? ) The idealized market was supposed to deliver 'friction free' exchanges, in which  the desires of consumers would be met directly, without the need for intervention or mediation by  regulatory agencies. Yet the drive to assess the performance of workers and to measure forms of  labor which, by their nature, are resistant to quantification, has inevitably required additional  layers of management and bureaucracy.

What we have is not a direct comparison of workers'  performance or output, but a comparison between the audited representation of that performance  and output. Inevitably, a short-circuiting occurs, and work becomes geared towards the generation  and massaging of representations rather than to the social goals of the work itself. " This is what  capitalism is, it's an elastic system that adapts, that consumes our former subjectivity, that  pacifies us into forms of entertainment and material idealism; evaporating the very prior  subjectivity that made us human for better or worse.

The concept of this contemporary capitalism  is one of profound ironic contradiction. Fisher quotes the French philosopher Alain  Badiou on this very late 20th century post-modern capitalistic paradox: "A brutal state of affairs,  profoundly inegalitarian - where all existence is evaluated in terms of money alone - is presented  to us as an ideal. To justify their conservatism, the partisans of the established order cannot  really call it ideal or wonderful.

So instead they have decided to say that all the rest  is horrible. Sure, they say, we may not live in a condition of perfect Goodness. But we're  lucky that we don't live in a condition of Evil.

Our democracy is not perfect. But it's better  than the bloody dictatorships. Capitalism is unjust.

But it's not criminal like Stalinism.  We let millions of Africans die of AIDS, but we don't make racist nationalist declarations  like Milosevic. We kill Iraqis with our airplanes, but we don't cut their throats with machetes  like they do in Rwanda, etc.

" What separates today's capitalism of a post-Soviet world is one  of post-modern capitalism. Where universal values do not really exist. There is a rejection of  responsibility outside of the pursuit of capital.

But Fisher articulates that this realism  he talks about isn't merely post-modernism, it's more intense than that. It's a form of  post-modernism beyond itself. Fisher says: "Capitalist realism no longer stages this kind  of confrontation with modernism, on the contrary, it takes the vanquishing of modernism for granted:  modernism is now something that can periodically return, but only as a frozen aesthetic style,  never as an ideal for living.

" This is what capitalist realism is. It is a rejection of  concepts of space and time; history; everything. Capitalist realism rejects absolutely everything  except the pursuit of capital.

And subsequently, we see a world that completely cries out for  modernity and of the very better days of the past. And in a very capitalist realist society,  this is what crying out for modernity looks like. "You feel it, let, vote now!

Make sure you  in fact let people know you're a senator; I'm not going to answer the question, because  the answer that because the question is; the question is; would you shut up? " "Listen, who  is on your list Joe? " "This is so unpresidential.

" "We have ended this segment, we're going to move  on to the second segment. " "That was really a productive segment wasn't it? " Biden represents  our prior tame post-modern capitalistic world, one just with a nice modern facade.

This world  still has a connection to modernity though, he is a representation of normalcy, a horrid  neoliberal normalcy, but he is a cry for a return to better days. Admittedly still terrible  days, yet better than the latter stages of this realism. But while there is a connection  to modernity this normalcy is still removed from modernity itself.

With Trump, Trump is the  very embodiment of elastic capitalist realism. He is the embodiment of the ultimate form of  postmodernism. As capitalist realism really is a hyper-potent form of post-modernism.

We've covered  a bit of post-modern conservatism on this channel. Here's a link above if you are interested.  Biden acknowledges the fact of climate change, student loan debt, and the woes affecting  capitalist subjects, yet it will still be a massive struggle for him to do anything of  substance on these issues.

He will fight tooth and nail to keep capital at the forefront of  importance. Compared to Trump, Trump denies these issues altogether. It's as simple as him  claiming these massive issues don't really exist.

And like that, they quite honestly disappear from  his sphere of responsibility, as his base simply follows along. He's a reverse of the former,  he lies about the issues plaguing humanity yet he's ironically honest about the result. "See  that?

