Rev Left Radio - Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative?

Episode Date: April 15, 2018

Jon (AKA The Lit Crit Guy) joins Brett to discuss the 2009 book by Mark Fisher entitled "Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative" published by Zero Books. Here is Jon's website: https://thelitcritguy.com Find him on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/TheLitCritGuy Follow on Twitter:@TheLitCritGuy Learn about and support Critical Mediations here: https://www.critmediations.com Follow Critical Mediations on twitter @CritMediations Support the Show: https://www.patreon.com/RevLeftRadio Follow us on Twitter @RevLeftRadio Follow us on FB at "Revolutionary Left Radio" Intro Music by The String-Bo String Duo. You can listen and support their music here: https://tsbsd.bandcamp.com/track/red-black This podcast is officially affiliated with The Nebraska Left Coalition, the Nebraska IWW, and the Omaha GDC. Check out Nebraska IWW's new website here: https://www.nebraskaiww.org

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Fight for the working class Fight for equality Fight against the right free of fascist ideology to hit in and turn it up loud. Revolutionary left radio starts now. Hello everyone and welcome to Revolutionary Left Radio. I'm your host, Ann Comrade, Brett O'Shea,

and today we have back on John the Lick-Crit guy to talk about the profound work of Mark by Mark Fisher. Capitalist Realism, Is There No Alternative? Now, we had John on our Gothic Marxism episode a few months ago, and that had a lot of really good reception by our listeners and in some ways this this conversation will sort of match up and kind of dovetail with that earlier conversation since a lot of what we're focusing on sort of combines the insights of both gothic Marxism and the concept of capitalist realism but before we get into anything john

would you like to introduce yourself and say a bit about your background for people who don't know who you are yeah thank you so much for having me back on uh hello comrades um my name is john I go by the Lickrit guy on Twitter. I am a teacher from the north of England, and I specialize in trying to talk about critical theory, Marxism, cultural criticism, in the most accessible and widely distributed medium possible. So you'll find me mostly on Twitter.

I do long threads trying to summarize the work of key thinkers, give introductions to topics, and, you know, basically try and take academic, left-wing writing and put it in the public sphere. Absolutely, and you do a wonderful job at that. I came across to you when we started our Twitter page for this show, and I think you were one of the first people I started following. It's just been really fascinating to see how you break down, like, really complex theory that's kind of sequestered in academia, and you make it accessible to regular people,

and you do a great job at that. I mean, yeah, thank you so much. For sure. Now, before we go into the show itself, I do want to give a plug up top to a sort of a think tank, a leftist media collective that both you and I belong to, which is critical mediations. Would you like to say anything about critical mediations, kind of tell people what it's about? Yeah, absolutely. So critical mediation is a network of left-wing media creators and critics. And what we try and do is we're trying to connect left-wing podcasters. and other content creators with one another and build a platform, a broad, loosely affiliated group

of people who can push each other on that we can kind of promote good leftist media as a way of taking on the prevailing right-wing hegemony and a lot of mainstream media. We also want to give a space to left-wing media critics to engage with this really vital political sphere. So we started just a few months ago We've already gained a lot of traction

Some incredible content creators have joined And it's really exciting to see this as a chance For left-wing media to really gain a much wider audience Yeah, I think the big point of it And something that we've stressed on the show Is this need to build up Sort of an infrastructure Networks of different creative people on the left

Whether that's podcasting, whether that's musicians, whether that's writers and sort of find a way to bring them all together and to work together to think of how we can expand on left-wing media and make it more of a mainstay in our culture as opposed to sort of a, you know, a sort of isolated relatively recent development in our culture. And I think Critical Mediations is doing interesting stuff on that front. Some of the podcasts that have joined it are Season of the Bitch, the Magnificas, delete your account. I could go on and on. There's so many wonderful podcasts there.

And they actually have their own critical mediations, has our own SoundCloud page where you can go and listen to RevLeft Radio and all these other podcasts that are combined there. So you can kind of flip through whatever podcast you want to listen to at that time. And it kind of puts all of our content into one place so people can engage with it in a more easy and convenient way. Absolutely. And then they also take submissions from people who want to write about, especially leftist media. You can submit it and we'll post it up on the website. the website really is um it's aesthetically pleasing it's a nice website it's i think it's crit is it critmediations.com or critical mediations.com it's crit mediation's um yeah we wanted to give a space

to uh left wing voices who want to comment on critique review and engage with media culture because we can't just be like passive consumers of a lot of this we have to take it on we have to be able to pull it apart to know how it works and also to challenge like prevailing orthodoxies of what media can and should be. Yeah, absolutely, and it's an honor that Rev Left Radio is a part of that, and I highly encourage people to go check that out, support it, and contribute to it if you can. But we have a big, fascinating episode here. We're doing, again, as I said earlier, we're kind of doing a summary and an overview of

some of the main concepts and arguments in Mark Fisher's book, Capitalist Realism, is there no alternative? And because we're covering a book for the first time on Rev Left, we're going to, I'm going to actively, and I think so is John, actively read some segments of the book as we discussed the concepts in the interview to kind of get an intimate connection with the book itself and ultimately encourage people to go check it out because I think there's a lot of really important concepts and it'll help people sort of theorize and think about anti-capitalist politics. But before we sort of get into the book

itself, I think it's just kind of an interesting way to start. How did you first discover this book and what effect did reading it have on you? So, a book came out in 2009 with zero books, a little left-wing press, and I read it maybe for the first time a couple of years

after it came out. It was really it was incredibly exciting. It's really short, but incredibly powerful. Every single page, every single essay, and it hits really, really hard.

And in a way, It was a means by which one could look at the contemporary political condition of Britain in the midst of kind of grinding austerity, a lack of political imagination, and you suddenly had a key to unlocking what was happening, what it meant, and how we had ended up in this particular situation. So over the past almost 10 years of the book being out, it's become incredibly popular because it seems to be responding to something that's so urgent, It's so contemporary.

Yeah, and it's like, it's only 80 pages long. It's accessible. And as John said, it was published in 2009. So this is in the wake of the economic catastrophe of 2008. And in large part, this book is sort of reacting to it and conceptualizing what that was and what it means. And it's a really helpful way to sort of orient yourself to a post-2008 capitalist sort of global economy and world. Mark Fisher was obviously the author. Who is Mark Fisher and what should people know about him? What do you think is important about knowing who the author is himself?

So Mark Fisher was a British left-wing academic communist and a writer. He was one of the best bloggers of the 2000s. He blogged under the name K-Punk. He was a brilliant critic of contemporary British culture. He wrote incredible essays on film and on music, always kind of decoding them and unlocking the kind of capitalist logics that were at work within them. He was a real kind of touchstone thinker

for a lot of British leftists. I count myself among that group who were very heavily influenced by the way that Mark wrote and thought. He was a teacher as well and a famously good one. He was also just a real comrade as well. Everyone who knew him speaks very highly of him.

