I recently asked my lecturer if they had any thoughts on Fisher’s best-known work Capitalist Realism. They told me that it was as a seminal book in their political awakening as the Communist Manifesto by Marx & Engels. How could I then justify not picking the book up now?
My first thoughts of the book were of how short the book is (81 pages), and I got sort of worried that there wasn’t going to be necessarily enough content to truly dissect and examine our contemporary existence under capitalist ruling. However, I judged the book by its cover, I went on and read the whole thing on 3 train rides on my commutes to and from uni. What Fisher does so well is address the fundamental idea that capitalism has seeped into the very fabric of our conscious being. An inescapable future is ahead of us or as Fukuyama put it “The end of history” in his remarks towards the development of the much-contested territory of neoliberalism. What is written is that this doesn’t have to be the case, for if we are able to articulate our very disaffection with our precarious lives thanks to the ravenous neoliberalism of the 20th and 21st century we can begin to repel the advance of environmental catastrophe and instead of pathologizing mental health we can turn our guns towards the true enemy of our well-being, capital.
Fisher begins this examination by going back to the latter stages of the 1980’s. To the shock of the globe, the Soviet Union was collapsing, and capitalist restoration was on the horizon. Democracy and capitalism had triumphed, the great experiment had failed. Communist parties across the globe saw a sharp decrease in membership. With capitalism being inevitable, what does this mean for us everyday people? Depression. Yes, as bluntly as that, moreover if we are not engulfed by crushing depression as a result of our endless precarious existence, then the impending doom of climate change will transform society so that our mental health will be the last of our priorities.
The excellence of this book – away from the damnation that will come soon – is the way in which Fisher is able to articulate the very chaotic and anarchic way in which capital sucks the life out of any meaningful interaction we have with our work or education and turns us into zombies of the Kulturindustrie (Culture industry). For example, Fisher presents us with a higher education setting where bureaucracy is king, and a genuine education achieved by the user (student) is secondary. The ceaseless monitoring of grades and performance becomes the sole focus of the educator, and all that matters are that reports on performance and functionality are handed in and recorded. Actual substance and form of education is not even considered. It is this dehumanising practice that is prevalent in almost all workplaces, whether it be in an NHS hospital or an office workplace. These endless procedures of collecting data that have no bearing on reality other than a false representation of the actual situation. Fisher does a remarkable job in this and presents our neoliberal dystopia in a deeply personal way, really hammering home the idea that we are all caught in capitalism’s capillaries of power.
Lastly, we shall look at Fisher’s solutions, which may seem vague and useless for someone looking for a “How to Guide” but offers us an insight into ourselves, our work, and our mental health. All of which are being devalued and pathologized by the onslaught of capital. Fisher suggests that the older ways of organising might not be apt in dealing with today’s issues. That if teachers go on strike, they must make it so the students do not suffer as a result of this withheld labour, that it is the middle managers, the directors and stock-holders that should be the ones that feel their fury and exclusion. For capital can live a day or two without profits. So, organising outside of the reach of capital may be what is necessary, since we our hurtling ourselves towards environmental ruin, which will lead to rationing, and much like in the film Children of Men which saw the rich hoard their cultural riches away from the masses, where coffee chains remain functioning whilst most of the masses lived in abject misery or will our future be collectively managed and directed by us, the masses. RIP Marl Fisher (K-Punk).
5/5
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