Capitalism is essentially a system of mass production for the satisfaction of the needs of the masses. It pours a horn of plenty upon the common man. It has raised the average standard of living to a height never dreamed of in earlier ages. It has made accessible to millions of people enjoyments which a few generations ago were only within the reach of a small élite.

Ludwig von Mises (The Anti-Capitalist Mentality)

Introduction:

Ever since we picked up the habit (and hobby) of leisurely reading, there were many books that we kept seeing and wished to read at some point in the future. Many books appear in almost everyone’s booklists: Think 1984, The Great Gatsby, Of Mice and Men, Man’s Search for Meaning, A Brief History of Time, and St. Augustine’s Confessions. These are considered timeless classics, and no one disputes their status as ‘imperishable works.’ And then there are those books that no one reads, but whose leatherbound volumes appear on people’s bookshelves not as a reference but as decoration. Books like Newton’s Principia, Sartre’s Being and Nothingness, Plato’s Republic, de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America, Marx’s Das Kapital, and Thucydides’ The Peloponnesian Wars. But a third, secret stash of books was the most alluring — enumerating these books was akin to reciting an incantation. We all wanted to belong to those book clubs and literary circles which read and discussed these books. One often thinks that those writers really understand how the world works and what’s going around at the most fundamental level. What immediately comes to mind when many of us think of these books are writers of the Frankfurt School, the French Postmodernists, the Structuralists, the Anarchosyndicalists, and so on. Their remoteness and incomprehensibility made them all the more attractive, and the degree of appreciation they have from philosophers and scholars makes us want to understand and master their dark arts. Of course, we loved them because we did not, and could not, understand them. Given that we’re at the beginning of our reading careers, we are massively impressionable and find it hard to oppose a writer’s ideas — because really, do we understand anything to begin with for us to demolish a completed system of thought? Don’t we gravitate towards these books because as Aristotle tells us that we have a natural ‘desire to know,’ and what better knowledge than that which has social prestige among the intellectuals?

I only started reading as an adult, and after being accepted into my university. I was an accounting student by then, since my uncle and aunt, who were both accountants, recommended the field to me and I really knew no better but to follow their advice. My introduction to reading was in literature, and my first 50 books were all novels, plays, and collections of short stories, with the eventual volume of poetry. I felt that I was not yet ready for complicated nonfiction books, but I read my university textbooks regularly. I always anticipated the days when I will be reading those books I’ve been holding in high esteem. Many of my friends would throw away the titles to appear sophisticated, and perhaps I wanted that mostly — to be able to master the ideas that would make me sophisticated and able to solve the perennial problems of the world. (Why would I want to seek them in the writings of the Frankfurt School spoke volumes of how distant I thought they were from the wisdom I thought they had, and how little I knew how garbled and pessimistic their ideas were.) One of those books that was always on my to-read list was Mark Fisher’s Capitalist Realism. The title immediately captured me, since I saw it everywhere and it was always cited favorably. Moreover, I always wanted to understand exactly what capitalism everyone spoke about. The word was repeated so often that in a spoken-word poetry competition I entered in 2013, I said ‘There’s no denying that the world is getting worse by the day, and it’s heading a path filled with sorrow and misery. Governments enter war after war, politicians fight over pride and dignity, and capitalist oligarchies [1] fool the people to suck all their money. Then we, the youth, as usual, are blamed for this scrap of a world that’s left.’ I had no idea what a capitalist oligarchy was, nor apparently did the audience of English literature professors and students who enjoyed the performance.