So he's a writer, a educator, and an organizer, I guess, are the key points to know about him. But the best way to get to know him is absolutely to check out his work. Yeah, and it's also worth noting, I think, that because he talks about mental illness in this book, and we're going to get to it later, he dedicates pretty much an entire chapter talking about the relations between social conditions and certain increases in mental illness and Fisher ultimately paid the ultimate price and that he was a lifelong struggler with depression and it ended up, you know, resulting in his suicide. And what year was that? Was it last year, January 2017? Yeah, yeah. It's been just over a year now since Mark passed away. And yeah,

we will get onto this. He was one of the sort of bravest and most honest writers about the relationship between capitalism and mental health and mental health problems. He was very sort of honest about what he went through, but he was never sort of despondent. He was always a writer who managed to inspire as well as confront some of the darkest issues in his own mind. Absolutely. And as somebody that has struggled with depression my entire life, and I know a lot of listeners have also struggled with depression and anxiety, when we get into talking about the mental

illness part of it. I think it's an absolutely fundamental and important aspect of Mark Fisher's work in his life. So having said that, let's go ahead and get into the book itself. Again, the book is called capitalist realism. Is there no alternative? Before we get into the details, can you summarize maybe the general argument of the book in order to orient people to what he's trying to do here? Yeah, absolutely. So as you said, in 2008, we have the massive global economic crisis that is only, only just staved off by a colossal amount of public money being put into the private hands of financiers and the global banking system. Now, in that moment, there seemed to be a possibility, a kind of spark in the darkness that maybe this was the crisis that would

bring down neoliberalism, that we would end that period of capitalism that had run probably from around the 70s up until then. However, as we all know, that did not happen. So this in many ways is an attempt to figure out why. What was it about the capitalist system that enabled it to survive? He borrows a quote from Thatcher for the subtitle. Thatcher very famously said that there is no alternative. And he was trying to examine the ways in which politically, culturally, we had internalized this notion that even in the moment of capitalist crisis, is there an alternative? And perhaps for a moment we faltered and capitalism was able to reassert itself. So in very broad terms, he's tracing a genealogy here of a particular approach and understanding of politics and culture that enabled capitalism to not only survive but thrive right after a moment.

where it looked at its most vulnerable for perhaps a century. Yeah. And because he does that, would you say it's fair to put him in sort of the broad tradition that is highlighted in examples like the Frankfurt School and what they were trying to do at their time? Yeah, I would

absolutely connect him to think as like the Frankfurt School. Two of his big influences are other contemporary critics of ideology, particularly Slavo Gijek. He also draws very heavily from the work of Deleuze and Qatari, particularly anti-edipus, which he calls the greatest

exploration of capital since Marx. He mentions David Harvey, one of the most kind of consistent voices that have critiqued neoliberalism. So he is part of a broad tradition on the left of thinkers who are engaged in cultural and ideological critique. Absolutely. All right, well, let's go ahead and get into the basic concept itself. So the name of the book is capitalist realism and that is sort of the center concept that he uses throughout the book. So in your own word, sort of what is capitalist realism and how did it emerge? So one of the great things about Marx's writing is that he never gets lost into kind of abstract jargon. So as simply as possible, I think capitalist realism is a political and cultural condition.

it is kind of like a widely accepted common sense in inverted commas that not only is capitalism the best way of ordering economic, cultural and political society. In fact, it's the only one. We have to be realistic about this. Capitalism is now the only game in town. In a way, this is an expansion of a kind of well-understood thesis in leftist thought, which is that of hegemony. which goes back to the work of communists like Gramsky. But what Mark did is he traces a sort of history of capitalist realism that immediately post-World War II, we had a kind of great moment, a kind of window of maybe about 20 years where capitalism seemed to be sort of muzzled effectively.

There were very strong labor unions. There was a strong and thriving social safety net. There were limits on the ability of bosses. I mean, it's not a communist utopia, but it seemed like there was definite more power with working class people. Capitalist realism emerges, again, as I mentioned at the beginning, Fisher links it explicitly to Thatcher's famous dictum that there is no alternative. There is no alternative to capitalism. And in fact, the best way of ordering society is to allow capitalism unparalleled freedom.

So capitalist realism is a internalized mood, right? It's a paradigm which we've entered into. It's a common sense. It's a hegemonic structure, to use a slightly more technical term, that has permeated almost every aspect of not just politics and economics, but culture itself. Yeah, and in the book in Chapter 3, page 16, Fisher writes himself, he says, capitalist realism, as I understand it, is more like a pervasive atmosphere. sphere, 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. So it's sort of this ambient background, sort of just constriction on thought and political imagination. The quote that gets used in the book, and I think it's used elsewhere, is that it's easier to imagine the end of the world than it is to imagine the end of capitalism. And that is sort of an effect of the concept of capitalist realism being. sort of ubiquitous in the way that we that we generally think. Yeah, absolutely. And in fact, Fisher takes it a little bit further, right?

The quote there, it's easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism is either attributed to Frederick Jameson or Slav or Jujek. It's a bit unclear who came up with him first. But Fisher, in the opening chapter, talks about the film Children of Men. And he raises the possibility that even if we were to hit the end of the world, even if that were to happen, capitalism could still persist, right? We're exhausted imaginatively that even in the midst of dystopia, you know, you can have internment camps in the same world that you have Starbucks coffee franchises everywhere. The two don't contradict themselves anymore.

Even when we've reached the end of the world, we don't escape capitalism. Right, yeah. And sort of another effect. A way to think about it, it crops up in arguments all the time, and I'm sure anybody who's ever articulated a left-wing argument has been hit at some point with the response that socialism or communism are antithetical to human nature, and that what capitalism is just an expression of human nature. So one aspect of capitalist realism or sort of the way it frames our minds is that people actually begin to think as if capitalism is embedded in nature, as if it's sort of a cause. or natural reality in the same way that feudal lords and people atop futile hierarchies used to claim that feudalism was just the natural way of things, the divine rights of kings. It was that this social structure was ordained from on high. We get variations of that today in the human nature argument by defenders of capital.

And it's simply because capitalism has become so internalized. It isn't just an impartial structure that we place ourselves into. it's actually something that reshapes subjectivity. It reshapes the kind of people who live in the world. So in many ways, that argument is easy to sort of knock aside as being a bad faith argument, but it's the best faith argument that they've got because there's kind of belief behind this. Right, right. Yeah, so the realism part of capital realism is based, as Fisher says, on Lacan's distinction

between the real, capital R, and realities. Can you explain this distinction and its importance to the overall concept of capitalist realism? Yeah. So without getting too bogged down into the specifics of Lacanian psychoanalysis, Le Can's idea of the real is, I suppose, the best way to kind of put it, is that it's a sort of unauthentic, unchangeable truth, right? It's a kind of external aspect of existence and experience, maybe good synonyms for it would be, would be like the infinite, you know, the actual, as opposed to a reality that is sort of contingent upon our material order, on sense perception, and on language itself. The real is, you know, it's out there

irreducible to the kind of what he would call the symbolic order of our lived experiences. So one of the things that we seek to avoid that Zhijek, the great Slovenian Marxist philosopher has written about this extensively, is an encounter with the real is irreducibly traumatic. It's something that we're not kind of mentally or linguistically or even imaginatively able to cope with, really. And so capitalism posits itself as a kind of reality by which we can distance the reel away. we we buy into realities rather than the real and those realities take on the status of something which seems permanent which takes on the status of something that seems invulnerable and fixed

but really is just a way of shielding ourselves from a traumatic encounter with the real that's extremely well said and i'm going to read a longer passage from this book that gives an example of of one such real because i think you know using concrete examples and reading from the book, we'll kind of flesh this idea out even more. So in it, Fisher says, quote, environmental catastrophe is one such real. At one level, to be sure, it might look as if green issues are very far from being, quote unquote, unrepresented voids for capitalist culture. Climate change and the threat of resource depletion are not being repressed so much as incorporated into advertising and marketing. What this treatment of environmental catastrophe

