Capitalist realism - Mark Fisher

This is a good book. It's like reading Zizek, Fredric Jameson and the likes, but without having to deal with 300 pages of boring parts between all the good stuff.

I can't think of a better review, sounds amazing!

This is the book that i want to read. where can I buy this?

You can buy it from Amazon through the links in this page - http://www.zero-books.net/books/capitalist-realism

I read this yesterday (slow times at work) and liked it very much. Perhaps too broad a subject to talk about in just 81 pages, though. For example, when he mentions Tarkovsky's two sci-fi films as a product of a snobbish, elitist USSR government culture department, that is not necessarily true, or at least not true to the purpose the author intends and would require a thicker book to explain them.

Still a cracking read, thanks very much for sharing.

Also, Y NO REFERENCES? I'm sure it can all be tracked down though.

have downloaded, it's now in the reading stack

This is an amazing book, it has plenty of the sophistication of the writers and subjects it refers to, but very little redundant or overly complex language. It is actually quite enjoyable to read rather than tiresome.

If it references Heat I'll have to read it. I love that movie especially the part where they come out of the bank and kill all those cops. Best movie shootout ever.

might give it a wee jook

To open a can of worms, do you think this is why Revol likes it?
He's going through a BAADER MEINHOF HAD THE RIGHT IDEA phase of political regression where he thinks we'll never win and should 'at least take some of the bastards out', rather than get on with the hard slog of talking to our workmates and trying to get shit off the ground.

Hmm I'll pick up a hard copy, hate reading on a screen and don't have kindle.

The practical side is weak, but I didn't read it for tactics. I think some of the cultural analysis/politicisation of depression is decent, and the stuff about bullshit managerialism in his college was interesting too. I have a load of annotations on my copy but it's lent out, so going off memory. Iirc there was a cringeable bit about 'not capturing the state but subjecting it to the general will' too, but like I say I remember thinking it was decent, but not on practical stuff/tactics.

I found this text version of the book.
http://pastebin.com/Qysdgj7Y
Looks like it's spellchecked and all, but the quotes aren't highlighted. :)

Capitalist Realism is a great book. The bits on education had me nervously laughing and I hope to reflect on it's relevance to teachers in the next week or so.

Overall I don't think it's anywhere near as pessimistic as JimClarke makes out - there's a kernal of hope at the end, but only in the realisation that we have to move beyond what we're doing, which is something we'd say anyway. I certainly don't think he advocates doing nothing in the workplace, nor is he 'against' one day strikes as such, just recognising them for what they are, which, again, we already know.

Of course he isn't full of practical suggestions but it's opening up that conversation about those sorts of actions. I think he's right about suggesting we choose actions that reject managerialism/bureuacracy - personally something like this would work in schools - refusing to be observed, collectively, refusing to sign our performance management documents things like that.

Went home sick today, but before that, I stopped by Boneshaker Books (local lefty bookstore in Minneapolis) and picked up this. Reading now and will hopefully get through it. I got about halfway through the PDF a while ago. Its pretty good, but $15 for a 80 page book, really ?

You need to get a Kindle!

Also, get well soon

great book, his piece in 'what are we fighting for' is also very good, which is a little bit more optimistic, i do think things are pretty bad though, I like his description of stalanistic capitalism, we are slipping rapidly into a dystopia in the UK and there seems to be little opposition and the old nostalgic left tactics still linger

Guest blog from Mark Fisher

Fisher's book crystallizes the ideas of many of the most important critics of the cultural and economic landscape since the onslaught of neoliberalism; a succinct, readable and jargon-free slim volume that should be the inception of a new debate about late-capitalist society and the way we humans interact with it.

Also criticised and discussed here:
http://libcom.org/library/capitalist-realism-renewed

Apparently page 37 is missing from this PDF. Anyone have a better version?