It was simply the fashion of the times that to be sophisticated you ought to hate capitalism without really a need to understand what it is or what an alternative to capitalism would look like. Margaret Thatcher is often quoted as saying that ‘there is no alternative’ to Capitalism, though I do not know if she ever said that (it would be characteristic of her if she had indeed said it). There’s a joke I found today where a woman tells her son ‘I don’t care about the drugs or the alcohol. Just tell me who gave you these Ayn Rand books!’ The situation has reached the stage where being pro-market seems counter-intellectual to boot. And perhaps there are many reasons behind this, which Ludwig von Mises explains at length in his book, the Anticapitalistic Mentality. A common anticapitalistic theme we used to hear that is in decline today was that capitalism sustains what is base in the masses and brings to the people in a lowered quality all the amenities that high society enjoyed. As Mises mentions in his book [2],

‘What characterizes capitalism is not the bad taste of the crowds, but the fact that these crowds, made prosperous by capitalism, became “consumers” of literature—of course, of trashy literature. The book market is flooded by a downpour of trivial fiction for the semibarbarians. But this does not prevent great authors from creating imperishable works.’

Nowadays, the attacks on capitalism come mainly from the environmental perspective, or from looking at the current inequality, or finally on the lack of universal coverage in some services we consider basic, such as medical care and higher education. Now, even people whom we consider to be in high-society do not condescend to the poor, but sport an egalitarian front. The time of the elitist high-class has come to an end, and we are rapidly approaching a state of social life where even the rich think of themselves as circumstantially privileged.

                   I was meeting with my friend in a Starbucks café who was writing on his laptop, and there was a Barnes and Noble near me. I decided to bring a book from there and sit down with him to read. The book I found which immediately captured my attention was Mark Fisher’s Capitalist Realism. I finished it there at the café, and will review it below. I have to note that I grabbed the book with the preconception that it would add nothing to my life, although I secretly wished it would help me understand what arguments are forwarded by modern anti-capitalists. I read the book wholly in the café, and my friend who was watching me noticed that my face was twisted from start to finish with the occasional chuckle or the outburst of “Oh, come on now!” It is a fun read, but there is really nothing that’s worth one’s time in the book. I figured that in reading this, I would be putting Mises’ ideas to the test, and so I begin.

Capitalist Realism:

The subtitle of Mark Fisher’s Capitalist Realism asks us if there are any alternatives to this state of Late-Capitalism, but quite strangely, at no point does the author offer a clear explanation of exactly what this capitalism is, which he spends a complete book criticizing. Like many books whose main focus is a critique of capitalism, the term is intentionally kept fluid and vague so as to make attacking it easier[3]. If capitalism entailed exploitation, then criticizing exploitative acts can find its way into attacking the foundations of the market. If the Central Bank and the Federal Reserve, as well as many regulatory institutions, were capitalistic constructs, then they might really have caused the 2008 crash and it would be proper to attribute the 2008 financial crash to Capitalism. If the United States of America represented Capitalism, then surely there must be something wrong with Capitalism, if there was something wrong with the United States — if such a wrong thing was necessarily connected to the United States’ socio-political structure. If neoconservatives and neoliberals were advocating for a competitive free-exchange market economy as Milton Friedman addresses Capitalism in his Capitalism and Freedom, then it would probably make sense to think that wars, tariffs, and the military-industrial complex are all compatible with the free market, even though terms like neoconservatives are catch-all terms that include people as pro-market as Murray Rothbard, and people as anti-market as former president George W. Bush and Pat Buchanan. The main issue is that none of these claims are true, and really, lumping all these statements together to accuse anyone who is not to the left of the political spectrum is a conflation of fascism, capitalism, conservatism, and many other groups who actually despise each other’s ideas.

But really, what is this late capitalism, or as it is referred to in the literature Late-Stage Capitalism (LSC)? The author seems to hint that it is a stage that comes after Fordism [sic], which connotes a society that has large-scale industries [4]. In the first chapter, titled ‘It is Easier to Imagine the End of the World than the End of Capitalism’ the author defines Capitalist Realism as [5] ‘the widespread sense that not only is capitalism the only viable political and economic system, but also that it is now impossible even to imagine a coherent alternative to it.’ We are still not given a definition of capitalism to which we might want to think of coherent alternatives to. One becomes even more confused when he reads in the same paragraph [6]:

‘Neoliberals, the capitalist realists par excellence, have celebrated the destruction of public space but, contrary to the official hopes, there is no withering away of the state […] only a stripping back of the state to its core military and police functions,’

followed by an aside [7],

‘Neoliberalism surreptitiously relied on the state even while it has ideologically excoriated it. This was made spectacularly clear during the banking crisis of 2008, when, at the invitation of neoliberal ideologues, the state rushed in to shore up the banking system.’

