Having been published in 2009, Capitalist Realism is a fascinating read in our post 2020 world.

"It's easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism"

Children of Men is a film that I have not watched in a long time. It is one I think I might have to rewatch after reading this book. There is something almost prophetic about the way it depicts life under capitalism during massive duress. The routine of it all, the media cycles keeping up with the current "Youngest person in the world" the kind of glib "nevertheless" attitude of the secondary characters within the film. All of these things, were, at the time, an almost humorous juxtaposition, one that left you thinking "Oh, it would totally be like that wouldn't it?"

Mark Fisher would not live to see his description of life under capitalist despair to be manifest into reality, as though it was his turn at the lathe.

The catastrophe in Children of Men is neither waiting down the road, nor has it already happened. Rather, it is being lived through. There is no punctual moment of disaster; the world doesn’t end with a bang, it winks out, unravels, gradually falls apart. What caused the catastrophe to occur, who knows; its cause lies long in the past, so absolutely detached from the present as to seem like the caprice of a malign being: a negative miracle, a malediction which no penitence can ameliorate. Such a blight can only be eased by an intervention that can no more be anticipated than was the onset of the curse in the first place. Action is pointless; only senseless hope makes sense. Superstition and religion, the first resorts of the helpless, proliferate.

I cannot help but to conjure up memories of post lockdown 2020. Our oldest was born late that year, Capital had decided it was time to get back to work. I remember being confronted with containment within the hospital to limit spread, while simultaneously being hit full in the face with the reality that I would need to burn all my PTO to spend as much time at home with our newborn. (about 4 weeks)

These last 4 years, washed over me as a kind of torrent of feelings while reading this first chapter. This idea that, "There is no punctual moment of disaster; the world doesn’t end with a bang, it winks out, unravels, gradually falls apart.", really resonated with me. It's a feeling I've been having on and off since 2020, but never could articulate. The farther we get from that time, the more absurd it all feels.

The pure contradiction being presented right in front of us, that for two months we instituted policy that improved global air quality, that saw a near eradication of child hunger, that saw what direct and unconditioned cash payments could do for the well-being of people, we saw housing first policies being implemented in the imperial core and houselessness being treated at its root.

Only to have it all unwound. I'm left wondering what Fisher would have made of that time. He at times references the credit crisis of 2008 as the kind of archetypical crisis of Capital, saying of it:

This is the temptation of the ethical which, as Žižek has argued, the capitalist system is using in order to protect itself in the wake of the credit crisis – the blame will be put on supposedly pathological individuals, those ‘abusing the system’, rather than on the system.

Imagine this kind of ethical laundering, but not for financial debauchery, but for a global health crisis in the form of an incredibly deadly and virulent strain of SARS-COVID-2. As a culture, we could not convince ourselves that we must all put aside our hedonistic desires of "freedom" for the sake of a larger and more impactful good. You can find reflections of Fishers points about global capitalism and its "centerlessness" in this time. Medical corporations, leaning on the patent system to maintain profit margins on the life-saving vaccines they produced, received ire, but ultimately the critique lay with the Federal Government.

Although excoriated by both neoliberalism and neoconserva-tivism, the concept of the Nanny State continues to haunt capitalist realism. The specter of big government plays an essential libidinal function for capitalist realism. It is there to be blamed precisely for its failure to act as a centralizing power, [...]‘ Time and again’, James Meek observed in an LRB piece on water privatization in Britain, ‘Conservative and Labor governments have discovered that when they give powers to private companies, and those private companies screw up, voters blame the government for giving the powers away, rather than the companies for misusing them’.

The decentralized horizontal arrangement of corporate power under Capitalism is its true strength. The pandemic only made this truth more obvious and clear. If, like Fisher says, about the credit crisis of 2008, that, "the crisis has led to the relaxing of a certain kind of mental paralysis", then the pandemic must have been a kind of "full release" of this mental paralysis.

We are now in a political landscape littered with what Alex Williams called ‘ideological rubble’ – it is year zero again, and a space has been cleared for a new anti-capitalism to emerge which is not necessarily tied to the old language or traditions.

It's hard, reading the optimism found in the last several paragraphs of this book, to not think that Fisher might have been engaging in what he himself called, "senseless hope". If anything, very little was mobilized after the 2008 crisis, and now being on the "other side" of COVID (as declared by Capital), facing down a genocide and threats of global war, seeing country after country turn to the right in the face of these challenges, times seem bleaker than ever. Even now, it's far more apparent that the population is as he described at the opening of the book: "Action is pointless; only senseless hope makes sense. Superstition and religion, the first resorts of the helpless, proliferate"

Cults of Personality, a rise in Christian Fascists, "Progressives" praying for salvation in the form of an election audit and recount. And yet, despite all that, I found his message near the end compelling:

It is crucial that a genuinely revitalized left confidently occupy the new political terrain I have (very provisionally) sketched here. Nothing is inherently political; politicization requires a political agent which can transform the taken-for-granted into the up-for-grabs. If neoliberalism triumphed by incorporating the desires of the post 68 working class, a new left could begin by building on the desires which neoliberalism has generated but which it has been unable to satisfy.

In this context, I can't think of anything more fitting to be described as "a desire which neoliberalism has generated but which has been unable to satisfy" as the Remote Work movement. Lockdown showed us that we could have time to perform the labor that so often piles up at the home, while outperforming our previous productivity. This idea that, in order to be a productive member of the workforce, you must be forced into an open office hellscape where management circles around you like hawks seeking a meal, was proven to be a total fabrication.

So much of what we experienced 4 years ago confronted "truths" held by most of the population, "truths" that say it would simply be "too difficult" to make ground on improving society. It showed us things we didn't even think were possible, like the vast amount of remote work getting done at high levels of productivity. Some aspects of this realization were incorporated into the greater landscape, but as time continues, more and more of these work from home policies are getting rolled back.

I have so many more thoughts about this book. There is a thread of Anti-Stalinism in the book that I find interesting, and might just be a product of the time it was written, or Fishers own views on the Stalin era of the Soviet Union. I found the passages about repetition found in media, and the kind of unchallenging content which it contains, as something that resonates with me. I think there is a lot to reflect on when it comes to the horizontal nature of Capital and how that gives it this slippery and evasive quality.

Maybe I'll write more later.