> [!cite]- Metadata > 2025-10-25 14:24 > Status: > Tags: `Read Time:` > Capitalist Realism, as Mark Fisher defines it, is the pervasive cultural condition where capitalism is experienced as the only viable social and economic system. The phrase "It's easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism" captures the mood. It's not just an economic situation - it's a psychological atmosphere, a kind of invisible weather - in which alternatives feel impossible or naive, and even our dreams are formatted by market logic. > Fisher argues that this mindset seeps into institutions, art, mental health, politics, and personal identity. Capitalism doesn't just govern how we work and buy; it shapes how we think, feel, and imagine the future. It becomes "the way things are," like gravity - unquestioned, inevitable, and often invisible. When every solution to society's problems is presented as a tweak within markets rather than a structural rethink, that's capitalist realism at work. 2 It is easier to imagine the end of the world than it is to imagine an end of capitalism 3 How long can a culture persist without the new? What happens if the young are no longer capable of producing surprises? A culture that is merely preserved is no culture at all 4 No cultural object can retain its power when there are no longer new eyes to see it. In the conversion of practices and rituals into merely aesthetic objects, the beliefs of previous cultures are objectively ironized, transformed into artifacts. Capitalist Realism is therefore not a particular type of realism; it's more like realism in itself. Capitalism is what is left when beliefs have collapsed at the level of ritual or symbolic elaboration, and all that is left is the consumer-spectator, trudging through the ruin and relics. 5 'We live in a contradiction,' Badiou has observed: a brutal state of affairs, profoundly inegalitarian - where all existence is evaluated in terms of money alone - is presented to us as ideal. To justify their conservatism, the partisans of the established order cannot really call it ideal or wonderful. So instead, they have decided to say that all the rest is horrible. Sure, they say, we may not live in a condition of perfect Goodness. But we're lucky that we don't live in a condition of Evil. Our democracy is not perfect. But it's better than the bloody dictatorships. Capitalism is unjust. But it's not criminal like Stalinism. We let millions of Africans die of AIDS, but we don't make racist nationalist declarations like Milosevic. We kill Iraqis with our airplanes, but we don't cut their throats with machetes like they do in Rwanda, etc. Deluze and Guattari desribe capitalism as a kind of dark potentiality which haunted all previous social systems. Capital, they argue, is the 'unnamable Thing', the abomination which primitive and feudal societies 'warded off in advance.' 6 It is a system which is no longer goverend by any transcendent Law; on the contrary, it dismantles all such codes, only to re-install them on an ad hoc basis. The limits of capitalism are not fixed by fiat, but defined (and redefined) pragmatically and improvisationally. This makes capitalism very much like the Thing in John Carpenter's film of the same name: a monstrous, infinitely plastic entity, capable of metabolizing and absorbing anything with which it comes into contact. Some of Nietzsche's most prescient pages are those in which he describes the 'oversaturation of an age with history.' 'It leads an age into a dangerous mood of irony in regard to itself,' he wrote in Untimely Meditations, 'and subsequently into the even more dangerous mood of cynicism.' in which 'cosmopolitan fingering', a detached spectatorialism, replaces engagement and involvement. 7 Fredric Jameson famously claimed that postmodernism is the 'cultural logic of late capitalism.' He argued that the failure of the future was constitutive of a postmodern cultural scene which, as he correctly prophesied, would become dominated by pastiche and revivalism. What I'm calling capitalist realism can be subsumed under the rubric of postmodernism as theorized by Jameson. 8 The 80s were the period when capitalist realism was fought for and established, when Margaret Thatcher's doctrine that 'there is no alternative' - as succinct a slogan of capitalist realism as you could hope for - became a brutally self-fulfilling prophecy. Capitalist Realism 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. 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 colonize and appropriate? 9 What we are dealing with now is not the incorporation of materials that previously seemed to possess subversive potentials, but instead their precorporation: the pre-emptive formatting and shaping of desires, aspirations and hopes by capitalist culture. 