Now, what should one make of these two quotations? What exactly is he attacking? Neoliberalism, or capitalism? And what has this to do with the whole issue? An attack on capitalism has to be an attack on something that is a necessary result of capitalism in its pure form. Many people who support the free-market ideal have warned of the policies and practices that eventually lead to the recession [8]. Capitalism does not have a voice. Its ideas are voiced by many proponents, and not all of them perfectly agree on what Capitalism stands for. However, there is a set of beliefs that all proponents of Capitalism believe in. These tenets were left intact and barely criticized in this book.

This kind of confusion is scattered all around the book in much the same way as Ha-Joon Chang confuses conservatives, republicans, and his accursed free-market ideologues [9]for actual free-marketeers. Later in the chapter, the author writes [10]:

‘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 ruins and the relics.’ But he says this in response to the type of consumerism one might find in a free-market society [11]: ‘The power of capitalist realism derives in part from the way that capitalism subsumes and consumes all of previous history: one effect of its ‘system of equivalence’ which can assign all cultural objects, whether they are religious iconography, pornography, or Das Kapital, a monetary value.’

One may understand that the author is really attacking consumerism, but prices can be understood apart from this view towards consumerism. What is ascribed to anything in the market is not a value, but a price — and a price is determined by exchange as well as many other factors that ultimately reduce to what persons are willing to sacrifice for the good or service to be gained. What really happens in a transaction is that when two persons choose to exchange an item, the price might be set by how much the seller needs to depart with the item being sold. This price mechanism can exist even in a social setting that is not free (i.e., that is not capitalist), but the prices would be skewed in comparison with how they would be in a free market [12]. Even if one thought that each item had an intrinsic value, it is no fault of capitalism that it allows such consumer behavior. In sitting on my chair and writing this article, I have not prevented many people from ending their lives, but my not preventing them should not be interpreted as me causing their deaths. Capitalism simply does not prohibit consumerism, and it allows production to proceed. People will always have the willpower and ultimately, the volition, to choose how they will act. The existence of self-restrained people is a testament to that, and for all others who cannot control themselves as efficiently, it remains the responsibility of individuals and not systems to help those persons if any such responsibility exists, and not any arbitrary individual at that.

In an attempt to describe capitalism, the author paraphrases Deleuze and Guattari [13]: Capitalism is ‘a kind of dark potentiality which haunted all previous social systems.’ It is ‘the ‘unnamable Thing,’ the abomination, which primitive and feudal societies ‘warded off in advance.’’ At no point do we really know what is this capitalism that is being criticized. Is it consumerism? Is it this strange commoditization the French philosophers were interested in studying? Or the profiteering he mentions in the same chapter? Free-market capitalism, as classical liberals and libertarians conceive of it, is a social system that aims at guaranteeing individuals the liberty (absence of coercion) to pursue their individual goals. Capitalism is simply a social system of individuals operating on their private properties and governed under the rule of law by social institutions that do not infringe on the individuals’ economic and civil liberties. And the details are really important, such as what laws should there be on the books, and whether political liberties should be granted (or indeed, what constitutes political liberties). One has to recognize that no definition can fully satisfy the inquiry, but this working definition helps us to at least talk about what it is that we’re discussing. A professor of philosophy like Mark Fisher should know at least, that a proper discussion starts with definitions. What use is it to be told that many believe there are no alternatives to X when X is really not well understood? In the social sciences and in philosophy, it is common to call Capitalism the process of creating a profit, or large-scale production. We all understand that Capital is generally assets (money and production goods) that are used in the production process to create the goods and services that would in the end bring profit to the entrepreneur. The book is obviously working under a different definition of Capital and Capitalism.

