Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? (Zero Books) [Paperback]

Let's get the negatives out of the way first. To start with, the author refers to several books and writers but gives no references at all, except an occasional mention in the text. Neither is there either a bibliography or an index. The lack of a bibliography is particularly annoying.

Secondly, the text itself is, at times, intimidatingly impenetrable in ways reminiscent of those lampooned in 'The demolition merchants of reality' chapter in Francis Wheen's book 'How Mumbo-jumbo Conquered the World'.

Still, once you've got over those points, there are some really interesting analyses and ideas in this slim volume. Perhaps much of what is covered is not entirely new but may be found in, for example, Thomas Frank's books 'The Wrecking Crew' and 'The Conquest of Cool' plus David Harvey's books, including the excellent 'A Brief History of Neoliberalism'. However, Mark Fisher puts forward his arguments with reference to Slavoj Zizek, Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, Jacques Lacan, Franz Kafa, Nietzsche, Fredric Jameson as well as David Harvey.

The proposition is that we are living in post-Fordist Capitalism. No longer authoritarian in the old 9 to 5 sense, control has shifted internally, with people being unable to imagine themselves 'outside' of Capitalism. In that sense, then, Francis Fukuyama's suggestion that we are at 'The End of History' is correct. And this is what Mark Fisher refers to as 'Capitalist Realism' - a term he prefers to 'Postmodernist' as he feels that we have, in a sense, gone past even that nebulous state. As he says:

"What we are dealing with now, however, is a deeper, far more pervasive, sense of exhaustion, of cultural and political sterility." (P7)

Secondly, whereas Postmodernism was still involved in a process of absorption and commodification of Modernism (a la Thomas Frank), that process is now complete:

"Capitalist Realism no longer stages this kind of confrontation with modernism. On the contrary, it takes the vanquishing of modernism for granted; modernism is now something that can periodically return, but only as a frozen aesthetic style, never as an ideal for living." (P8)

And thirdly, we have history - or at least 'events'. As he points out:

"a whole generation has passed since the collapse of the Berlin Wall. In the 1960s and 1970s, capitalism had to face the problem of how to contain and absorb energies from outside. It now, in fact, has the opposite problem; having all too successfully incorporated externality, how can it function without an outside it can colonise and appropriate?...Capitalism seamlessly occupies the horizons of the thinkable." (P8)

That is a fair point. However, capitalism seems quite adept at inventing an 'outside'. After the collapse of the Berlin Wall and all that that symbolized, suddenly we found ourselves in a South American 'War on Drugs', with General Noriega surrounded and pounded into submission by pop music. Then, of course, there was the invasion of Iraq and Afghanistan - and the ongoing 'War on Terror'. There is a material basis to this - keeping the U.S. military-industrial complex in funds, and the enforcement of what is, for all intents and purposes, an economic conscription. It will be interesting to see what 'other' may be constructed subsequently - perhaps China looms as a successor at least on an economic, if not ideological, level.

Still, Mark Fisher draws his examples from popular (remnants of counter-) culture (Kurt Cobain, Nirvana), from cinema ('Children of Men', 'The Truman Show', 'Memento'), literature (Kafka, in particular 'The Castle', William Gibson's 'Neuromancer'), from the TV documentaries of Adam Curtis and from his own experience teaching in Further Education. At times, particularly when writing of his teaching experiences, he sounds almost like that arch-neoconservative, Allan Bloom, but his points regarding the ever-optimistic, ever-irresponsible, ever-memory-less management strategies certainly mirror my experiences of 20 years working for IT companies, with their rotting figleaves of 'Corporate Social Responsibility' programmes.

Although the book clearly owes a lot to Zizek, when it is grounded in experience it has a weight and relevance that shines through some of the more turgid prose and, most happily, it 'makes you think'.

Of course, being sold on Amazon perhaps emphasises the seeming inescapability of 'Capitalist Realism' and it's Petrushka doll-like powers to prevent 'thinking outside the box'. Clearly, I still have doubts though. Whenever I read a text like this, I more or less inevitably think of the ironically titled 'How We Became Posthuman' by N Katherine Hailes which reminds us that all this must be grounded in a real, and thoroughly material, world - a world full of military expenditure, industrial waste and economic serfdom.

