DOC TAYROC'S [UNSOLICITED] BOOK REVIEW - CAPITALIST REALISM by Mark Fisher

Available here.

This one I have a hard time outright recommending because the publisher has taken a weird route that I can't really agree with, and frankly seem hostile to authors. But you know, there are many streams on the vast ocean of the internet. I'll say no more.

Regular readers are likely tired of hearing me bring up the 2007/08 financial crisis, but it was a fairly important moment in modern economic history, what exactly it signalled is still surprisingly up for debate, as a large number of economists, policy makers, and pundits seem hell-bent on not learning a single lesson from it, but I would argue that it should have signalled the death of neo-liberal capitalism, and very likely did, and we've been walking around inside the bloated corpse ever since. Laskos and Tsakalotos in their book Crucible of Resistance, which I reviewed here argued it was the signal to the capitalist class that we were reaching the end of their system and began doing 'hyper-capitalistic extraction' to extract as much value from the system as they could before the whole thing came crashing down one final time. On a personal note, it was also about the time I began studying economics, and as such, and as I mentioned in my review of Freefall by Joseph Stiglitz most of my undergraduate economics modules were very much taught in the clear and evident shadow of the recent breakdown of the global economic system.

Some economists and activists did learn lessons from the 2007/08 financial crisis. One of them, covered in this blog extensively as I'm rather a fan of his, was economist and anthropologist David Graeber, who sharpened his teeth and eventually his research in the trenches of the Occupy Wallstreet movement that emerged in the aftermath of the financial crisis. Much ink has been spilt on that movement, and its impacts on wider politics (both far right and far left) in the aftermath of 2007/08, but suffice to say that Dr Graeber, a self-described anarchist, definitely fell on the left. Similarly emerging from those trenches on the left was Mark Fisher, who noticed, like Graeber, that one of the problems he frequently ran into in both the Occupy movement as well as in broader popular media of the era was the lack of imagination, namely, the belief that capitalism was the 'only way' and that all of this was natural, normal, and inevitable, despite even fairly recent evidence to the contrary blocked meaningful discussion on how to fix the many, many, many issues that had led to catastrophe in the first place. For Graeber, this would lead to a wider body of work showing that not only was capitalism not inevitable, but it was also far from 'natural', showing that several cultures had worked out alternatives to capitalism and the material conditions that led to capitalism. Rodney, who I've also covered extensively but who hadn't participated in Occupy Wallstreet due to having been dead for some time, frequently demonstrated how the imposition of capitalism to the vast majority of the world was so unnatural that a considerable amount of violence and effort were necessary on behalf of the bourgeois class to establish capitalism both at home and in the colonies. Graeber and Rodney both bring a good question, if capitalism is the natural order of things, and inevitable, why was such immense violence necessary? And why is so much propaganda and violence necessary to maintain it?

But of course, the other side of this critique is, well if it isn't the only way, what are the alternatives? It's fairly easy to point out everything wrong (especially as the 'solutions' put forth in 2009 onwards only put a carpet on top of the problems, and the foundational rot is putting more and more obvious cracks throughout the building), but what is the other way? And why is it so hard to imagine?

I'm firmly a millennial, and I'm sure that quite a few of the people reading this are either millennials or Gen Xers, with a few Gen Zers reading this as well. As such, my entire living memory is within the neo-liberal era, spending my childhood and early adult years watching the last vestiges of Keynesian state capacity being wiped out, before in my adulthood watching the completely hollowed out states lack any meaningful capacity to do anything except lose foreign wars they kept picking, fail to respond in any meaningful way to climate change, fail to respond to financial crisis after crisis, and of course display complete and utter incompetence during the Covid-19 pandemic. Of course, this constant cycle of crises has given room for the alternatives to start organising, and of course not all alternatives are created equal. For everyone who wants to create a more fair system, there's an idiot saying that we need to create 'hard men' and rebuild society around a pointless arbitrary hierarchy defined by some imagined past and 'hard men'. Aka fascism. You would think the choice would be obvious, but the worship of 'the system' and 'private property rights' and national myths steer far, far too many people to the fascism, since it always purports to support those ideas, at least as long as necessary for whoever they arbitrarily stick at the top of their hierarchy.

So why do we have a hard time imagining alternatives? And why do so many default to fascism despite the fact that fascism is so obviously evil and every time we try it it kills loads of innocent people, collapses predictively, we all swear that we will 'never do this again', and then a bunch of the people who had helped prop up the fascists in the first place pretend that they either had no idea the fascists would be so bad, or that actually they had been against the fascism the whole time despite obvious evidence to the contrary.

Fisher argues that this is because the capitalist class intentionally blocks any thoughts of viable alternatives. This book pairs well with books like Racial Fictions by Hazel Carby, From the Clinic to the Streets by Lara Sheehi, Imagined Communities by Benedict Anderson, and the classic Black Skin, White Masks by Frantz Fanon. Artificial constructions like race, class, nationalism, and capitalism need to have certain agreed upon delusions in order to work. Capital is entirely abstract, a recent abstraction at that, a product of Dutch, British, and American political decisions from the late 17th century to today, upheld through considerable effort by the capitalist class, which itself is largely focused in Britain, Europe, and the US, with a few outposts, particularly in Japan, South Korea, Israel, Saudi Arabia, and the UAE. (I promise the review for Crude Capitalism by Adam Hanieh is coming). In order to ensure the efficient and 'peaceful' extraction of surplus value from the majority of the population, the capitalist class have to build this 'hyper reality', in which the pillars become unassailable, largely because questioning the pillars will bring the whole project crashing down.

Resultantly, you need to ensure that everyone is invested in the same fictional hyperrealities, such that any threat to the larger illusion will be rejected through the same existentialist anxieties that the capitalist class hold. In this regard, nationalism and race become particularly potent tools to ensure that members of the proletariat vote against their best interests in favour of hurting or harming the 'out group' however nebulous that out group may be. Of course, the out-group must necessarily include anyone who threatens the hyper reality. This becomes the driving force of anti-migrant, anti-socialist, transphobic and/or homophobic rhetoric, if all that fails, you can also launch 'wars' on abstract ideas like drugs and/or terrorism. This all culminates to allow the capitalist class to extract and expand their capacities to extract, at the cost of state capacity and the wider ability of the proletariat to fight back, through unions, organising, and other acts of unity against the bourgeois.

I think I've covered this book fairly well in this post of Marx and the Death of the Author, and this week is on the busier side, so I'll leave it here today.