In the following chapter, the author tells us that [14] ‘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.’ It seems that this is said in defeat and frustration at the inability to actualize this anti-capitalist revolution, in a manner akin to Herbert Marcuse’s argument in his One-Dimensional Man. Under capitalism, we become too shallow and simplistic to be able to oppose capitalism. It is always assumed that there are easy steps we may take to make the world a better place, though we all know that legislating such change does not help much. Why not legislate poverty away? Why not criminalize murder to eliminate murder? And so on. Legislations that affect to produce a sought-after change, and though they really do produce change, due to the principle of double effect it is often not the change we had imagined our legislations would yield.

The book covers the same half-digested ideas throughout. The most important of which is that we cannot imagine now a way out of Capitalism and that we are losing the ability to think of a way out. Why should we want a way out of this Capitalist society is the focus of the book? But really, the attacks on Capitalism never attack Capitalism itself, but the things that the author associates Capitalism with. All of this could have been avoided if the author — a professor of philosophy and a college instructor — had read what economists and philosophers who champion a Capitalist society had said. Sadly, the author has ended his life (may he rest in peace), which does not allow me to contact him. This book is not an isolated case, since there are many (too many) authors who do the same thing. It is very hard to see Anticapitalists citing Mises, Rothbard, Hayek, Ayn Rand, or Friedman. And why should they, if they can simply rely on weasel terms?  

Much of the book reads as a pamphlet for reviving the radical left, and mobilizing it against neoliberals. The author understands that among the left, there might be many factions, but treats all those not on the left as if they were united against the left whereas many people are sympathetic to the issues the left raises — if only the methods were appropriate. In the latter chapters, the author invokes the notions many scholars have invented that mental illnesses are nurtured and cultured in Capitalist societies and that this can be used against Capitalism. In the final chapter of the book, we find the author calling for action [15]:

‘We must convert widespread mental health problems from medicalized conditions into effective antagonisms. Affective disorders are forms of captured discontent; this disaffection can and must be channeled outwards, directed toward its real cause, Capital. Furthermore, the proliferation of certain kinds of mental illness in late capitalism makes the case for a new austerity, a case that is also made by the increasing urgency of dealing with environmental disasters.’

It seems unscientific to attribute the causes of mental illnesses to Capitalism by using rhetoric and psychoanalysis since such causal attribution requires not only high correlation and a strong theoretical basis but also the ability to isolate other factors that might be the real causes. In the methods presented in this book, one sees none of this — in fact, the author’s methods do not differ much from using energy crystals and extracting negative energy from people to solve their current social or psychological problems. Earlier in the book (Ch. 5), the author cites a book [16] that offers a comparison of the number of people diagnosed with bipolar disorder between countries that lean more toward Capitalism and those that lean more toward control (Capitalism meaning the interventionist states in Europe or Northern America). However, what captured my attention was when he linked schizophrenia with Capitalism following Deleuze and Guattari [17]:

‘[I]f, as Deleuze and Guattari argue, schizophrenia is the condition that marks the outer edges of capitalism, then bi-polar disorder is the mental illness proper to the ‘interior’ of capitalism. With its ceaseless boom and bust cycles, capitalism is itself fundamentally and irreducibly bi-polar, periodically lurching between hyped-up mania (the irrational exuberance of ‘bubble thinking’) and depressive come-down. (The term ‘economic depression’ is no accident, of course). To a degree unprecedented in any other social system, capitalism both feeds on and reproduces the moods of populations. Without delirium and confidence, capital could not function.’

To which degree is this improper, one cannot say. But that is really not different from saying that Monkey-Pox or AIDS are caused by homosexuality since the illness is common among many homosexuals. Neither three authors are qualified psychiatrists or clinical psychologists (Guattari is a psychoanalyst, which is really different), and their methods are purely rhetorical in any case.