Where I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody, and I wouldn't lose  any voters, okay, it's like incredible. " You see, he is cryptically honest about the political  reality we are residing in, and the very disturbing yet true results of his actions. But  these actions, these desires for a return to modernity, to normalcy, can be viewed through  the psychoanalytic lens of the Lacanian Real.

In this case, Fisher uses the Real as something  that any reality must suppress. An unattainable void that can be viewed through the fractures and  inconsistencies of what we perceive reality to be. And in more Lacanian and psychoanalytic terms, the  appearance of reality can be seen as a symbolic order and the imaginary.

But of course, we'll have  to refrain from doing a complete deep dive into Lacanian psychoanalysis. Yet, through this lens  of looking at the fractures within capitalism; fractures that give us a glimpse into the Real;  the concept of the Real can be used as a tool to uncover the true reality of capitalism. Capitalist  realism.

And the very psychological effects it attempts to cover up. Rather than using a more  ontological or metaphysical approach to the Real, Mark Fisher is simply using the Real as an  application. How the Real can kind of ironically be used in concepts symbolically.

So with a  very symbolic approach to the Real, Fisher gives environmental catastrophe as an example of a real.  It's impossible for capitalism to truly assimilate climate change-induced apocalypse into a potential  reality. This statement might be confusing to some given we use the example of Wall-E, an ultimate  critique of capitalism, yet even within the most cynical examples such as Wall-E we don't even  concede that human annihilation is actually possible.

Within Wall-E humans are still alive  with robots to do the fixing of human woes and mass consumption. Even the most cynical critiques  within mass entertainment and media does not truly contend with absolute catastrophe. Rather, the  idea of catastrophe is just ironically reinforced within the system of capitalism.

Solutions  are just repackaged within the commodity, packaged into advertising and marketing campaigns.  In simpler terms, under this stage of capitalism, the solution to climate catastrophe driven by  capitalism is repackaged into more capitalism. Fischer quotes: “Environmental catastrophe  is one such Real.

At one level, to be sure, it might look as if Green issues are very far  from being ‘unrepresentable voids’ for capitalist culture. Climate change and the threat of  resource-depletion are not being repressed so much as incorporated into advertising and marketing.  What this treatment of environmental catastrophe illustrates is the 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 like a used skin, and that any problem can  be solved by the market.

” In this case, the hidden Real in a capitalist system is the emergence of  surface capitalist solutions. To solve the very issues capitalism has created: the privatization  of stress, a new emergence of neo-liberal hyper bureaucracy; a very much worse audit-based  version of bureaucracy neoliberalism promised to solve. Fisher describes this massive issue of  mental health and how capitalism privatizes it and reestablishes mental health as purely internal. 

A natural occurrence. This mirrors the naturalism that neoliberalism espouses. When you ask the  majority of Americans if they want socialized medicine, government-funded healthcare, universal  healthcare and the like, a likely majority show fear or shudder in confusion.

That's because  private health care is as natural as the trees around us. Not only this, but the public entity of  any tangible service or product. Mark Fisher calls this existence people in the U.

S are thrusted  into as a business ontology. Mark Fischer talks about how theorists like Foucault and Badiou  have described potent and successful politics as something that explodes the very appearance  of the natural order. To make their ideology, core beliefs, policies, appear as something innate  as nature.

Fisher points out that the sheer amount of privatizations that took place in the 80s  were unimaginable in 1975. Denationalization of utilities, railways, the existence of prisons  as a profitable enterprise. These used to be things that were unimaginable.

This changed  because of the emergence of neoliberalism as something natural. And with our new existence  being centered around profit and finance, a complete business ontology. As we see,  this is why 21st century Americans still seem shocked at the idea that something isn't for sale. 

That something's existence isn't centered around profit. That being business, and even people.  Thus a world where our existence, an ontology, is centered around business.

Despite a universal  a single-payer, not-for-profit, health care system being statistically cheaper more efficient.  And an ultimate benefit to nearly everyone. Many in the United States still shudder in fear or  complete confusion at the prospect of it.