'Alternative and Independent' don't designate something outside mainstream culture; rather, they are styles, in fact the dominant styles, within the mainstream. No one embodied (and struggled with) this deadlock more than Kurt Cobain and Nirvana. Cobain knew that he was just another piece of the spectacle, that nothing runs better on MTV than a protest against MTV; knew that his every move was a cliche. The impasse that paralyzed Cobain is precisely the one that Jameson described: like Postmodern culture in general, Cobain found himself in 'a world in which stylistic innovation is no longer possible, where all that is left is to imitate dead styles, to speak through the masks and with the voices of the styles in the imaginary museum.' Here, even success meant failure, since to succeed would only mean that you were the new meat on which the system could feed. But the high existential angst of Nirvana and Cobain belongs to an older moment; what succeeded them was a pastiche-rock which reproduced the forms of the past without anxiety. 10 Cobain's death confirmed the defeat and incorporation of rock's utopian and promethean ambitions. When he died, rock was already being eclipsed by hip hop, whose global success has presupposed just the kind of precorporation by capital which I alluded to above. In hip hop, Simon Reynolds pointed out in a 1996 essay in The Wire magazine 'real' has two meanings. First, it means authentic, uncompromised music that refuses to sell out to the music industry and soften its message for crossover. 'Real' also signifies that the music reflects a 'reality' constituted by late capitalist economic instability, institutionalized racism, and increased surveillance and harassment of youth by the police. 'Real' means the death of the social: it means corporations who respond to increased profits not by raising pay or improving benefits but by ... downsizing (the laying-off the permanent workforce in order to create a floating employment pool of part-time and freelance workers without benefits or job security). 11 In hip hop, Reynolds writes, 'To "get real" is to confront a state-of-nature where dog eats dog, where you're either a winner or loser, and where most will be losers.' The same neo-noir worldview can be found in the comic books of Frank Miller and in the novels of James Ellroy. There is a kind of machismo and demythologization in Miller and Ellroy's works. They pose as unflinching observers who refuse to prettify the world so that it can be fitted into the supposedly simple ethical binaries of the superhero comic and the traditional crime novel. 'In this pitch blackness,' Mike Davis wrote of Ellroy in 1992, 'there is no light left to cast shadows and evil becomes a forensic banality. The result feels very much like the actual moral texture of the Raegan-Bush era: a supersaturation of corruption that fails any longer to outrage or even interest'. Yet this very desensitization serves a function for capitalist realism: Davis hypothesized that 'the role of L.A. noir' may have been to 'endorse the emergence of *homo reaganus.* 12 In fact, capitalist realism is very far from precluding a certain anti-capitalism. After all, and as Zizek has provocatively pointed out, anti-capitalism is widely disseminated in capitalism. Time after time, the villain in Hollywood films will turn out to be the 'evil corporation.' The role of capitalist ideology is not to make an explicit case for something in the way that propaganda does, but to conceal the fact that the operations of capital do not depend on any sort of subjectively assumed belief. 13 'If the concept of ideology is the classic one in which the illusion is located in knowledge', he argues, then today's society must appear post-ideological: the prevailing ideology is that of cynicism; people no longer believe in ideological truth; they do not take ideological propositions seriously. The fundamental level of ideology, however, is not of an illusion masking the real state of things but that of an (unconscious) fantasy structuring our social reality itself. And at this level, we are of course far from being a post-ideological society. Cynical distance is just one way... to blind ourselves to the structural power of ideological fantasy: even if we do not take things seriously, even if we keep an ironical distance, we are still doing them. So long as we believe (in our hearts) that capitalism is bad, we are free to continue to participate in capitalist exchange. According to Zizek, capitalism in general relies on this system of disavowal. We believe that money is only a meaningless token of no intrinsic worth, yet we act as if it has a holy value. Moreover, this behavior precisely depends upon the prior disavowal - we are able to fetishize money in our actions only because we have already taken an ironic distance towards money in our heads. 