In yet another chapter of the book (Ch. 6), the author compares Capitalism with this notion of market Stalinism in which the author tells us that [18] what ‘late capitalism repeats from Stalinism is just this valuing of symbols of achievement over actual achievement.’ He carries on on the following page [19]:

It would be a mistake to regard this market Stalinism as some deviation from the ‘true spirit’ of capitalism. On the contrary, it would be better to say that an essential dimension of Stalinism was inhibited by its association with a social project like socialism and can only emerge in a late capitalist culture in which images acquire an autonomous force. The way value is generated on the stock exchange depends of course less on what a company ‘really does,’ and more on perceptions of, and beliefs about, its (future) performance. In capitalism, that is to say, all that is solid melts into PR, and late capitalism is defined at least as much by this ubiquitous tendency towards PR-production as it is by the imposition of market mechanisms.’

In the final chapter, we are reminded of where this all comes from. The author tells us that the goal of[20] ‘the new left should not be to take over the state but to subordinate the state to the general will.’ Furthermore, he attacks neoliberalism’s economic tool [21]:

‘The ‘methodological individualism’ of the capitalist realist worldview presupposes the philosophy of Max Stirner as much as that of Adam Smith or Hayek in that it regards notions such as the public as ‘spooks,’ phantom abstractions devoid of content. All that is real is the individual (and their families). The symptoms of the failures of this worldview are everywhere — in a disintegrated social sphere in which teenagers shooting each other has become commonplace, in which hospitals incubate aggressive superbugs — what is required is that effect be connected to structural cause.’

The book cannot be salvaged so long as it keeps engaging with this sophistry: The hazy language is intentional, as it seems. The terms we’re most interested in are ill-defined. The book’s writing is hard to read. Even scientific books that try to explain complicated phenomena try to ease the communication of ideas and present them in the clearest light. The book fails at every argument it presents, none of which is scientific, and almost no fact is well-established so the book forgoes citations. Is this what modern authors do to get published, because there is really very little value in this book despite all the praise in the reviews and the endorsement of Slavoj Zizek, who is a jester (descriptive, not derisive) in the world of philosophy, and though he is fun to read, is ultimately not someone whose suggestions have been taken seriously in the field. Perhaps this book should teach us a lesson: In these postmodern times, if a philosopher is unable to properly define his terms, maybe he’s not worth reading, because he can get away with saying anything. This book is more of a pamphlet than a full-fledged book carrying an important thesis that we need to consider, and though it is propaganda written in a sophisticated (and often fun to read) language, it really has nothing to offer and can only be cogent to those with preconceived ideas. What one has in his hand upon buying this book is political rhetoric at worst malicious in its attempts to dismantle the social structure we live in without trying to understand it, and at worst, confused.

Notes:

[1] An oligarchy is a nation ruled by an oligarch — a head of state. Capitalist oligarchy, therefore, is a contradiction in terms.
[2] Ludwig von Mises, The Anti-capitalistic Mentality, LvMI, 2008, p. 79.
[3] Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism, Zer0 Books, 2009, p. 77: ‘We need to begin, as if for the first time, to develop strategies against a Capital which presents itself as ontologically, as well as geographically, ubiquitous.’
[4] Ibid, p. 33. A Fordist society seems to imply a regulated industrial society, whereas the post-Fordist society we currently live in had been largely ‘deregulated.’
[5]Ibid, p. 2.
[6] Ibid, p. 2.
[7] Ibid, p. 2.
[8] See for instance, Thomas Sowell, The Housing Boom and Bust, 2^nd ed., Basic Books, 2010.
[9] Ha-Joon Chang, 23 Things They Don’t Tell You About Capitalism, Bloomsbury Publishing, 2012.
[10] Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism, Zer0 Books, 2009, p. 4.
[11] Ibid, p. 4.
[12] Ibid, pp. 5 – 6.
[13] Ibid, p. 15.
[14] Ibid, p. 80.
[15] Ibid, p. 35. The book cited was Oliver James’ The Selfish Capitalist.
[16] Ibid, p. 35.
[17] Ibid, pp. 42 – 43.
[18] Ibid, p. 44.
[19] Ibid, p. 77.
[20] Ibid, p. 77.

I would like to thank Dr. Abdulrahman Qutub for being with me in a Starbucks in Rochester near the University, he told our friends that I have written an article that is longer than the book itself.

Rochester, New York,
August, 2022.