Mark Fisher: Capitalist Realism
(Zero Books, 2009) [a]
This is the second part of a three-part post: part one can be accessed by clicking here.
I.
Fisher ties his analysis of capitalist realism (or neoliberalism and postmodernity) to three areas; bureaucracy, education, and mental health.
It's the last of these things with which he is most concerned and why, as a matter of fact, the book has proved to be so popular. For we are in an age obsessed with mental wellbeing; everyone from King Charles to Z-list celebrities feels the need to bang on about anxiety, depression, stress, eating disorders, learning difficulties, and reflexive impotence.
And Fisher, convinced by his reading of Oliver James's 2008 book The Selfish Capitalist [b], is able to reassure us that the mental health crisis is due to an inherently dysfunctional society and not caused only by "chemical imbalances in the individual's neurology and/or by their family background" (21).
II.
That last term in the above list - reflexive impotence - was coined by Fisher to describe a widespread modern mindset where individuals recognise that the world is fucked up, yet feel utterly incapable of changing it. This belief creates a self-fulfilling prophecy, fostering depression on the one hand and political disengagement on the other.
According to Fisher, depression is endemic in the UK and "afflicting people at increasingly younger ages" (21). But it's a new form of depression - one he terms depressive hedonia:
"Depression is usually characterised as a state of anhedonia, but the condition I'm referring to is constituted not by an inability to get pleasure so much as an inability to do anything else except pursue pleasure." (21-22)
In other words, kids today have too much of a good thing - "the soft narcosis, the comfort food oblivion of Playstation, all-night TV and marijuana" (23) - and it's spoiling them and wrecking their health (physically and mentally).
"There is a sense that 'something is missing' - but no appreciation that this mysterious, missing enjoyment can only be accessed beyond the pleasure principle." (22)
Hmmm ... That sounds like the sort of thing those who are promoting national service or Jesus usually say!
Obviously, I'm not saying that's what Fisher is doing. Nevertheless, there is something amusingly kids today-ish about what he writes of his experience dealing with young students in further education; their inability to read more than a couple of sentences without getting bored; their wanting to consume Nietzsche with the same ease they eat a hamburger; their need to constantly listen to music or check social media:
"The consequence of being hooked into the entertainment matrix is twitchy, agitated interpassivity, an inability to concentrate or focus." (24)
That could well be the case, but, the funny thing (unless I'm very much mistaken) is that back in the day Fisher and his pals in the CCRU - were all for cyberspace and schizophrenia, the fragmentation of time and subjectivity, etc.
His complaint in Capitalist Realism seems to be that all this was co-opted by those whom he thinks of as neoliberals and that it didn't lead to the revolution he was hoping for, but, rather, to a generation suffering from "attention deficit hyperactivity disorder" (25); a pathology peculiar to late-capitalism and "a consequence of being wired into the entertainment-control circuits of hypermediated consumer culture" (25) [c].
III.
Once upon a time, Marxists used to call for permanent revolution and anarchists dream of permanent insurrection. But what we have today thanks to neoliberalism is permanent instability - McJobs and zero-hours contracts. Now there's no such thing as full-employment or jobs for life; workers are expected to be flexible and willing to periodically learn new skills.
New buzzwords emerged, such as deregulation and outsourcing. And now, in 2026, everyone's talking about AI.
And if permanent instability places intolerable strain on family life, too bad: "The values that family life depends upon - obligation, trustworthiness, commitment - are precisely those which are held to be obsolete in the new capitalism." (33)
Today, we have to all live like Neil McCauley, De Niro's character in Heat (dir. Michael Mann, 1995), and not let ourselves get attached to anything (or anyone) we're not willing (and able) to walk out on in 30 seconds flat if need be.
In brief, the world has changed - though, crucially, the change was in part "driven by the desires of workers" (34) themselves. The moral of which (not drawn by Fisher) is: be careful what you wish for - because even freedom and happiness can become burdensome and make miserable.
IV.
The urgent task today, says Fisher, is to repoliticise mental illness; that's the way to challenge capitalist realism.
And there seem to be many on the radical left who agree with him, which is perhaps why so many of those pink-haired young people with rings through their noses, campaigning for a wide range of progressive issues and causes, are keen to tell you about their struggles with anxiety and depression.