14 The so called anti-capitalist movement seemed also to have concealed too much to capitalist realism. Since it was unable to posit a coherent alternative political-economic model to capitalism, the suspicion was that the actual aim was not to replace capitalism but to mitigate its worst excesses; and, since the form of its activities tended to be the staging of protests rather than political organization, there was a sense that the anti-capitalism movement consisted of making a series of hysterical demands which it didn't expect to be met. It was in Live 8 that the logic of the protest was revealed in its purest form. The protest impulse of the 60s posited a malevolent Father, the harbinger of a reality principle that (supposedly) cruelly and arbitrarily denies the 'right' to total enjoyment. This Father has unlimited access to resources, but he selfishly - and senselessly - hoards them. Yet it is not capitalism but protest itself which depends upon this figuration of the Father; and one of the successes of the current global elite has been their avoidance of identification with the figure of the hoarding Father, even though the 'reality' they impose on the young is *substantially harsher* than the conditions they protested against in the 60s. 15 To reclaim a real political agency means first of all accepting our insertion at the *level of desire* in the remorseless meat-grinder of Capital. What is being disavowed in the abjection of evil and ignorance onto fantasmatic Others is our own complicity in planetary networks of oppression. What needs to be kept in mind is *both* that capitalism is a hyper-abstract impersonal structure **and** that it would be nothing without our co-operation. The most Gothic description of Capital is also the most accurate. Capital is an abstract parasite, an insatiable vampire and zombie-maker; but the living flesh it converts into dead labor is ours, and the zombies it makes are us. There is a sense in which it simply is the case that the political elite *are* our servants; the miserable service they provide from us is to launder our libidos, to obligingly re-present for us our own disavowed desires as if they had nothing to do with us. The point was not to offer an alternative to capitalism - on the contrary, Product Red's 'punk rock' or 'hip hop' character consisted in its 'realistic' acceptance that capitalism is the only game in town. No, the aim was only to ensure that some of the proceeds of particular transactions went to good causes. The fantasy being that western consumerism, far from being intrinsically implicated in systemic global inequalities, could itself solve them. All we have to do is buy the right products. 16 Capitalist realism as I understand it cannot be confined to art or to the quasi-propagandistic way in which advertising functions. It is more like a pervasive atmosphere, conditioning not only the production of culture but also the regulation of work and education, and acting as a kind of invisible barrier constraining thought and action. If capitalist realism is so seamless, and if current forms of resistance are so hopeless and impotent, where can an effective challenge come from? Capitalist realism can only be threatened if it is shown to be in some way inconsistent or untenable; if, that is to say, capitalism's ostensible 'realism' turns out to be nothing of the sort. An ideological position can never be really successful until it is naturalized, and it cannot be naturalized while it is still thought of as a value rather than a fact. Accordingly, neoliberalism has sought to eliminate the very category of value in the ethical sense. 17 Over the past thirty years, capitalist realism has successfully installed a 'business ontology' in which it is simply obvious that everything in society, including healthcare and education, should be run as a business. As any number of radical theorists from Brecht through to Foucalt and Badiou have maintained, emancipatory politics must always destroy the appearance of a 'natural order', must reveal what is presented as necessary and inevitable to be a mere contingency, just as it must make what was previously deemed to be impossible seem attainable. It is worth recalling that what us currently called realistic was itself once 'impossible': the slew of privatizations that took place since the 1980s would have been unthinkable only a decade earlier, and the current political landscape (with unions in abeyance, utilities and railways denationalized) could scarcely have been imagined in 1975. Conversely, what was once eminently possible is now deemed unrealistic. 