Not sure if this is the best place to mention, but I noticed that Mark Fisher is mentioned quite a bit by the 'new' Social Democratic Left in the US. Chapo Trap House, Jacobin, various figures associated with DSA, etc I've seen all cite or mention Fisher positively. What they have in common is they are 'very online', which I think Fisher was, too. I think they sympathize with some of Fisher's critique of online identity politics and leftist behavior online. Ironically, some of these figures are some of the worst people online I've ever seen so its hard to take seriously. I'm most familiar with Capitalist Realism but not so much his other writings.

The resurface of Mark Fisher is honestly a plague on online discourse, it has only driven the most online socialists deeper into their dogmas and egos. People like Peter Coffin just say and do awful things, and justify everything by throwing around psudo-intellectual terms("perception labor") and then start talking about "the vampire castle" when they are criticized or dismissed. These people have forgotten that the power of class struggle comes from collective struggle, not trying to be the coolest on twitter.

Zero books, Peter Coffin and Xeixzy; we must fight all three Mark Fisherites but we fight the second most of the lot.

Yeah, as I understand it I think the Nagle book was probably an important point for that "Fisher revival".
Tbf to Fisher, I think it's worth bearing in mind that he was a very prolific writer, and as far as I can tell a lot of the self-proclaimed Fisherians seem to be basing that very heavily on one particular article. Someone saying they really like Mark Fisher because they got criticised online so now they think Fisher's article about how it's bad to criticise people online feels a bit like calling yourself a Marxist because you like the bits in the communist manifesto about nationalisation or something.
A lot of his writing's worth reading, especially if you like pop-culture criticism - there's always plenty of stuff to disagree with, but I think it does him a real disservice to try and turn his legacy into just an endless repetition of one internet fight from 2013, which often seems to be what his supposed fans want.

Steven.

Apparently page 37 is missing from this PDF. Anyone have a better version?

There is one here;
https://monoskop.org/File:Fisher_Mark_Capitalist_Realism_Is_There_No_Alternative_2009.pdf

R Totale

Someone saying they really like Mark Fisher because they got criticised online so now they think Fisher's article about how it's bad to criticise people online feels a bit like calling yourself a Marxist because you like the bits in the communist manifesto about nationalisation or something.

A venn diagram of those two groups would have a lot of crossover.

LeninistGirl

The resurface of Mark Fisher is honestly a plague on online discourse, it has only driven the most online socialists deeper into their dogmas and egos. People like Peter Coffin just say and do awful things, and justify everything by throwing around psudo-intellectual terms("perception labor") and then start talking about "the vampire castle" when they are criticized or dismissed. These people have forgotten that the power of class struggle comes from collective struggle, not trying to be the coolest on twitter.

Zero books, Peter Coffin and Xeixzy; we must fight all three Mark Fisherites but we fight the second most of the lot.

i preferred it when peter coffin was just that guy who faked a girlfriend

Juan Conatz

Not sure if this is the best place to mention, but I noticed that Mark Fisher is mentioned quite a bit by the 'new' Social Democratic Left in the US. Chapo Trap House, Jacobin, various figures associated with DSA, etc I've seen all cite or mention Fisher positively. What they have in common is they are 'very online', which I think Fisher was, too. I think they sympathize with some of Fisher's critique of online identity politics and leftist behavior online. Ironically, some of these figures are some of the worst people online I've ever seen so its hard to take seriously. I'm most familiar with Capitalist Realism but not so much his other writings.

I see that phenomenon as well, twitter and reddit have a lot of these people. The best example I can think of recently is the absolutely bizarre dispute between the Red Scare podcast (+ Amber Frost) and Current Affairs/Nathan Robinson -- the Red Scare people in particular seem to have mainly arrived at their positions by being as cynical and contrarian as they possibly can towards what they perceive to be the mainstream left.

I've been meaning to write something about this, as the polarisation between 'idpol' and 'class-based' leftists has been weighing on my mind, as it doesn't seem to be going away and in fact is increasing in severity. In the past few years there's been serious splits and disputes in a bunch of organisations over these issues and I don't think many yet have figured out a coherent way to solve them or to mend fences (if they should be mended at all).

