@ trosso19
2025-02-19 03:22:53
*Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? by Mark Fisher* (2009, Zero Books)
## Why a dare and not a recommendation?
I'm writing this "review" primarily for the Nostr audience. The majority of Nostr users, in my experience, are predisposed to a worldview somewhere in the realm of Anarcho-Capitalism or Libertarianism, with a strong focus on individual autonomy and free markets. The title *Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative* might evoke an immediate negative reaction in the mind of my imaginary Nostr reader. Even worse, looking up summaries of the book or the author before diving in, the reader will find the dreaded phrase "critical theory", seen as a hallmark of the "other" side in the Western culture war. I'm challenging you to not judge this book by its cover.
Despite the book's short (86 page) length, I have found myself spending an unusually large amount of time thinking about the topics discussed within. I'm unsure if my worldview has actually shifted after reading this (I think I'm still close to the Nostr median), but I've enjoyed this exercise in contemplation, and I hope this article can lead someone else to a similarly fruitful experience. I feel compelled to put my thoughts to paper as part of this exercise, and what follows is something like the internal dialog I go through considering and challenging Fisher's main points.
First, despite the word "Capitalism" in the title, this book is not about economics. Rather, the central point is that after the fall of the Soviet Union the prevailing worldview in the Western world is a "business ontology", essentially seeing people as purely material producer/consumers. Most people have internalized this view, seeing no higher purpose or meaning in their lives other than going to work and buying things. Even worse than the widespread internalization of this view, Fisher argues that it is so pervasive that most people can't even conceptualize an alternative. Fisher points out the rapid increases in mental health problems, despair, and suicide, especially among young people in the 21st century as evidence of this argument. *Capitalist Realism* was written in 2009, and I think there is a clear line between Fishers argument and the current conception of a "crisis of meaning" among young people espoused by some online figures such as Jordan Peterson. Whether there is a direct link between the business ontology and crisis of meaning (as Fisher argues) is less clear to me, but he clearly identified a phenomenon that has only gotten more acute since the book was published. Further, Fisher cites popular culture, particularly modern music and movies as evidence of this phenomenon. In his conception, this business ontology leads to endlessly recycled aesthetic callbacks to previous generations, with most media appealing to our nostalgia for a time when people had a genuine belief that the future may be different than the present, which he thinks has been lost by total adoption of this business ontology. I'm not knowledgeable enough in aesthetics to comment on this point, but do have an intuitive feeling that modern movies and music are degenerate from the works created by previous generations. Fisher calls this "Hauntology" as is explored in another book that I haven't read yet.
In a section of the book I found particularly interesting, Fisher critiques the hypocrisy of capitalist neoliberal societies that cite the "Stalinist Bureaucracy" as a fatal fall that led to the demise of the Soviet Union while rapidly adopting the same form of work domestically. Essentially, in the Soviet system most people only "worked" to achieve whatever metric the bureaucrats used to assess their productivity. Whether or not this correlated with producing useful goods or services was entirely irrelevant. If a factory had a quota of making 100 tons of clocks, the workers would just produce overweight and non-functional clocks to meet this quota. All up and down the chain the metrics were met, pleasing the bureaucrats and appearing "productive", but everyone was fully aware that the work was performative and fake. Fisher points to his experience in academia, where universities continued to add more and more administrators to run pointless audit and review programs. Both the faculty and administrators are fully aware that these programs are meaningless and unproductive, but the metrics become a justification of themselves. They don't matter, but they need to exist to make massive administrator bloat and associated bureaucracy appear necessary. Again, in the years since the book's publication the public consciousness of this problem has grown, though the criticism is more often leveled from the political right. I was surprised to read an author I would stereotype as an "ivory tower leftist academic" forcefully level this criticism at his own institution.
As I think about this book, I wonder if it helps to make a distinction between "capitalism" and "fiat". On Nostr we often critique "fiat food", "fiat jobs", and "fiat music" as hollow, meaningless, and temporary things. We hypothesize that sound money will fix the incentives that lead to the societal problems that Fisher attributes to neoliberal capitalism. Fisher does not consider Bitcoin in this book (or any of this other works, to my knowledge) but I'm curious if he would make a similar distinction. If this book was called *Fiat Realism: Is There No Alternative* would it be popular in Bitcoin circles? I think it would be. Maybe people would point to these criticisms leveled within a year of Bitcoin's creation and claim "Bitcoin fixes this". Going back to an earlier point, Fisher doesn't critique free exchange, markets or individual liberty. He critiques a specific culture that currently seems all-pervasive without any alternative. I hope that the freedom money and freedom technology movement we are a part of is a feasible alternative.
I hope this article is helpful to someone. It was certainly helpful for me to write it. I'm interested in hearing your thoughts on this book or this article!