Despite these findings. But this business ontology goes  further than this. It's the prospect or hope that monetization can reach absolutely everything.

It's  a world and existence where commodity fetishism is at its highest point. Chapter six of the book  brings us back into the new hyper bureaucracy that's present in 21st-century capitalism. Fisher  argues that the consequences of this new economic world is a world that melts into pure PR. 

Substance and progress is gone. Work now exists for the illusion of work. It's an ultimate  anti-production work strategy.

He sees this new phenomenon that marketizes Stalin's aesthetic  approach to production. The irony in this is beyond comprehension. Neoliberalism has sought to  become the most efficient system that would fight the Stalinist approach to the appearance of work. 

Fisher uses the example of Stalin's White Sea Canal. In the 1930s this canal was one of the  most impressive feats in engineering, but only on the surface. The canal was too shallow to use for  most 20th-century cargo.

Thus, it was a symbol of production. And more importantly, anti-production  at that. Stalin's USSR would turn this canal into PR.

People would photograph it. Whole Soviet  public relations teams would be tasked with showcasing this canal. An empty canal that was  really only pretty and useful on the outside.

This is the very symbolic anti-production  neoliberal capitalism sought to destroy. Yet, neoliberal capitalism has made this PR  business meta a more efficient endeavor under the use of constant auditing. Because of managers,  bosses constantly breathing down your neck, workers are more concerned with the image  of production.

Teachers are more concerned with adhering to complete guidelines and the very  appearance of education, rather than education itself. This is what capitalist realism is.  It's a post-Fordist system where we cannot get too attached.

We must move all the time.  Sentimentalism is turned into pure profit motive. We are sucked into the end of history.

An end of  history that turns to new nihilism. A new nihilism that makes the old look like child's play.  So can we get past this capitalist realism?

Can we break through capitalism? To Fisher  there isn't a huge tangible prescriptive answer. Seven-eighths of the whole book is  descriptive of our current capitalism.

But, there are prescriptive bits and pieces he gives  us. The first is not to underestimate the system we are living in. It's arguable the traditional  Marxist approach that capitalism will kill itself is far too optimistic.

Marx's critiques of the  past cannot hold a candle to the situation we are currently in. The reality is way more grim.  Capitalism will kill itself by killing virtually all life via ecological disaster.

The second is  we must constructively approach neoliberalism, post-modern capitalism, as a framework that is  hyper artificial. Because it ultimately is. It's a massive ideological construct that isn't  natural whatsoever.

It's constructed for the benefit of a few oligarchs, with the expense  of the many. We need to point out that our capitalist realism relies on public funding, it  relies on bailouts when it will ultimately fail every decade or so. Capitalist realism hides  that collective intervention is necessary.

We need to make this public. The existence of  purely private enterprise is the artificial reality that has been implanted onto our being.  Our approach should be new, it should be organic, it shouldn't be hyper fixated on ideology.

It  should be humane with the approach to mental health, the material conditions people face,  and most of all we must create new politics that exposes the prior reality as something  purely artificial. As a world past capitalist realism is the natural order of things. Fisher  ends the book with this: “In any case, rationing of some sort is inevitable.

The issue is  whether it will be collectively managed, or whether it will be imposed by authoritarian  means when it is already too late. Quite what forms this collective management  should take is, again, an open question, one that can only be resolved practically and  experimentally. 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.

” Thank you guys so much for watching and making  it to the end. Capitalist Realism, in my opinion, is one of the most important books written in the  21st century. And hopefully, I was able to do it justice.

As always guys I have a huge request to  make. These videos are only possible via Patreon. And without it this channel could not survive.

So,  if possible, if you could pledge a couple dollars a month, this would absolutely ensure our survival  and would help me out immensely. And of course, using our Amazon link for any purchases you make  helps us immensely as well. Aside from that, feel free to follow me on Twitter, Instagram,  and come join the Discord and come hang out.

Thank you guys so much, I thoroughly hope you  enjoyed, and hopefully, I can see you in the next!