After 1989, capitalism has successfully presented itself as the only realistic political-economic system - a situation that the bank crisis of 2008, far from ending, actually compounded. The book analyses the development and principal features of this capitalist realism as a lived ideological framework. Using examples from politics, films, fiction, work and education, it argues that capitalist realism colours all areas of contemporary experience. But it will also show that, because of a number of inconsistencies and glitches internal to the capitalist reality program capitalism in fact is anything but realistic.

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Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative?

think Memento, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, or the Bourne Identity films. Or again, films where the dystopian future doesn’t centre on a despotic government forcing its own will upon the people by force of violence (a jack-boot stomping a face for all eternity), but rather the world ending as in Children of Men, where infertility threatens the future and where all of our efforts become essentially pointless and meaningless, although we carry on regardless.   I was interested in his discussion of the difference between ‘realism’ as the ideas we ‘know’ about capitalism – that it is fundamentally opposed to bureaucracy or that it is a system where ‘the customer always comes first’ and how this is daily contradicted by our own experience of the real world of capitalism, and yet this never seems to undermine our notion of ‘capitalist realism’.  The instances given are of workplace performance systems – which he compares to Maoist versions of self-criticism and Stalinist versions of 5 year plans, where this was all more ritual and expected dance, than anything anyone literally believed.   He references this back to a film called ‘Office Space’ from the 1990s where staff were expected to wear seven pieces of ‘flair’ that would display their personality to those around them (think Myers-Briggs and so on). All good. Except one of the staff get into trouble because they are wearing exactly seven pieces of flair, which proves they are only doing the minimum of what is required of them, when they really ought to be trying to go over and above. Having worked in exactly these workplaces, this was all a little too real, barely even exaggerated. Which was also true of his discussion of the performance targets and the cult of management through numbers that, surely, is the essence of a good bureaucracy that most businesses routinely impose on staff.   And as for the truth of capitalist ‘customer service’ I have but two words, which ought to be enough to send a shiver of recognition down the spine of anyone who has had any contact with a business since 1980 – call centre. Who doesn’t feel horror of the abyss when they hear the words ‘your call is important to us’ interrupt the musak while on hold?  I liked this book – it is quite short, but has lots packed into it. He makes the point that if the left is have a future, it will need to create a positive alternative to capitalist realism, which must be utopian in the sense of providing a vision for what the world could become. He says criticism isn’t enough because capitalism criticises itself and still goes on – Wall-E, for instance, shows the impact of a corporate monopoly in destroying both the world and humanity’s ability to even move about other than with mechanical assistance. The film hardly provides a vision splendid, nor does it hide where the blame lies, but as with Bono’s Red Card, we aren’t offered a vision of a new world that threatens (or promises) to change the social structure, but rather we are offered more of the same old consumerism, but this time with a love-heart emoji painted on for good measure and the hope that perhaps this time doing the same as we have always done will produce a different result.

Mark Fisher

Zero Books

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