Basic Info
Title Capitalist Realism Author Mark Fisher Original Link Date Last Highlighted 2023-09-23 Date Published Type books Source manual Generated Summary
Process
Status Items Highlights Done See section below Claims Not yet Related Lenses Processing ”capitalism” Related Questions Not yet Output Not yet
Highlights
Page 4
In the conversion of practices and rituals into merely aesthetic objects, the beliefs of previous cultures are objectively ironized, transformed into artifacts.
✏️ Making me think about Saudi “preserving” the traditions of the flower men. Are they being preserved for their sake first? Or is it for the sake of tourism and needs to be preserved with that lens in mind? If a tourist came and the flower men weren’t wearing their wreaths, would that be okay? For a day? A week? A month? If tourists complained, who would the government side with?
👓 ksa colonization 📖 (Page 4)
Page 4
[Capital] has drowned the most heavenly ecstasies of religious fervor, of chivalrous enthusiasm, of philistine sentimentalism, in the icy water of egotistical calculation. It has resolved personal worth into 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. Quote by Marx and Engel in Communist Manifesto
👓 quote 📖 (Page 4)
Page 12
What we have here is a vision of control and communication much as Jean Baudrillard understood it, in which subjugation no longer takes the form of a subordination to an extrinsic spectacle, but rather invites us to interact and participate. It seems that the cinema audience is itself the object of this satire, which prompted some right wing observers to recoil in disgust, condemning Disney/Pixar for attacking its own audience. But this kind of irony feeds rather than challenges capitalist realism. A film like Wall-E exemplifies what Robert Pfaller has called ‘interpassivity’: the film performs our anti-capitalism for us, allowing us to continue to consume with impunity. The role of capitalist ideology is not to make an explicit case for something in the way that propaganda does, but to conceal the fact that the operations of capital do not depend on any sort of subjectively assumed belief. It is impossible to conceive of fascism or Stalinism without propaganda but capitalism can proceed perfectly well, in some ways better, without anyone making a case for it.
✏️ Thinking about barbie and other movies here.. followup How these films highlight the evils of capitalism, and making us think that consuming it is akin to having performed this anticapitalism protest, and we’re absolved of doing anything more. Go back to consuming, thank you.
📖 (Page 12)
Page 16
where can an effective challenge come from? A moral critique of capitalism, emphasizing the ways in which it leads to suffering, only reinforces capitalist realism. Poverty, famine and war can be presented as an inevitable part of reality, while the hope that these forms of suffering could be eliminated easily painted as naive utopianism. Capitalist realism can only be threatened if it is shown to be in some way inconsistent or untenable; if, that is to say, capitalism’s ostensible ‘realism’ turns out to be nothing of the sort.
✏️ How to approach challenging capitalism
📖 (Page 16)
Page 16
Needless to say, what counts as ‘realistic’, what seems possible at any point in the social field, is defined by a series of political determinations. An ideological position can never be really successful until it is naturalized, and it cannot be naturalized while it is still thought of as a value rather than a fact. Accordingly, neoliberalism has sought to eliminate the very category of value in the ethical sense. Over the past thirty years, capitalist realism has successfully installed a ‘business ontology’ in which it is simply obvious that everything in society, including healthcare and education, should be run as a business. As any number of radical theorists from Brecht through to Foucault and Badiou have maintained, emancipatory politics must always destroy the appearance of a ‘natural order’, must reveal what is presented as necessary and inevitable to be a mere contingency, just as it must make what was previously deemed to be impossible seem attainable
✏️ Need to digest this more followu
📖 (Page 16)
Page 17
‘Modernization’, Badiou bitterly observes, is the name for a strict and servile definition of the possible. These ‘reforms’ invariably aim at making impossible what used to be practicable (for the largest number), and making profitable (for the dominant oligarchy) what did not used to be so’.
✏️ Think about things like the electric trolleys throughout the US, etc. For sure there are more examples.. Rise of privatization was this way from pre to post 70s apparently.
👓 quote 📖 (Page 17)
Page 33
According to Marxist economist Christian Marazzi, the switch from Fordism to post-Fordism can be given a very specific date: October 6, 1979. It was on that date that the Federal Reserve increased interest rates by 20 points, preparing the way for the ‘supply-side economics’ that would constitute the ‘economic reality’ in which we are now enmeshed. The rise in interest rates not only contained inflation, it made possible a new organization of the means of production and distribution. The ‘rigidity’ of the Fordist production line gave way to a new ‘flexibility’, a word that will send chills of recognition down the spine of every worker today. This flexibility was defined by a deregulation of Capital and labor, with the workforce being casualized (with an increasing number of workers employed on a temporary basis), and outsourced.