Admittedly I haven't read as much of Fisher's work as other people have but I don't think these people are misappropriating what he says too much, not like someone liking the Communist Manifesto just because of nationalisation. The overemphasis on being online is arguably there in Vampire Castle; the first paragraph of the piece is him saying he was thinking of retiring from political engagement without ever really implying that 'political engagement' for him was anything more than being online -- aside from the mention of the People's Assembly it's not really clear what he'd be withdrawing from... was he withdrawing from union activity? A political party? An activist group? He doesn't say.

There's also an overlap in the way they all seem to dislike anarchists. Fisher used to criticise 'neo-anarchists' a lot, Bhaskar Sunkara of Jacobin does the same thing but calls them 'anarcho-liberals' instead. Same vague, perpetually moving target.

sherbu-kteer

I see that phenomenon as well, twitter and reddit have a lot of these people. The best example I can think of recently is the absolutely bizarre dispute between the Red Scare podcast (+ Amber Frost) and Current Affairs/Nathan Robinson -- the Red Scare people in particular seem to have mainly arrived at their positions by being as cynical and contrarian as they possibly can towards what they perceive to be the mainstream left.

Do I need to know anything about what this means, or am I happier not knowing?

Admittedly I haven't read as much of Fisher's work as other people have but I don't think these people are misappropriating what he says too much, not like someone liking the Communist Manifesto just because of nationalisation. The overemphasis on being online is arguably there in Vampire Castle; the first paragraph of the piece is him saying he was thinking of retiring from political engagement without ever really implying that 'political engagement' for him was anything more than being online -- aside from the mention of the People's Assembly it's not really clear what he'd be withdrawing from... was he withdrawing from union activity? A political party? An activist group? He doesn't say.

Yeah, that particular article is dire, it's more just that he wrote tons and tons of other stuff, which wasn't all perfect by any means (I don't think he ever had a proper critique of representation as such, which is a pretty big sticking point from an anarchist perspective), but much of it was way better, and I just find it dispiriting how one of the worst things he ever wrote also seems to be treated as the one thing that defines his legacy. Do you get the impression that many of these Fisher stans have read or paid attention to much other than the VC piece?

sherbu-kteer

There's also an overlap in the way they all seem to dislike anarchists. Fisher used to criticise 'neo-anarchists' a lot, Bhaskar Sunkara of Jacobin does the same thing but calls them 'anarcho-liberals' instead. Same vague, perpetually moving target.

Without knowing details of the current spat there's a few ways this works:

They will rarely if ever actually engage with anarchism or any kind of anti-state communism, to do so openly would be to acknowledge that there are ideologies to their left. Similarly when it comes to left social democrats like Nathan Robinson they can't make an (ultra) left critique of him (like http://libcom.org/library/socialist-dog-catchers-or-presidents-won-t-save-us does), but have to give the appearance of doing so despite this. Therefore anyone who talks about both class and race/colonialism etc. becomes a race-first liberal and conflated with Hillary Clinton (or Deray) and the people who want you to (only) vote for Bernie, canvass for M4A and push business unions are the class warriors.

When Sunkara has a go at anarcho-liberals, he means people like Naomi Klein and George Monbiot who are really left-liberals who support extra-parliamentary action as opposed to purely electoral methods. Monbiot has is own more direct (but still straw man) anti-anarchist screeds (although has apparently just has a damascene conversion to anti-capitalism and started reading Bookchin, see how long that lasts and where it ends up).

It's easiest to understand some of these disputes not as a genuine argument about how race and gender etc. interact with class struggle and capitalism, but instead as a factional dispute for control over the left of the Democrats (mirrored to some extent in Labour/Momentum but not in the same way). Obviously people who are operating in good faith (whether they've got great politics or not) get caught up in this too but when I'm trying to figure out what the fuck people are on about, it's useful to remind myself that some of them are earning the equivalent of very good salaries running a podcasting business and/or promoting themselves as op-ed writers and/or a couple of years before they're in charge of a think tank or someone's election campaign.

Probably most people on this thread have seen it, but an examination of how Adolph Reed does this bait and switch here: https://libcom.org/blog/identity-crisis-leftist-anti-wokeness-bullshit-22082017 (since writing that article Reed has directly got involved with some of these intra-DSA spats on the Amber Frost side of things).