'Modernization', Badiou bitterly observes, 'is the name for a strict and servile definition of the possible. These 'reforms' invariably aim at making impossible what used to be practicable (for the largest number), and making profitable (for the dominant oligarchy) what did not used to be so.' At this point, it is perhaps worth introducing an elementary theoretical distinction from Lacanian psychoanalysis which Zizek has done so much to give contemporary currency: the difference between Real and reality. As Alenka Zupancic explains, psychoanalysis's positing of a reality principle invites us to be suspicious of any reality that presents itself as natural. 'The reality principle', Zupanicic writes is not some kind of natural way associated with how things are... The reality principle itself is ideologically mediated; one could even claim that it constitutes the highest form of ideology, the ideology that presents itself as empirical fact (or biological, economic...) necessity (and that we tend to perceive as non-ideological). It is precisely here that we should be most alert to the functioning of ideology. 18 For Lacan, the Real is what any 'reality' must suppress; indeed, reality constitutes itself through just this repression. The Real is an unrepresentable X, a traumatic void that can only be glimpsed in the fractures and inconsistencies in the field of apparent reality. **So one strategy against capitalist realism could involve invoking the Real(s) underlying the reality that capitalism prevents us.** **Environmental catastrophe is one such Real.** --- ### My Notes --- **Chapter 2** Ideology, in everyday use, sounds like “a set of beliefs.” A culture’s worldview. The stories we tell ourselves about how society works and why. That’s the textbook idea — ideology lives in what people think. Žižek says that version is outdated. The old model of ideology: People believe in a grand narrative — religion, nationalism, communism — and that belief blinds them to reality. You break ideology by breaking the illusion. The modern model (Žižek’s twist): People don’t need to believe anymore. In fact, they often don’t believe. They’re cynical. They joke about corruption, irony-poisoned memes flood the internet, nobody trusts politicians or corporations — yet we still participate in the system. That’s what he calls post-ideological on the surface: we think we’ve outgrown ideology because we laugh at it. But he argues it's a trick. The ideology isn't in our beliefs — it’s in our behavior and fantasies. Žižek’s punchline: Cynicism is not freedom from ideology. Cynicism is ideology’s clever new costume. The fantasy is deeper than belief — it's the invisible script designing our habits, not our slogans. The interesting frontier here isn’t mocking ideology, but asking: What fantasies about life, success, identity, and the future are quietly directing us? What would it take not just to disbelieve in a system — but to stop performing it? The theater of moral outsourcing. True political agency begins when we stop pretending we are innocent. We aren't just victims of capitalism; we desire things inside it. We participate. We feed it. We get something out of it - even if what we get is toxic or hollow. “Level of desire” This isn’t “desire” as in simple cravings. It means the deep, often unconscious impulses that shape what we want: status, convenience, comfort, recognition, novelty, security, the thrill of consumption, the dopamine buzz of newness. We don’t just endure capitalism — we are libidinally invested in it. We like streaming convenience, next-day delivery, shiny tech, the idea of “making it,” and the social validation tied to success. Even ascetics sometimes enjoy the aesthetic of rejecting capitalism — which still orbits the system. So, level of desire = the deep psychological engine of our wants, not just our stated beliefs. “Fantasmic/fantasmatic Others” These are the imaginary villains we blame so we don't have to confront our own complicity. The scapegoats. The shadow people who supposedly “really” benefit: greedy billionaires corrupt politicians Wall Street “vampires” tech overlords oil executives We tell ourselves: They are the problem. They’re evil. If only they weren’t here… But Žižek/Fisher's provocation: We project our responsibility onto these Others to avoid facing our participation. We keep using Amazon, scrolling Instagram, investing in index funds, dreaming of success. So we narrate the elites as moral monsters to keep our hands clean — fantasmic in the sense of being figures of projection and fantasy. So, what’s he really saying? To truly change society, we can’t simply: – mock the system – blame elites – disavow our desires – insist “we are pure and they are corrupt” We have to admit that the system lives inside us, in our desires, habits, aspirations, and fantasies about success and fulfillment. Political maturity means confronting that we are not morally outside the machine - we help run it from the inside. How do you imagine desire after capitalism? What does wanting look like without extraction, domination, status, envy consumption? ### **References**