✏️ What is this event, what does it mean, how does it relates to capitalism as we have now? followup
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Page 35
bi-polar disorder is the mental illness proper to the ‘interior’ of capitalism. With its ceaseless boom and bust cycles, capitalism is itself fundamentally and irreducibly bi-polar, periodically lurching between hyped-up mania (the irrational exuberance of ‘bubble thinking’) and depressive come-down. (The term ‘economic depression’ is no accident, of course). To a degree unprecedented in any other social system, capitalism both feeds on and reproduces the moods of populations. Without delirium and confidence, capital could not function.
✏️ Capitalism as bipolar disorder
📖 (Page 35)
Page 42
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 shortcircuiting occurs, and work becomes geared towards the generation and massaging of representations rather than to the official goals of the work itself. Indeed, an anthropological study of local government in Britain argues that ‘More effort goes into ensuring that a local authority’s services are represented correctly than goes into actually improving those services’. This reversal of priorities is one of the hallmarks of a system which can be characterized without hyperbole as ‘market Stalinism’.
✏️ The all too familiar concept of performance over actual results
📖 (Page 42)
Page 44
It would be a mistake to regard this market Stalinism as some deviation from the ‘true spirit’ of capitalism. On the contrary, it would be better to say that an essential dimension of Stalinism was inhibited by its association with a social project like socialism and can only emerge in a late capitalist culture in which images acquire an autonomous force
📖 (Page 44)
Page 44
The way value is generated on the stock exchange depends of course less on what a company ‘really does’, and more on perceptions of, and beliefs about, its (future) performance. In capitalism, that is to say, all that is solid melts into PR, and late capitalism is defined at least as much by this ubiquitous tendency towards PR-production as it is by the imposition of market mechanisms.
✏️ Perception and performance writ large in the form of the stock market
📖 (Page 44)
Page 50
Auditing can perhaps best be conceived of as fusion of PR and bureaucracy, because the bureaucratic data is usually intended to fulfill a promotional role: in the case of education, for example, exam results or research ratings augment (or diminish) the prestige of particular institutions.
📖 (Page 50)
Page 51
‘Data’ has been put in inverted commas here, because much of the so-called information has little meaning or application outside the parameters of the audit: as Eeva Berglund puts it, ‘the information that audit creates does have consequences even though it is so shorn of local detail, so abstract, as to be misleading or meaningless except, that is, by the aesthetic criteria of audit itself’.
✏️ Just as with kpis and targets being all that matters regardless of the original purpose, data becomes meaningless except in terms of serving the performance.
👓 hypocrisy 📖 (Page 51)
Page 52
there is no need for the place of surveillance to actually be occupied. The effect of not knowing whether you will be observed or not produces an introjection of the surveillance apparatus. You constantly act as if you are always about to be observed.
✏️ A few highlights of side effects of constant surveillance
📖 (Page 52)
Page 52
what you will be graded on is not primarily your abilities as a teacher so much as your diligence as a bureaucrat.
✏️ The meaningless of self surveillance
👓 hypocrisy 📖 (Page 52)
Page 52
Since OFSTED is now observing the college’s self-assessment systems, there is an implicit incentive for the college to grade itself and its teaching lower than it actually deserves. The result is a kind of postmodern capitalist version of Maoist confessionalism, in which workers are required to engage in constant symbolic selfdenigration. At one point, when our line manager was extolling the virtues of the new, light inspection system, he told us that the problem with our departmental log-books was that they were not sufficiently self-critical. But don’t worry, he urged, any self-criticisms we make are purely symbolic, and will never be acted upon; as if performing selfflagellation as part of a purely formal exercise in cynical bureaucratic compliance were any less demoralizing.
✏️ An example of what it looks like when a regulator utilizes an entity’s self surveillance for its auditing. One won’t trust that the self assessment system is working properly unless you look appropriately self critical.. You have to perform again, regardless of the truth.. Because the “truth” of a good organization doesn’t seem realistic enough.
👓 hypocrisy 📖 (Page 52)
Page 79
the left should argue that it can deliver what neoliberalism signally failed to do: a massive reduction of bureaucracy. What is needed is a new struggle over work and who controls it; an assertion of worker autonomy (as opposed to control by management) together with a rejection of certain kinds of labor (such as the excessive auditing which has become so central feature of work in post-Fordism).
✏️ What to do
📖 (Page 79)
Page 79
New forms of industrial action need to be instituted against managerialism.
📖 (Page 79)
Page 80
What is needed is the strategic withdrawal of forms of labor which will only be noticed my management: all of the machineries of self-surveillance that have no effect whatsoever on the delivery of education, but which managerialism could not exist without.
✏️ He’s taking about education specifically, but basically insert whatever industry
📖 (Page 80)