illustrates is the fantasy structure on which capitalist realism depends. a presupposition that resources are infinite, that the Earth itself is merely a husk which capital can at a certain point slough off like a used skin, and that any problem can be solved by the market. In the end, Wali presents a version of this fantasy, the idea that the infinite expansion of capital is possible, that capital can proliferate without labor on the off-world ship axiom, all labor is performed by robots, that the burning up of Earth's resources is only a temporary glitch, and that, after a suitable period of recovery, capital can terraform the planet and recolonize it. Yet environmental catastrophe features in late

capitalist culture only as a kind of simulcra. It's real implications for capitalism too traumatic to be assimilated into the system. The significance of green critiques is that they suggest that far from being the only viable political economic system, capitalism is in fact primed to destroy the entire human environment. The relationship between capitalism and eco-disaster is neither coincidental nor accidental. Capital's need of a constantly expanding market, its growth fetish, mean that capitalism is, by its very nature, opposed to any notion of sustainability. And that sort of highlights one example of a reality too traumatic to fully approach and appreciate, and the way that capitalism itself sort of obscures the, the desperate nature of this problem and prevents actual real solutions because real solutions

would mean the end of capitalism itself. Absolutely. You can see this today in the work of so many big multinational corporations. The next big business plan is saving the environment as if there were no contradiction inherent in what they're saying. They think of it as an incredibly profitable thing to stave off the environmental catastrophe that they have caused, this idea that we can somehow, through the machinations of the market, stave off, you know, not just the machinations of the market, but new kinds of consumption will be the solution to the problems of consumption shows the way in which capitalism seeks to sort of shield itself from these sort of hugely traumatic, real encounters.

Yeah, and I think an interesting aspect of this is there's sort of a subconscious understanding of this on the right. And so when you look at the GOP and Republicans and libertarians who are dogmatically committed to free market capitalism, instead of sort of trying to address the reality of climate disaster, it's more easy for them to just claim it's a hoax, to deny its absolute reality rather than have to face up to it. Because at some level, although almost certainly not a conscious one, these people know. that capitalism is simply unsustainable, and so they'd rather deny its very reality than try to address it, because the moment they try to address it, it throws into question the very, you know, sort of aspects, the very mechanisms that they hold to be dogmatically true

and holy. Absolutely. And not just those mechanisms, but it throws themselves into psychological doubt and confusion, right? If you, this is why they kind of stave off this contradiction with the most sort of bizarre pronouncements on the global warming hoax, which is, if anything, a psychic self-defense mechanism on behalf of the right. But that's why it's absolutely vital that these points to antagonism, these conflicts between real incoming problems and capitalist ideology be exploited to the full. Absolutely. Now, in the book, Fisher argues that the USSR represented the only real example of a working non-capitalist system. what role did the collapse of the Soviet Union play in the emergence of capitalist realism

and the reframing of the historical narrative essential to it? Yeah, so this is really coming back to something that we've maybe heard an awful lot, which is that we've reached the end of history. This is Francis Fukuyama's much-quoted thesis, right? We've reached the end of history. The collapse of the USSR signifies the failure of actually existing socialism. the actually existing alternatives to a capitalist mode of production. I'm not saying I necessarily agree with this, but this is the kind of logic of capitalist realism, right?

You see that the USSR falls apart, and this enables you to present an image that not only is capitalism completely natural, it's also the best, and it's also morally superior. So it plays not only a useful political role, the collapse of the USSR and the emergence of capitalist realism, and a useful economic one because suddenly there is no challenge to the hegemony of capitalism as a worldwide system, but also a moral ideological function where Americans will get to talk about winning the Cold War, they'll get to talk about coming out on top in this battle. So in many ways, that period of the late 20th century is the key birth moment of capitalist realism as an ideological force. Yeah, absolutely. And I think it also, we talk about this a lot on this show, but the way that having a big socialist state, whatever its flaws, whatever your ultimate ideas or thoughts about what the Soviet Union turned out to be, that's almost unnecessary to the basic fact that having a big socialist state, whatever its flaws, whatever your ultimate ideas or thoughts about what the Soviet Union turned out to be, that's almost unnecessary to the basic fact that having a big social. powerhouse in the world did in effect sort of blunt the edges of of capital it kept it in check it provided sort of the fear and the bourgeoisie that would that would make it more easily

capitulate to worker demands and as the Soviet Union began to deteriorate and ultimately collapse that that external pressure on the capitalist system went away and it's no it's no coincidence that during the 80s as the Soviet Union was being ushered off the historical stage neoliberalism, Thatcherism, Reaganism, were on the ascendant. And what we live in now is sort of the world that Thatcher and Reagan, as sort of models of the overall system, not individuals, but, you know, sort of ways of thinking about the system, the world that they created. And that's what we're living in now. And that's why I think ultimately a powerhouse like the Soviet Union played a really important role in all this. And in lieu of it, we kind of find ourselves a wash in capitalist realism.

Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. Now, one interesting way that this operates, and this also touches in with our previous discussion on Gothic Marxism and other shows we've done where we've analyzed film and popular culture as a way of getting to the way ideology functions in our minds and in our culture. This is one aspect of this book that Fisher really focuses on. So how does capitalist realism operate in popular culture and in our psyches as subjects who exist under its influence? well one of the things that fisher is such a keen critic of is moments in which culture poses an alternative to the status quo where culture ruptures the sort of seamless edges of capitalist logic and he writes really sort of incisively about a lot of british culture during the 70s and 80s which was really wrestling with this and often through the guys of music as a space in which the prevailing sense of things can be fractured. And one of the ways in which you can kind of see the exhaustion of these alternative ideas to capitalism is by looking at popular culture. As I said, the very first chapter of the book deals with a long sort of reading of children of men, this notion that even in the midst of an apocalypse, even in the midst of a dystopia, nothing new has actually emerged yet. there is a problem of sterility in the film which Fisher reads almost entirely metaphorically

there's this great scene where one of the main characters goes to Barthi Power Station which has now been converted as it were into sort of safe for lots of the great works of art of human history and they pose the rhetorical question of what's going to happen to all of this cultural wealth if there are no future generations to see it and instead of trying to sort of assert the possibility of a future, what you get is a kind of exhausted nihilism, a sort of, I try not to think about it. It's the response that the other character sort of throws back. I think you can see this, actually, in the way in which we've entered incredibly tight cycles

of nostalgia and recycling, particularly since we passed the 2000s. I mean, just in the last few years, we've had the big 80s cycle where you had shows like Stranger Things, the remake of Stephen King. novel It into a very successful horror movie you've had now of course the big thing is we've re-entered the 1990s everyone discovered

that Friends was on Netflix and suddenly we were all re-watching this incredibly 1990 sitcom so even in cultural terms we're consuming in very tight cycles which are constantly not gesturing forward into anything new but are constantly reaching back

it's no surprise that with a seeming more optimistic capitalist realism now, because the 90s were a boom time. You had the retreats of capitalist alternatives, the retreat of communism. You had the boom time brought on by the neoliberal rampage of Reagan and Thatcher. And you're going to see that again in pop culture. This obsession with superhero films is a great example of it. We're constantly looking to these old archetypes from the past to be reinvented in the present to save us all over again. rather than try and create something new.

