On Capitalist Realism

I first read Capitalist Realism in a graduate seminar in 2018, and it changed more for me than all the theory I’d read before it, and perhaps since. At the time I couldn’t say why. The arguments are so simple, yet they pulled away the curtain in ways other theorists couldn’t manage for me. Maybe it’s that the neoliberal age is so fundamentally unlike the freshly industrial period Marx wrote in, unlike the ideological battles Gramsci and Trotsky addressed, unlike the immediate, visceral brutality the Frankfurt School tried to understand, or the disillusioned post-‘68 mood that Lyotard and Deleuze gave voice to. And Fisher is the great popularizer; much of his incisive, fast style and his command of cultural reference came from cutting his teeth in the anarchic blogosphere.

His core argument is that capitalism has sidelined every competitor and presented itself not only as the sole realistic socio-economic system but as the only natural one. There’s a great deal happening under the surface that I missed on the first read — he unites Deleuze and Guattari, Lyotard, and Žižek in a way only a former member of the Cybernetic Culture Research Unit could. Nick Land was Fisher’s doctoral advisor, and Land’s mark on his thinking may be impossible to overstate.

For Fisher, capitalism is a cybernetic system: whatever resistance people set against it gets absorbed and turned to its reinforcement. It runs on feedback loops that keep it churning, and it generates the myths that make it seem the only natural order. Drawing on Lacan by way of Žižek, he shows how its ideology works — a symbolic order that makes people apathetic to its violence. Where Marx held that ideology conceals reality, Žižek finds that it instead makes people cynical: they don’t care what happens. But there are occasional glimpses that provoke visceral horror — Lacan’s “Real,” surfacing in the climate crisis, in mental health, in decentralized bureaucracy. Capitalism deploys these to shore up the symbolic order, through marketing techniques like greenwashing and the privatization of problems like stress; yet Fisher argues those same eruptions of the Real could be turned against it.

Rather than wind the clock back to pre-capitalist arrangements, Fisher urges us to build on the systems capitalism has made — which makes his argument, characteristically for the CCRU, accelerationist. The more the Left can use the decentralization capitalism developed, the better it can fight it.

When I read this years ago, I half-took Fisher for a defeatist. I couldn’t grasp what he meant, and his all-pervasive picture of capitalism — like a London smog choking all of us — seemed to leave no way out. Re-reading it, I see how optimistic he actually is. He’s profoundly negative about the state of the world, but he’s one of the very few thinkers capable of seriously imagining what a twenty-first-century, post-capitalist system might look like. Make no mistake: capitalism killed him in 2017 for his ability to threaten it.