However, he ends on an up-beat and almost optimistic note, citing the 'long, dark night of the end of history' as an opportunity. Sign me up!

In Capitalist Realism: Is there no alternative? Mark Fisher successful reinvigorates the style of a short polemical commentary that insightfully analyses today's contemporary condition. Capitalist realism is the state we have reached - when capitalism becomes naturalised, unquestioned, when common sense tells us that there is no alternative. Fisher questions this naturalisation of capitalism, arguing that the promises of the neo-liberal capitalism are not all they've cracked up to be.

He draws on contemporary culture, contemporary theory, philosophy and personal experience to evaluate the effects of capitalism in three key areas - mental health, bureaucracy and education. He shows how the system has covertly transformed a generation into being a blip generation, a generation for which everything must be in tiny twitter-sized packages, for whom reading is boring (not the content of books, as Fisher points out, but reading per se). He looks at the rise of depression within late capitalism and the constant anxieties that are produced. Do I have enough money? Am I too fat? Am I too thin? Should I be exercising more? Should I stop smoking? And he rightly cites Kafka in relation to the current baroque bureaucratic system of quangos, committees, red tape and call centres that we acceptingly exist in, and the infinite deferral that the process of constant of auditing in education causes.

When drawing upon contemporary theory it's easy to make one of two mistakes. The first is that you speak only in the language of the thinker whose theories you're using - Deleuzospeak, Lacanobabble etc etc. This makes the work only accessible to a specific audience of about 10 people who speak that language. The other mistake is that you trivialise it by trying to make it palatable to some imaginary `everyman'. Fisher does neither of these. He expertly balances a line that weaves complex theory into a narrative that neither patronises nor baffles the reader. It's what philosophy, what thought, should aspire to.

Finally, as past student of philosophy, this book gave me one overwhelming feeling - this is the type of project that made me study philosophy in the first place. In recent years, philosophy has become a conversation between a bunch of academics, a conversation that excludes those who don't speak a particular language or follow a particular way of thinking. In a short book, Fisher has reminded me of two big things, Firstly that philosophy is not the domain of academics but that it is about unsettling and displacing dominant modes of thought . Secondly, and more importantly, that thinking is not only worth doing but that it is worth doing with joy, exuberance and commitment.

An invigorating and hugely overdue political intervention from perhaps *the* most engaging theorist around right now. Usually found over at the much-recommended k-punk blog, Mark Fisher has now launched his analysis into the more conventional world of print media. Readers of his online works will find much that is familiar here, from the comfortable deployment of pop culture references (very reminiscent of Zizek, but not in any cloying hero-worship way) to the unashamed celebration of theory. The turns of phrases are typically concise and pugnacious. 'Capitalist realism' is exactly the right way to put it, and much the same could be said for 'nu-bureaucracy' and 'reflexive impotence'. The anecdotes, particularly those garnered from time negotiating British higher education, bring that sensation of familiar truths elucidated in the kind of terms you wish you'd formulated for yourself.

As a pamphlet, exhaustive referencing and factual avalanches are not the point, but Fisher is unusual in his reliance on pertinent facts that capitalist realism obscures. The issue is not just that, for example, the technocratic discourse of neo-liberalism masks politics as administration in today's university, but also that it is a *social lie* on its own terms - the costs of bureaucracy have gone up, not down, since the days of Thatcher.

There are a lot of ideas packed into these 81 pages, but you can get through it in one sitting. Like other worthwhile recent manifestos from ZeroBooks (see Nina Power's 'One Dimensional Woman' [http://www.amazon.co.uk/One-Dimensional-Woman-Nina-Power/dp/1846942411/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1272152905&sr=8-1]) politics is to the fore, but never at the expense of thought or argument. Like many of the best tracts, this will entice and provoke, whatever you ultimately make of the argument. Highly recommended.