Yeah, that is so fascinating. The notion that the 80s and 90s were a boom time and a period of optimism, and so in the drudgeries of 2018, 2017, etc, we're almost going back to a more comfortable time as opposed to facing the realities that we are in the present and then the possibilities of different futures. There's a sort of, it talks about it a little bit in the book, but in other places as well, I've heard this concept.

there's a sort of atemporality to neoliberal culture and the way that the neoliberal subjects sort of think about time and history. It's sort of abstracted away from a historical movement, and that serves to kind of perpetuate it. Does that make sense to you? I'm kind of working through this thought. Yeah, totally. Jameson has talked about this. Frederick Jameson, the kind of great Marxist historian of culture, where he talks about this new phase, what he calls late digital networks, globalized, computerized capitalism has irreducibly affected our understanding of time, right? No longer do we operate by the old kind of agrarian seasons. No longer even do we operate on the eight-hour workday. We operate in this kind of atemporal flux where we're

constantly responding to things which our boss tells us might happen. We have to be flexible. We have to be constantly on the move. We have to be constantly innovative. And so it's no surprise that one of the great triumphs of neoliberal capitalist realism is the stripping away of our historical conception. Memory becomes something that's very pliable. There's a great story Fisher tells in the book where he's talking about his experiences working as part of a very bureaucratic system. And he tells the story about a manager who comes in one day and tells them the new dictator from higher up. This is what you have to do. And the next day, the very next day, without any sense of contradiction, he comes in and goes, well, actually, now we need to do this.

And it's almost as if he's been able to forget as a means of kind of remaining psychologically coherent within that system. You have to forget the way things used to work. I mean, I talked about this in what we mentioned on the last episode I popped up on the one on Gothic Marxism, that things that used to be conquers. create existing actual things in our politics have suddenly become these utopian dreams. We barely remember what it was like to have them. And now we have to kind of project them into the future because of the way that neoliberalism kind of hollows out history. Yeah. And, you know, I see this, this is somewhat related. And maybe it's more related than even I totally understand. But I see this argument pop up a lot on the left. And sometimes I've

even fallen prey to it myself, which is this temptation to say, that the revolution is not going to happen in our lifetimes, right? Like, capitalism isn't going away in our lifetimes, but maybe in the future, maybe in a couple generations, maybe in 2,200, we'll have something akin to an anti-capitalist movement that can actually be successful. And that's sort of defeatism, which I think is woven into the way the left sort of looks at itself, and it also relates to sort of a historicity of our modern culture, or postmodern culture, if you will. I think that manifests itself and that sort of pushing

revolution or pushing the revolutionary movement beyond the horizon of the present, beyond the possible. And it sort of plays into the very hands of our ruling class. Yeah, absolutely. This is one of the reasons Fisher paid so much attention to culture, because culture is a space in which one can bring to light now a different future. You know, you don't have to wait for it. We can make. something here together, even if it's just you and your three friends in a band, you know, with musical imagination and with kind of commitment, there is the possibility of creating something that sounds different. I remember I was listening to a talk where he was talking

about, you know, if you played somebody, so if somebody arrived from the like the late 80s, early 90s and you played them some pop music on the hot 100, they would say it sounded exactly the same. It wouldn't sound like the future to them. And I think it's in culture that Fisher sees a space in which we can be very politically bold and optimistic. Absolutely. Now, I do want to read a segment from his book again. It's sort of a longer passage, but it's super interesting. It touches on Kurt Cobain, but it also touches on something that we've talked about in previous episodes, and then I'm sure many of you have had conversations with your friends about, which is how we can create subversive culture inside the broader culture and how capitalism is

so able to absorb subversive elements and re sort of regurgitate them as as fully absorbed inside the capitalist system. And this segment sort of talks about how Kurt Cobain struggle with that in Nirvana. So I'm just going to read this. It says, yet the old struggle between subversion and incorporation seems to have been played out. What we are dealing with now is not the incorporation of materials that previously seem to possess subversive potentials, but instead they're pre-corporation, the pre-emptive formatting and shaping of desires, aspirations, and hopes by capitalist culture. Witness, for example, the establishment of settled alternative or independent cultural zones,

which endlessly repeat older gestures of rebellion and contestation as if for the first time. Alternative and independent don't designate something outside mainstream culture, rather they are styles and, in fact, the dominant styles within the mainstream. No one embodied and struggled with this deadlock more than Kurt Cobain and Nirvana. In his dreadful lassitude and objectless rage, Cobain seemed to give worried voice to the despondency of the generation that had come after history, whose every move was anticipated, tracked, bought, and sold before it had even happened. Cobain knew that he was just another piece of spectacle, that nothing runs better on MTV than a protest against MTV. He knew that his every move was a cliche, scripted in advance, and knew that even realizing it as a cliche 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, quote, 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 be able to succeed would only be able to speak. mean that you were the new meat on which the system could feed. And I think that sort of speaks to sort of a position that a lot of creative people find themselves in, people that want to authentically create subversive music or give voice to the subversive impulse and being confronted with the monstrosity of the capitalist system,

which seems so easily to absorb it and make it its own and in the process, strip it of its subversive value. Absolutely. I think this is something that we're still struggling with, right? How do we do this? How do we create culture that is meaningful if the old forms of rebellion and of subversion have already been pre-corporated into the capitalist structure which we're trying to throw off?

Yeah, extremely challenging is something I don't have the answers to. I mean, I still wrestle with it all the time. and I'm sure many people out there do as well. But let's move on to the interrelation between a few things, because the concept of postmodernism, the concept of neoliberalism, and the very concept of capitalist realism themselves, they're not synonymous with one another, but they interact. So what is the relationship between capitalist realism, neoliberalism, and postmodernism,

and in what ways is our neoliberal culture postmodern, according to Fisher? So let's, we'll kind of start with a few definitions. Yeah, that's a huge question. Joseph. Yeah, no, no, no, that's really cool. That's a great question. It's a great question. So postmodernism, it's commonly called this sort of collapse of grand narratives, right? That's a very famous quote from a book written by Jean-François Laotard, which is called the postmodern condition. And he says, to summarize or to simplify an extreme, I would say that post-modernism represents a skepticism towards metanarrative, towards the grand

unifying stories which we tell ourselves about how the world and how society functions. I mean, in ages gone by, one of the meta-narratives that held together a culture in a society was something like the divine right of kings, for example. Or even religious belief works as a metanarrative to unify and define a particular cultural moment. Now, we've reached a point when all of those have begun to fracture. right? It's become belief is something that we now do in a sort of cynical way, which is something Zijek has been a very trenchant critic of. Neoliberalism, this moment of not only arguing that there are certain things that the market should do, that there are certain things the market is the

best at and actively using the mechanisms of the state in order to create those markets. And so neoliberal culture depends upon a lack of belief in many ways. It depends upon that collapse of metanarrative because it allows even things like belief to become spaces in which markets can operate. I think one of the really good examples of this is something like what is very common in America, which is Christian culture, right? No longer do you have a religion that seeks to kind of explain society. What neoliberal capitalism has done has just replaced mainstream society with its own hermetically sealed bubble. So instead of going to the movies, you go see Christian movies. Instead of going to a gig, you go see Christian

music instead. So it is a cynical way of ensuring that new markets can consistently be created, and it's a way of ensuring that there is nothing that remains that can challenge the naturalization of capitalism as not just an economic system that emerges through particular historical and material conditions, but as just the way the world is. Yeah, and he's talking about Zhijek and the concept of belief and the concept of irony, which has really arisen in the 90s and is still in so many ways with us. And irony is an interesting thing for me because we all engage in irony and we find ironic humor to be sort of the humor of our generation of our time. But it serves interesting purposes. One of the things in the book, Fisher working

off of Xijek says, capitalist ideology in general consists precisely. in the overvaluing of belief, in the sense of inner subjective attitude, at the expense of the beliefs we exhibit and externalize in our actual behavior. So long as we believe in our hearts that capitalism is bad, we are free to continue to participate in capitalist exchange. According to Jizek, capitalism in general relies on this structure 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.