Ironically, however, recent research suggests that viewing everything through a lens of activism can become mentally exhausting and the fact that they find it easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism undoubtedly adds to their levels of distress and unhappiness [d].
Oliver James was widely criticised for his anti-medication stance in The Selfish Capitalist (2008); he explicitly attacked the use of pharmaceuticals as a pacifying social element that enabled damaged individuals to be returned to the work force. James also dismissed cognitive behavioural therapy and suggested it too was designed to serve neoliberal interests.
I mention that because I do wonder if - inadvertently - Fisher's book harms some of the people he most cares about by feeding into their political neuroses and validating their psychopathologies ...
Perhaps a reader who already finds the world cruel and unjust and blames society for his or her own feelings of what used to be called alienation, might come away from Capitalist Realism feeling even more depressed; particularly as it doesn't actually offer an alternative, functioning more as a diagnostic tool.
Just sayin' ...
V.
Fisher's ideas on market Stalinism, the triumph of PR, and bureaucratic anti-producion - ideas which form the basis for chapter 6 of Capitalist Realism - are interesting; but not so interesting that I have much to say about them here.
These are the things into which all that was once solid have dissolved ... The things which that spectral authority known as the big Other [e] believes in even if (even when) nobody else does.
Fisher rejects the claim made by some (including Nick Land) that capitalist realism has "given up belief in the big Other" (45) - that it has become as incredulous to the latter as to all metanarratives and doesn't need such to act as a guarantor. Either the Symbolic hasn't been as abolished as once believed, or, even if it has, this abolition did not lead to "a direct encounter with the Real" (48) - it led to what Baudrillard termed hyperreality.
Oh, and bureaucracy hasn't gone away either (which is why we can still learn much by reading Kafka) - just ask any teacher or university lecturer. It's no wonder, then, that Fisher felt less than happy working in the education sector and one can't help wondering why he felt so compelled to belong to it and desperate to secure a permanent post ...
Shortly before resigning from Warwick and after his position there had become untenble, Nick Land once told me: 'I'd rather flip burgers from the back of a van than be an academic.'
Notes
[a] This is the cover of the first edition. I'm using the 2022 edition published by Zero Books and page references given here are to this edition.
[b] In The Selfish Capitalist (2008), psychologist Oliver James asserts that the model of neoliberalism adopted by English-speaking nations since the 1970s is a primary driver of widespread mental illness. He contends that this system fosters affluenza - i.e., a kind of cultural virus, symptoms of which include an obsessive pursuit of money and status, which makes people prone to depression, anxiety, and low self-esteem for those who don't succeed in getting rich or becoming famous.
Thus, like Mark Fisher, James argues that mental illness is essentially a social consequence, rather than a genetic or neurological condition and he calls for an unselfish form of capitalism, in which workers have more pay, shorter hours, better conditions, and so on, thereby ensuring the wellbeing of the many takes precedence over the wealth of the few.
Critics point to his use of data and the fact that his thesis relies on correlation rather than proves causation. He also seems to have little real knowledge of some of the countries he champions as more caring and sharing; countries including Japan, which has one of the highest suicide rates in the world. Ultimately, his proposed solution to the crisis in mental health is a bit like Fisher's; underdeveloped, to say the least.
[c] It's probably due to his somewhat belated recognition that cyberfuturism and schizonomadism might lend themselves to neoliberalism - not to mention a neo-reactionary politics (à la Nick Land) - that led Fisher to retreat to acid communism (which is essentially an all too human model of politics).
[d] Researchers in Finland at the University of Turku identified a negative correlation between progressive ideals and mental wellbeing. Their findings suggest that other Western nations may find similar patterns among socially conscious (or woke) individuals.
See the study, authored by Oskari Lahtinen, titled 'Construction and validation of a scale for assessing social justice attitudes', in the Scandinavian Journal of Psychology, Vol. 65, Issue 4 (August 2024), pp. 693-705. Click here to read online.
[e] The big Other is Fisher's development of Žižek's elaboration of Lacan's concept; a collective fiction or symbolic structure "presupposed by any social field" (44) and which organises and supports social reality via an invisible framework of rules, laws, and cultural norms. It is sometimes known by other names; such as the Market, or that coldest of all cold monsters, the State.
