I've lurked here since day 2, but I haven't made a post on here yet so let my first one be an effort post, even though I suck at posting and efforts.
Ever since I read Mark Fisher's “Capitalist Realism, is there no alternative?” a couple of years back, my politics and the lens through which I view and understand the world has been pretty much unchanged. Nothing that I read or watched after that really had an impact on me, or at least not one of this size.
In the country/region I was born in the most popular party has a concept called “climate realism”, and this morning rereading Capitalist Realism I couldn't help but think that it's pretty much the same deal. Climate realism is a position held by absolute ghouls, it's acknowledging that there's catastrophic change coming for us and things will keep getting worse; but that we can only try to prepare or mitigate within the confines of our dear capitalist system, where the only truth is the market, and the only tools are taxes.
Climate realism is capitalist realism. Capitalist realism is the idea that there is no alternative, that only solutions that work within capitalism are even conceivable. Which is why the most radical idea somewhat accepted by liberals is a carbon tax, because taxes is pretty much the only tool governments have left after privatizing almost everything.
Capitalist realism is of course so completely ingrained into politics and culture, that even proposing alternative solutions like nationalizing electric companies so you actually have direct control over future investments, would immediately condemn you to the political margins. And maybe we won't get ridiculous situations like when corona first hit, where Germany's coal powerplants kept running even though lack of demand resulted in negative electricity prices.
Don't get me wrong, having green parties and left parties in power that function within capitalism is still way better than neolibs and neocons, but their policy would still be confined by our political culture of capitalist realism. However in said country/region I'm from, neolibs have way more power, so we won't even get that.
So I guess we just end up waiting for some giant contingency that will change everything and make things possible again.
I hope I'm wrong and I probably am.
What book has cemented your politics? Is there anything I could read that might evolve me beyond this extremely depressing worldview?
tldr: shitty effortpost
Very Good post indeed I agree with both of my hand up in the air however have you considered... crisis theory? It states that (oversimplified) since the global capitalism has reached the level of concentration and management that the it could not be either attacked, threaten, or undermined the only force to bring it down is a general collapse. The material conditions get knifed out it might literally be stopped via running out of its steam.
I subscribe to this theory, since it indicates everybody is essentially running on a platform of survivalist mode. Everybody is fully aware of the danger of "climate realism" the problem is that a) human brain is just biologically unfit to process such information which is out of their material realm. As long as the time-frame or numbers reaches astronomical or geological level human brain literally learns to stop processing the info and shrug it off b) much more urgency stuff could and would happen well before the eventual climate catastrophe walls in on all of us, for instance, a PANDEMIC. I think Covid-19 is a preview of what would feel like living in the (at least early half of) 21 century. Crisis after crisis will hit in which makes all of us busy at hands and distracted until the eventual climate Evangelion.