Absolutely. And one of the kind of key insights from both Fisher and Zhijek is that ideology is not necessarily, even left ideology. It's not necessarily about what we say. It's about what we do. You know, that's how you see it. That's how you find it. And there's this great quote from Fisher where he says that 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's a sense in which it simply is the case that the political elites are our own servants. The miserable service they provide from us is to launder our own libidos to obligingly. represent for us our disavowed desires. Because one of the things that we have not yet done, and one of the things that Fisher insists upon as being a vital means of reclaiming political agency is the accepting of our insertion at the level of desire into capital. You know, what's being another quote, Fisher says, that what's being disavowed in the objection of evil and ignorance onto phantasmatic others is our own complicity in planetary networks of oppression. That insertion at the level of desire, you know, we know in many ways that we

don't have a choice but to participate. But is there a level? Have we reckoned with that level on which our participation is a means of accessing and gaining our desires? Man, that, yeah, that's, it's so challenging because it speaks, it speaks so directly to a situation we all find ourselves in. We all struggle with this as you know, conscious leftists, as anti-capitalists, is communist, anarchist, socialists, etc. It's something we have to face in every step of our lives. And it's, yeah, it's just, it's a challenge,

and it's our job to deal with it. No easy answers, but just the requirement that we'd be honest about where we are. Yeah, and I think that's so important, you know, to elevate and articulate questions that cut to the core of how we live and how we think that make us face those sort of inconsistencies in ourselves and in our culture. Those questions are the springboards to solutions.

Without those questions being articulated and challenging us, the solutions are impossible to find. So as difficult as some of this stuff is, it's also the doorway into maybe ways of finding solutions. But moving on, talking about neoliberalism, a concept that Fisher makes use of throughout the book is the concept of business ontology. So what is business ontology and what role does it play in our politics and our culture? So business ontology is maybe the kind of mantra of neoliberalism. That not only should we organize things like a business, we should run them like a business. And in fact, their best mode of existence is realized through a business. I saw a great example of it just the other day on Twitter.

there was a headline that was floating around that was reporting on a study done by the accountants at Goldman Sachs where they questioned whether curing patients was a reliable and positive business practice because if people have contracted an infectious disease and a doctor has figured out a way of curing that person, you've also reduced the future business pool. This is an incredibly pure example of a business ontology. This is looking at life, life itself, not as an inalienable right, but as a series of economic exchanges. I pointed out on Twitter that there's this possibility that in the future, or maybe even now, what we do is we rent life and we rent it back from doctors, insurance companies and pharmaceutical companies, especially those of us who have to deal with. chronic health problems. In fact, any of us who are ever going to have to go to a doctor,

it's because increasingly healthcare has not become something that all are entitled to, regardless of their economic means, but it becomes something that you require purchasing power to access. That is a business ontology. It's treating life as an economic exchange. Absolutely. My sister just recently got fired from her job, and I don't want to get too much into it, I don't want to talk about her personal life too much, but I think it's worth talking about because it relates to this topic. She had to go to the hospital. She woke up in the morning to work, and she had this insane pain in her stomach. She went to the ER, didn't know what it was. It ended up that she really required surgery on her gallbladder. But the doctor himself,

she said, you know, I don't make a lot of money. I can't have health insurance. I can't possibly afford a surgery. And he sort of, he's sort of like understood. He made the little, you know, when you slide your fingers across your other fingers as a sign of money he kind of did that he's like i totally understand and so she had to take prescription medications but they didn't solve the problem so she was going through a lot of pain and when she she went to her job and tried to explain why she missed work her boss was just like you know in orientation we told you that we don't accept doctors notes as viable excuses because nowadays anybody can forge them and so unfortunately we're going to have to let you go you missed work and you didn't give us enough heads up so

So it's not only did she lose her job, but she wasn't able to even address the underlying condition she had that made her lose her job because she doesn't have enough fucking money. This is the kind of monstrousness of it, right? They try and make this the natural order. And this is why gothic Marxism is something that I think is so useful and it's something that dovetails really nicely with Fisher's work. That is abhorrent. You know, there is no, on any moral intellectual level, that that should be the way that

we accept things but you know the fact that the boss can turn around and fucking say orientation we told you your health like the physical fact of existence cannot interfere with your labor part of time and our extraction of the surplus value yeah it's just it's just monstrous this is this is something out of a fucking nightmare right yeah and the the humiliation that came with being fired she was so humiliated she's like don't tell, you know, don't tell dad. I don't want people to know that, you know, and obviously nobody listening knows my sister,

so it's sort of shrouded in anonymity. But she's humiliated, and she was just destroyed by the healthcare system, destroyed by the capitalist workplace, and then on top of it, she internalizes that as her own failure. And it's fucking heartbreaking. This is a business ontology, right?

Where not only is it simply obvious that we should run everything, everything including healthcare education as a business but all of us become employees so structural issues

flaws in the fabric of capitalism become reflected in our own sense of self people who have done nothing wrong will think of themselves as the most abject failures as as humiliated simply because capitalist realism has naturalized this idea that this is just how

the world is. Right. And something that came to mind when you were saying this, I had not thought of this before, but when you were sort of explaining business ontology, Trump himself is a manifestation of business ontology. One of the biggest arguments that you heard from people, including

my own father when he was trying to defend Trump's rise, was he's a businessman. What American needs is a businessman. Yeah, we run this country like a business. I'm like, what in the fuck? In many ways, though, I was thinking about something much the same. And And Trump is the reality TV simulation of a businessman.

And I was thinking about this because he put a fucking trailer up for his political decision about striking at Syria, where he's a, oh, big decision coming on Monday, as if it was the promo for the next episode of US capitalist nightmare. Right. Oh, my God. Yeah. So we can talk about that forever, but I think both of us. us will just get super angry and end up breaking something.

So let's go ahead and move on a little bit. Fisher argues that capitalist realism has so thoroughly captured the public's mind that even the idea of anti-capitalism becomes incorporated into capitalist culture and rendered impotent by that act of subsuming. Can you talk about this and maybe highlight some examples of how anti-capitalism has been incorporated into capitalist culture itself? Yeah. So there are two examples that I'd like to flag up.

