Capitalist realism seems all-encompassing. Even in left ideology we see the capitalist realist mindset flourishing in thought and action. Though many leftists wish it were not so, capitalist realism is not constrained to liberalism or conservatism, and it finds roots just as happily in the vague left sentiment of anti-capitalism.
In a phrase commonly attributed to Zizek, capitalist realism is defined as “the inability to imagine a coherent alternative to capitalism”. It manifests subtly and overtly, the most obvious being the common refrain of capitalism being all we have. It also manifests in the inability to push past current economics to imagine something new as the marketists suffer from, and it manifests acutely in the firmly emerging ideology of “anti-capitalism”.
These anti-capitalists are stuck. They offer a rounded critique of capitalism, and often do fairly well at it, but they cannot move beyond a mere critique of capitalism towards an imaginative new reality. Instead they offer, again and again the same criticism. That we are dying, hungry, unable to recieve medical care, drowning and burning as global warming accelerates towards ecological collapse, that capital is a death cult dragging the whole human population down with it. But what is to be done? This is where the anti-capitalists falter, unable to offer a vision of the work to be done to restructure society, or even what restructuring society would look like.
This is manifest capitalist realism, the ultimate ideological infiltration, capitalism has convinced the anti-capitalists on its own merits that it is both irreconcilable with continued human life on earth and the only imaginable future. It has at once become the only enemy and no enemy at all.
This anti-capitalism is unabashedly on display throughout all aspects of capitalist society, from movies to music to real politics to video games, it remains, poisoning the well, unable to believe in anything but imminent doom, and the dystopic end times of capital. Fisher illustrates this point with reference to the movie “Wall-E” in which an environmentally focused criticism of capitalism and mega-corporations is the main plot. The radicality of this movie falls flat however, when it fails to offer any alternative to the current state of things, and falls even further flat when it is made clear that Disney, the company that made the film, has become in almost every way a monopoly on media entertainment, the very villain they attack in the movie has created it. It is present in the dystopian facades of cyberpunk and in the pessimism of fantasy in all genres. The capitalist critique of capitalism has become the dominant ideological driving force of the post-fordist landscape.
This can be seen in real world politics in the way that capitalists (and particularly social democrats and the growing “democratic socialist” faction) recuperate and co-opt anti-capitalist rhetoric in order to gain mass appeal without proposing any alternative at all to the brutality and alienation of the current situation. The capitalist politicians no longer defend capitalism on it’s own merits, acknowledging and endorsing the damning critiques of capitalism with a mild “communism failed” and a gesture at mediocre reforms. Everyone knows it’s bad, that post-fordism has eaten away at their jobs, their retirement, their future, but no one can articulate a way out. This feeling of stuckness, of depression and rage and impotence, has all but totally eclipsed the realm of the political and individual, preventing organization, and even true socialization, in it’s all-encompassing depressive force.
This mindset of doomer anti-capitalism must be combatted if we wish to force change in the very fabric of society. It deadens the creativity sorely needed to push the left past the failure of electoral politics and the hegemony of capitalist realism, and fosters depression and burnout that will quickly eradicate any hope for a budding communist movement. The only effective antidote to this capitalist realist poison is the building of radical new social forms and relations, be it in the midst of a riot or the heart of a mutual aid network or dual power structure, and these things must be pursued as beneficial both in and of themselves, and as a means to create something new and beautiful far outside the constraints of capitalism.
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.
-Mark Fisher