R Totale

Do I need to know anything about what this means, or am I happier not knowing?[

I envy you if you don't know what Red Scare is

R Totale

Do you get the impression that many of these Fisher stans have read or paid attention to much other than the VC piece?

That's fair point, as I said I haven't read as much of his stuff as others so I will leave that judgement to them. But with that said, Frost spoke at the launch of an anthology of his writing which would imply that she at least has something more than a passing familiarity with his writing.

Mike Harman

They will rarely if ever actually engage with anarchism or any kind of anti-state communism, to do so openly would be to acknowledge that there are ideologies to their left. Similarly when it comes to left social democrats like Nathan Robinson they can't make an (ultra) left critique of him (like http://libcom.org/library/socialist-dog-catchers-or-presidents-won-t-save-us does), but have to give the appearance of doing so despite this. Therefore anyone who talks about both class and race/colonialism etc. becomes a race-first liberal and conflated with Hillary Clinton (or Deray) and the people who want you to (only) vote for Bernie, canvass for M4A and push business unions are the class warriors.

I agree 100%, you've hit the nail on the head with how they work.

sherbu-kteer

I envy you if you don't know what Red Scare is

Having now gone and looked it up, it definitely reinforces my impression that a lot of this stuff is not so much "class-based vs idpol" (and to be clear, that is a real division that will come up sometimes, there are all kinds of lines of argument that can be used against insurgent proles and sometimes people will use ones that rely on appeals to identity) and more "people who like to describe themselves as class-based vs people who they insist on describing as idpol". Like, the impression I get of them based on a quick read around is that it's pretty much Manhattan artworld people making fun of things, which I don't necessarily have a problem with as such, but I also really can't see as having any actual connection to class struggle as such.
Also,

the Red Scare people in particular seem to have mainly arrived at their positions by being as cynical and contrarian as they possibly can towards what they perceive to be the mainstream left.

Hang on a second, I thought that was meant to be our job! :P

That's fair point, as I said I haven't read as much of his stuff as others so I will leave that judgement to them. But with that said, Frost spoke at the launch of an anthology of his writing which would imply that she at least has something more than a passing familiarity with his writing.

Ah, I'm not going to watch that whole video to check, but as a rule of thumb I'd say it's worth paying attention to whether/how much people cite or quote anything by him other than the VC piece. Also, I do have a bit more time for Frost than some of those other people - she seems genuinely dedicated to her version of DSA politics, which, while it's a position I disagree with, I can respect a lot more than someone like Nagle, who doesn't seem to be that interested in advancing any kind of collective project beyond their own career. I suspect I'd put Khachiyan in the latter category.

R Totale

Having now gone and looked it up, it definitely reinforces my impression that a lot of this stuff is not so much "class-based vs idpol" (and to be clear, that is a real division that will come up sometimes, there are all kinds of lines of argument that can be used against insurgent proles and sometimes people will use ones that rely on appeals to identity) and more "people who like to describe themselves as class-based vs people who they insist on describing as idpol".

I was trying to get that across by putting idpol and class-first in quotation marks in my original comment. I completely agree with you, it's not how the division plays out at all, but it is how the 'anti-idpol' people see it. I mean I think that some of the disputes appear just because of that framing alone, considering how vague 'identity politics' is as a buzzword and how more often than not it's just a pejorative.

Going back to the question of Fisher's legacy in general, I think Tom Whyman is someone who manages to use his ideas in actually interesting ways (and has obviously read a lot more of him than I have):
Operation Snowflake
Critique of Pure Niceness

Both pieces attempt to use Fisher's thinking to criticise some of the positions that are commonly held, implictly or explicitly, by the Nagle/VC fan crowd, and are quite worthwhile imo.

Another article on Fisher that goes beyond just "online social democrats trying to own people in arguments and wanting to cite someone who sounds more intellectual than Nagle": https://www.lrb.co.uk/v41/n09/jenny-turner/not-no-longer-but-not-yet (cw for suicide)