And this comes in the chapter of capitalist realism called What If You Held a Protest and Everybody Came? And it's, in a way, corporate anti-capitalism, what we might call capitalist anti-capitalism, is a symptom of the failures of the anti-capitalist movement, which Fisher says even prior to the September 11th attacks on the World Trade Center had conceded an awful lot to capitalist realism. you know, anti-capitalists were struggling to coherently articulate what a alternative to capitalism might look like. And so maybe the best we could do was not replace it, but we would mitigate the worst excesses. We would have capitalism with a human face. We would make it a bit nicer. Ajijek has a really famous example of this, which is that you go into Starbucks. You go into any Starbucks and they'll tell you that a portion of your coffee will, the price of a cup of coffee, portion of that will go to help coffee farmers in the global south in the developing world. So in the act of

consumption, you buy your redemption from consuming. So you go, oh, well, I know I shouldn't really participate, but, you know, I go into the Starbucks, I get a nice cup of coffee and I can feel good knowing that a little bit of that money has gone to help coffee farmers in Ecuador, for example. In many ways, Fisher expands on this, and he refines it a little bit by singling out the Live 8 concert in 2005. And there's this great quote here that I'd like to read very briefly. Live 8 was a strange kind of protest, a protest that everyone could agree with, who is it, who actually wants poverty. And it's not that Live 8 was a degraded form of protest on the contrary. enlivate 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 hordes them. Yet it's not capitalism, but protest itself, which depends upon the spigoration of the father. And one of the successes of the current global elite has been their avoidance of the 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. You'll see this all the time, if you ever dare criticize Elon Musk on Twitter.

If you point out that he is an exploitative capitalist who treats his workers atrociously, who's seeking to make himself into some sign of kind of God-King and outer space, what you'll get is you'll get loads of people coming back and going, oh, but he's one of the good billionaires, as if any billionaire could be considered morally good. The global elite itself, in the form of entertainers such as Bono, organized live eight, those most responsible for the exploitation and degradation of global poverty were the ones who were organizing this global spectacle that was supposed to legislate away poverty. Yeah, and in the book he talks about like the movie Wally and how there's sort of a way that that even film with explicitly anti-capitalist messages can sort of be used by capital as a way to dissipate anti-capitalist energy and to allow you to walk out of the theater feeling sort of morally and intellectually superior, feeling like you understand how everything is fucked up, but also at the same time giving you no meaningful way to go about actually changing the problem. it poses no actual threat to capital's domination. Yeah, it's like, oh, we want to feel good about our anti-capitalist ideas, so let's buy a movie ticket.

Right. Let's put ourselves more firmly into this capitalist system. Yeah, one of the recent sort of controversies that highlights this was the, I think it was last year, maybe the year before, the Pepsi commercial where they staged a, it was a, it was a, protest that was protesting nothing. People had just signs that vaguely incorporated the colors of the Pepsi logo and they were marching and then one of the Kardashians gave a soda to the cop and the cop smiled and it was like this feel good moment, but it just showed the complete depravity

and cluelessness of the marketing elites and the people that run that company to think that this would catch fire them and they eventually had to take it down. But it's that same sort of like, we're going to use protest itself as a mechanism by which we can sell you. our shitty sugar water. Yeah, as a symbol. And just as Live Aid is this huge spectacle that's really a protest against nothing, organized by the ones who've caused this. You know, here they even got rid of it being a protest against something as basic as poverty. It just became

the symbolic protest. Protest becomes nothing but just like people in their nice outfits holding a well-made signs. Right. That's why. protest is. Definitely. And a related topic to that, and it sort of ties a lot of these concepts together, is individualism. And we've had entire episodes where we sort of break down bourgeois individualism and how it operates. But in the book, Fisher talks about how individualism operates ideologically and the need to, quote, construct a collective subject. Can you explain the role that individualism plays in maintaining capitalism and then what the call to construct a

collective subject might mean in practice? Yeah, I think there are a couple of things worth pointing out. So Fisher talks quite a lot about this idea that he calls Responsibilization, where a lot of things that exist in society have been made something which the individual should take responsibility for. This will become more of a thing when we get on to talking about mental health. You're no longer employed by your boss and so are a worker along with other workers at a company.

you're an independent contractor now you're an independent contractor you've been distanced and so the insecurity of your condition and your low wages are not something that you can collectively organize about but are something that are your fault because you haven't worked hard enough that's the ideological uh operation of individualism um and this the notion of a of a collective subject i think is really interesting i was thinking about this today and i just wanted to give a quick shout out to the sister podcast of the show, The Gillotine. And I was thinking about how so many people I see on the guillotine pod, Twitter feed, say that they listen to the show and it gets them quite emotional.

You know, I've had similar experiences where you and Dr. Bones are talking about the global condition, maybe talking about stories that haven't been given attention. And I feel myself get quite emotional. And it's because suddenly there's this moment of connection. not only to other people who I know and who might look like me, but also people who I don't know, people who I've never met, but I can count myself on the same side, on the same struggle, involved in that same global fight for emancipation.

This call to construct a kind of collective subject, I think, is something that Fisher talks about this in the context of blogging. You know, that's where he came through in the early 2000s, that that was a space in which you could meet, and instead of being pandered to, instead of being further atomized, further individuated by a system, you could connect, you could form new connections that otherwise wouldn't be possible. So I think the collective subject, this idea that we have to find new means of building class solidarity, of class consciousness, is something incredibly vital.

One final example, Fisher, I was listening to a talk that he gave a few years ago, in an almost like throwaway remark, he talked about how the widening of access to universities in Britain had actually destroyed working class collective self-education because instead of educating, you know, having teachings at factories or working men's educational clubs, suddenly the kids all went off to university, where you were individuated, you're turned into,

to an economically productive graduates. So I think the collective subject is something that is a real field of struggle. Yeah. Well, first of all, thank you so much for saying that about the guillotine. I never even conceptualized it quite the way that you just articulated it. That's really fascinating.

For those that don't know, obviously, the guillotine is hosted by me and a friend, Dr. Bones. And this show, Rev. Left covers theory and history. That show covers current events. And one thing we did up front, before we even started the show is that we talked about wanting to hit people emotionally because that sort of breaks down not only the sort of NPR mode of discussing current events which is just kind of dry and boring but it hits people in the heart and it and it bypasses

the ironic distance that's far too often we've talked about earlier that people can take an ironic distance from suffering and the problems of the system and just kind of use irony as a weak method of mockery, but it doesn't really go much further. And embedded inside the sort of obsession with irony is this repulsion to sentimentality or this fear that being sentimental or being able to openly say like, this breaks my fucking heart or to tear up is actually sort of a sign of naivete and that irony sort of is an armor that we wear to protect ourselves from that charge. But like on the guillotine, we actively insert clips. of people going through situations.

So, like, if a cop kills somebody and is recorded on camera, we play it not to wallow in the grotesquery or to sort of highlight the depravity of the situation for its own sake, but to really drive home the suffering that this system causes. And even when you hear a Palestinian mother or a Kurdish person in Afrin being attacked by Turkey, scream and cry in a foreign language, you don't even know what they're saying.

But you viscerally connect with the pain, that they are trying to explain. So language itself falls away, and all you have is this human-to-human relationship. I know that feeling. I've cried. I can't imagine what it means to lose somebody in that situation. And in that way, I hope we can kind of bypass the irony obsession

and connect people across cultures. And in that way, maybe we can all work towards creating, as you say, and as Fisher says, a collective subject that can move beyond mere individualism. ironic distance is a kind of cynicism of belief where we go ah you know that kind of meme leftism right if you know what i mean where it's like this will get clicks and it'll make people laugh but i don't want to have to genuinely believe it and i think uh i think the work that you and dr barnes do and so many other kind of leftist um media figures are chances of getting beyond kind of cynical, ironic distance from what we actually believe as people on the left.

Yeah. And I know an episode of Season of the Bitch, one of the members of Critical Mediations, they were talking about sort of the effect that sort of conservative religion had in their upbringing and really spoke openly and honestly about the self-loathing and the incorporated self-hatred that they sometimes felt growing up in stifling environments. And it really opened up this fascinating conversation where they were talking to religious leftists and there was no irony there was no detachment there was no distance it's human beings being human and and more than anything right now i think i think we need to to build on that and to focus on our on our common humanity absolutely completely agree and going into from that about humanity and we talked earlier

about mental illness fisher makes a lot out of the connections between capitalism and mental illness. Now, before we get into this, one of the initial thoughts I had, and maybe you can tell me your opinion, too, I read what he was saying, and I totally was on board for most of it, for all of it. But what I felt like he was missing, and maybe it was just the format of the book, and it's inability to go too deep and cover every aspect of mental illness. But I do want to avoid being reductive where mental illness is reduced merely to a reaction to social conditions and to sort of downplay the genetic chemical or other other variables that come into play to create mental illness. So with that in mind, what are the connections between capitalism and mental

illness for Fisher? And what approach to mental illness does Fisher suggest anti-capitalist take? Yeah, I think that's a really important point. And I just want to firstly reiterate it that I don't think, I don't think Mark would want us to suggest. And I know we both don't want to suggest that we're being reductive, that I don't want to elide or erase the reality, the physiological, chemical, physical reality of mental illness. But one of the things that Mark writes about really movingly in lots of his work is this idea that there is some connection, there must be some connection between our material conditions and the way that we think. he wrote really well about this I think it's it's something that maybe doesn't want to be admitted by a lot of people that the price of capitalism functioning successfully appears to be extremely high there's a he says that it's a paradigmatic example of how capitalism capitalist realism operates is in the field of mental health and I think

I think he's got a real point here. So he says that one of the most common conditions treated by the NHS in Britain is depression. There is a disturbing correlation between rising rates of mental distress and the neoliberal mode of production. Stress and distress are symptoms of many causes, but also of existing under capitalism. It is hard. precarity is incredibly hard if um you know i for example i'm sure there are lots of people here who may who listening who maybe have to work two or three or more crappy jobs and so you get home and you don't have time to spend with your family and your loved ones and so you feel

isolated and so you don't have time to socialize and so you become more anxious and introverted in social situations uh i mean He poses this question that there is this fast privatization of stress, right? Stress has become something that you suffer through, just you alone individually. And we've stopped admitting that maybe the way that we are told to live and work is contributing to it. Just a quote from capitalist realism, how has it become acceptable that so many people, and especially so many young people are ill? The mental health plague in capitalist societies would suggest that instead of being the only social system that works, capitalism is inherently dysfunctional and the cost of it appearing to work is very painfully high. Yeah.

And you can't ignore so often in our discussions of mental illness in this society and all of our societies, there's a strategic or even maybe unconscious, whatever it may be, downplaying. of precisely the role that social conditions play. So if Fisher emphasizes that role, he does it to sort of push back against its complete disregard and rejection in the mainstream conversation. When it comes, and speaking for myself, you know, I've talked about my struggles with depression. I've been hospitalized for depression in the past.

And I cannot disregard the fact that my working conditions so often totally. Fuck me up. I mean, I work a nine to five like anybody else. I work in a sort of office environment. And so often I come home after a day just completely depressed. I feel empty. I feel like my soul has been crushed. I only get to see my kids a few hours before they go to bed. And there's nobody to turn to. When I come home after just a regular day of work, I feel like I've been robbed of eight hours of my life. And my mind is thinking about other things. I want to be working on the show. I want to be playing with my kids. want to be hanging out with my friends, but I'm forced to do this utterly meaningless eight-hour nonsense to make somebody else rich so that I can just struggle to pay my bills every month. And the only person I have to come home to is my, my fiancé. And she also has been either at her job or taking care of the kids all day. She's depressed. She's, you know, totally stripped of all of her energy. And the only people we have left to rely on is one

another, but we're totally, we're totally beaten down. And it just, yeah, there's a, there's an article that Fisher wrote for the Occupied Times called Good for Nothing. And I just wanted to add a short quote from that article, because I think it really helps illustrate his take on, on mental illness. He says this, for some time now, one of the most successful tactics of the ruling class has been responsibility. Each individual member of the subordinate class is encouraged into feeling that their poverty, lack of opportunities or unemployment is their fault and their fault alone. Individuals will blame themselves rather than social structures, which in any case they've been induced into believing do not really exist. They are just excuses called upon

by the weak. What Smale, who's a psychologist, calls magical volunteerism, the belief that it's within every individual's power to make themselves, whatever they want to be, is that dominant ideology and unofficial religion of contemporary capitalist society, pushed by reality. TV experts and business gurus and U.S. presidents, I might as, as much as by politicians. Magical volunteerism is both an effect and a cause of the currently historically low levels of class consciousness. It is the flip side of depression, whose underlying conviction is that we are all uniquely responsible for our own misery and therefore deserve it. A particularly vicious double bind is imposed on the long term unemployed in the UK now, a population that

all its life has been sent the message that it's good for nothing is simultaneously told that it can do anything it wants to do yeah and i mean speaks right to the heart of it and then i'll respond with another reading from from fisher in capitalist realism he says and this speaks to sort of what the what the anti-capitalist movement can do to to reframe discussions about mental illness he says the the current ruling ontology denies any possibility of a social causation of mental illness the chemical biologization of mental illness is, of course, strictly commensurate with its depoliticization. Considering mental illness as an individual chemical biological problem has enormous benefits for capitalism. First, it reinforces capital's drive towards

atomistic individualization, i.e., you are sick because of your brain chemistry. Second, it provides an enormously lucrative market in which multinational pharmaceutical companies can peddle their pharmaceuticals, e.g., we can cure you with our SSRIs. It goes with out saying that all mental illnesses are neurologically instantiated, but this says nothing about their causation. If it is true, for instance, that depression is constituted by low serotonin levels, what still needs to be explained is why particular individuals have low levels of serotonin. This requires a social and political explanation, and the task of repoliticizing mental illness is an urgent one if the left wants to challenge capitalist realism. Absolutely.

So that speaks to the problems of it, how the social conditions are downplayed, and then it also opens up a window for for anti-capitalists to to take part in that discussion in a way that pushes back against what it rejects and what it omits and what it leaves out that vital struggle of politicizing what is made to seem natural exactly exactly just like poverty just like war these are things you'll constantly hear are natural they're human nature there's no way around them you know that what that does is it provides cover for the continuation of capitalism because it's it's a that the worst parts of capitalism are just not, not due to capitalism, but due to human nature itself. And that's something we should all be aware of and push back on whenever it comes into play. We have a couple more questions here. I know we're over time, but I don't care because this is an important discussion. What role does the state play in all of this, both in terms of its existence under neoliberalism and in its possible use by anti-capitalists? man that is that's a really that's a really tough question um but there are two possible options here

he writes in the later half of the book quite extensively about Kafka um the the European uh mostly short story writer and novelist and Kafka was the great writer of bureaucracy um so fisher talks about the way in which we kind of the state seems to to allow capitalism to function almost seamlessly until something goes wrong, right? Maybe you've got sent a bill that you're not supposed to have and you have to call somebody up and you have to find your way through the morass of how capitalist institutions function

and you seem to have entered the sort of bureaucratic hellhole that you can't escape from and you can't get any solid answers out of. So the state is something that is supposed to allow the very smooth functioning of the capitalist system And you only see the contingency of that when something in that system goes wrong. He also makes the point that in many ways, neoliberal capitalists have been kind of good Leninists. They formed their own intellectual vanguard in terms of think tanks, in terms of policy units,

and have slowly had their ideology accepted as the role of the state. And that's become internalized by the operations of the state itself. So does that sort of answer the first bit of that question? Yeah, I think so. Now he makes a really interesting point sort of in relation to the states and particularly state broadcasting right at the end in a chapter with the amazing title

of Marxist Supernanny where he talks about this notion that perhaps to paraphrase Jijek, we don't really want what we think we want. We are simply allowed to have stuff. You know, we're allowed to meet our own pleasures. We're allowed, in many ways, he says that kind of

culture sort of panders to us, panders to our desires. And he argues that actually something like the British Broadcasting Corporation, a sort of state broadcaster, could actually give us something that we did not know that we actually wanted or needed as kind of a way of breaking us out of this cycle of passivity and of learned impotence and learned helplessness and could actually challenge us to grow culturally speaking. Yeah. And, you know, I would, like even in that chapter, I was kind of struggling because his position on the state generally is ambiguous. That sometimes

he talks about the USSR as if it played an important role. And at other times he, uses terms like Stalinism to sort of critique big state and bureaucracy. And then at one point he says, quote, it's well past time for the left to cease limiting its ambitions to the establishing of a big state. But being at a distance from the state does not mean either abandoning the state or retreating into the private space of affects and diversity, which Zizek rightly argues, is the perfect compliment to neoliberalism's domination of the state. So I think that kind of speaks to maybe even Fisher himself is ambiguous on the use. of the state in this context or how how anti-capitalist could eventually use a state apparatus.

It's sort of unclear what his position is, but he doesn't totally reject it, nor does he totally embrace it in like a Marxist-Leninist sense. No, it's not a traditional Marxist-Leninist, although there is this, that wonderful sentence for he says the goal of a genuinely new left should not be to take over the state, but to subordinate the state to the general will. And what that requires is not kind of vanguard politics. It requires, I think probably Fisher's argument would be for the building of class consciousness. Not in the old stereotypical sense, but in whatever class unities and class lines can be established, those are the sites that we start to build up a hegemonic general will.

Yeah, and in other interviews that he's done, he's talked about the quote unquote post-structuralist skepticism about institutions and organization. And he even highlights Jody Dean, who we've had on the show, we had her on the show to talk about the building of the party and combating bourgeois individualism. But he cites, he cites her and her work as, you know, approvingly saying that there is this need for the left to reembrace organization, to reembrace institutions and the powers that they can wield. And so I think ultimately, although he might not totally be in line with a Marxist-Lenin's view of the state, I think he's certainly in line with a more Marxist form of, of, organization and the use of institutions to shape culture? I mean, individualization has been one of the great successes of capitalist realism, turning us into isolated, anxious, depressed people, separated from both our kind of libidinal

desires and from one another. And if we can undo that damage, if we can build kind of new tentative connections to one another, you know, reaching out across whatever means and by whatever means necessary, we may have this chance, this kind of optimistic chance that he sort of closes the book on. And closing this, the discussion of the book,

on the last few pages of capitalist realism, Fisher writes, quote, an effective anti-capitalism must be a rival to capital, not a reaction to it. There can be no return to pre-capitalist territorialities.

Anti-capitalism must oppose capital's globalism with its own authentic universality, end quote. What does that mean to you? And what exactly is Fisher arguing for here, in your opinion? I think this is a really complicated question, but to kind of borrow, to salvage a bit of Marxist terminology, I think what he's arguing for here is both class consciousness and class struggle. And these won't be the old class struggles that we're familiar with, right? Those structures of 20th century economics don't exist anymore. That 20th

century culture that gave unified class consciousness, its coherence, has been obliterated, if not smashed totally. And so what we have to do, and one of the reasons he closes the book on an optimistic note is recognize that it's all up for grabs again, right? Ideologically, he uses the phrase that this is year zero you know 2008 that great economic moment of instability suddenly neoliberalism has been completely discredited completely in in both the financial and political senses of the term but we have we have a chance fisher says i think to begin the this isn't an easy solution either this is a long slow hard solution of rebuilding class consciousness of being of being able to form new alliances that aren't based on kind of rigid economic stratification,

but on shifting potentialities, on shifting positions. And, you know, using networks like this in order to educate in order to connect people in order to build up and amplify struggles around the world and join them together to show how they are unified, you know, that struggle for politicization is a really vital one, in the field of mental health but nothing about capitalism is natural right everything can be pushed back on we can fight everything

back there's that wonderful final sentence the two final sentences of the whole book where he says the tiniest event can tear a hole in the grey curtain of reaction which has marked the horizons of possibility under

capitalist realism from a situation in which nothing can happen suddenly anything is possible again. For a long time, I think huge sections of the left believed that we were at the end of history. You know, that we had just got to put up with the fact that capitalism was the only game in town and that's something that we have all internalized

to an incredibly deep level, I think. But Fisher ends it on this wonderfully optimistic note that that gray curtain of reaction which has been draped over us for decades, generations, there are tears appearing in it and together if there are enough hands

we can rip that fabric to shreds and I do appreciate that optimism and certainly that's what you try to do with your work that's what we try to do with our work and that's what so many of our listeners

are trying to do in their community organizing work or in their families and their work spaces is trying to create this optimism to reframe our situation and to push forward for a better world

my take on that quote I read in the question about there can be no return to pre-capitalist territorialities and we must build our own authentic universality. I think part of that and whether or not he was he was meaning this or not, I don't know, but a part of me thinks, you know, we can't shrink away from the global stage and sort of try to build communes or merely build a co-op here or sort of try to break off from the overarching system and form our own little communities and on the fringes and margins, but that if we're really going to combat capitalism, we have to combat it on a global level, and that means an internationalism. That means organizational work. That means

real politics, not a, not a recoiling away from politics, but an aggressive engagement with it, reaching across identities, reaching across depressions, and trying to bring a diverse group of people who all have been ravaged by the system together for a common struggle forward. And that, that that not only calls for our own political work, but it calls for a rethinking of who we are as historical subjects and a reintroduction of historicity into our culture. One of the things I think I said on the last episode I was on, and I want to reiterate it, is that we don't have solidarity with leftists across the world in spite of our differences, but because of our differences, because all of us have in various ways endured this

this global system, and those differences don't separate us, but that can be the ground in which we unite, you know, the fact that despite the plurality of difference, it is because of capital. You know, that is where the attention should be focused. Well said, my friend. So overall, what do you think we as leftists should generally take away from this book? What makes it an important work for anti-capitalist to read? There are just a couple of things to sum up, which is this will allow you to understand how bad things are, but on what grounds we can hope that we are not alone in our struggles, that this is something that so many of us face, and that politics is, it's a really comforting work for me,

and I hope it's a comfort to other anti-capitalists, that we're not enduring this alone, that when you look at the world and recognize that it wasn't supposed to be like this, It isn't just you. It isn't just all in your head. And there is a way of thinking and imagining and maybe living differently. Absolutely. Well, thank you, John, so much for coming on. If anybody enjoyed this conversation, me and John had a previous conversation.

It's in our back catalog. The episode title is Gothic Marxism. If you listen to this episode and enjoyed it, you'll almost certainly enjoy that episode as well. It covers different things, but with the same sort of in-depth analysis that John always offers, before we let you go, can you let listeners know where they can find you and your work? Yes, I will. You can find me on Twitter at the Lickrit Guy. You can find me at the Lickrit Guy.com as well. Thank you so much for having me on.