Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative?

This book deserves an intelligent, well thought out review. Unfortunately, you are stuck with mine. I don't think I have the education or background to give this the analysis it deserves, so this is a very subjective rating and review.

There is clearly a lot of value in this book, Fisher having given a new use for the phrase "capital realism" that stuck. A lot of it went right over my head or seemed to come out of nowhere. I had a hard time grokking the structure of the book overall, what with chapters having their own subtitles, as though they are books unto themselves. For such a short book, I found myself highlighting often, though not just for the normal feeling of "this captures the idea being communicated well"; a lot of times it was "this feels important" or "this apparently summarized the point made leading up to it".

What left a sour taste in my mouth, one that still remains, is Chapter 4, on which this philosophy professor speaks to the origins of psychiatric disorders. Do not get me wrong: I think the overall point he is making is incredibly important – that "privatizing" mental illness means that there is no thought or investigation into systemic causes. However, Fisher makes specific claims as to how things like ADHD is the direct consequence of "consumer culture", that dyslexia is really "post-lexia", Really interesting ideas that I think are irresponsible to make as claims. Suddenly, when dealing with something that can be concretely measured and studied, as opposed to abstract concepts such as the big Other, it becomes clear that Fisher is making claims that, at least in the scope of this book, seem obviously unsubstantiated. It was at this point that it became incredibly obvious that Fisher was largely drawing on his own observations as a college professor, looking at his teenage students. Despite the academic language, much of it is the same rhetoric espoused for decades (sometimes centuries) at this point: the internet has broken kids' attention span, that teenagers are lazy (in fancier terms like "hedonic lassitude", etc that older generations faithfully make about the younger generation, yet somehow think that this time, its true. And to an extent it most certainly is. The measurement of that extent is a whole other barrel of monkeys; what I'm speaking of here is truth claims about the origins of these patterns, without the necessary (or any) proof to back it up, aside from abstract philosophical ideas. To be clear, Fisher could be right on everything he's said, and I would still say that, given merely what is present in the book and in academic knowledge at the time of its writing, the claims were poorly made. Teenagers don't suddenly develop ADHD or dyslexia in college, they're frequently diagnosed as small children.

I've already said enough to get my point across, and someone who actually knows the subject matter beyond this book (which, to be fair to Fisher, is probably the target audience) would say that I missed the point, or are hung up on the wrong thing.

My point in speaking about it is that, to the layperson like me, claims such as the ones I've outlined – or the even more brazen one that bipolar is in essence solely caused by capitalism – forces me to stop and question everything said up until that point, and everything after. It is in that sense that, while I do feel I got a lot out of reading this book, I could also say that I got next to nothing; I was exposed to so many ideas, but nothing that I can actually hold to be a groundwork for further ideas. To put it another way, I am grateful for my exposure to so many new (to me) ideas that exist in the world, but I close this book only with the knowledge that they exist instead of their nearness to truth, just as I hold ideas like neoliberalism or neoconservatism.

Purely based on word count, this review seems to skew heavily towards the faults of the book, but its not the case that I find it that way. I just can't speak intelligently enough to any of the other bits.

I read Capitalist Realism for the first time in one of my graduate seminars in 2018, and I think that this was a greater game-changer for me than all of the theory I had read prior (and perhaps since). At the time, I couldn't figure out why. The arguments made in this book are so simple, but they seemed to throw away so much of the curtain for me in ways that other theorists could not. Perhaps it is because the neoliberal age is so fundamentally different than the then-new industrial period that Marx wrote in, than the ideological battles that Gramsci and Trotsky spoke to, than the immediate and visceral brutality that the Frankfurt School tried to understand, or the disillusioned, post-68 age that Lyotard and Deleuze manifested. Moreover, Fisher is the great popularizer, and much of his incisive, rapid style and control of cultural references came from cutting his teeth in the anarchic blogosphere.

Essentially, Fisher argues that capitalism has managed to sideline all other competitors and portray itself as not only the sole realistic socio-economic system, but the only natural one. There's a lot happening under the surface here that I did not understand on my first read-through: he unites Deleuze and Guattari, Lyotard, and Zizek in a way that only a former member of the Cybernetic Culture Research Unit could do. Nick Land was Fisher's doctoral advisor, and Land's mark on Fisher's thinking may be impossible to overstate.

To Fisher, capitalism is a cybernetic system. Any sort of resistance that people set against capitalism manages to get incorporated into it, further reinforcing it. It has a series of feedback cycles that keep it churning, and it generates myths that make it seems like the only natural system. Moreover, he draws on Lacan via Zizek to demonstrate how its ideology works. It has put together a symbolic order to make people apathetic to its violence. Unlike Marx's understanding that ideology hides reality, Zizek finds that it instead makes people cynical. They don't care what happens. But, there are occasional glimpses that make people react in visceral horror (Lacan's "Real," e.g. the climate crisis, mental health, and decentralized bureaucracy). Capitalism uses these tactics to reinforce the symbolic order through marketing techniques (e.g. "greenwashing") and the privatization of issues like stress, but Fisher finds that these examples of the Real could be exploited to fight against capitalism.

Rather than turn back the time to pre-capitalist territorialities, Fisher urges us to build on the systems that capitalism has created. In this way, his argument is (characteristically for the CCRU) accelerationist. The more that Leftists can rely on the decentralization developed by capitalism, the more it can fight against it.

When I read this piece years ago, I almost saw Fisher as a bit defeatist. I couldn't quite grasp what he meant by this, and I thought his all-pervasive understanding of capitalism (like London smog choking us all) meant that there was no way out. Re-reading this, I'm seeing in new light just how optimistic Fisher really is. He's profoundly negative about the current state of the world, but you can see here that he is one of the only thinkers capable of seriously imagining what a 21st Century, post-capitalist system could look like.

Make no mistake, capitalism killed him in 2017 for his ability to threaten it.

I don't think this merits whatever praise it gets, especially for how often it's used among leftist writers when developing their arguments.

This book really... feels devoid of its own thought. The analysis and synthesis of ideas doesn't seem to actually take place, with it relying heavily on the thoughts of others. Considering the amount of times I read some variation of the phrase "as Žižek said," I may as well have gone and read Žižek (or Deleuze and Guattari, for that matter).

There are far too many references to too many pieces of media, which makes everything feel entirely vague or superficial. Even if he could adequately build a point using those pieces of media, it falls short and a lot of that analysis is needless? Like there's some media analysis about how names like McCauley are anonymous and without history, while Corleone is full of history because it's a name that comes from a village! And it's like... What was the point of mentioning this? Or even bringing it up? And it kind of feels like a weird way to say that you think history doesn't come from the Irish or the Scottish, but it does come from the Italians.

And the ableism, I swear. This book is a great example of how the "left" (or people perceived as such) provides entry points for harmful conspiracy theory, especially when it starts making an argument for how mental illness is really only addressed now that pharmaceutical companies can sell everyone SSRIs and make lots of money. He falsely claims that we don't discuss social causation of mental illnesses because we "individualised" it to brain chemistry to blame ourselves (which isn't true now, and definitely wasn't true in 2009). He tries to pin the use of the phrase "economic depression" on mental illness, when there's always been another meaning of the word "depression" (it's a very weird attempt at a gotcha and a strange failure to understand basic language).

He tries to claim that mental illness has increased over time without actually recognising all of the factors (so he'll look at numbers but not at factors contributing to the increase in mental illness, which also includes people feeling more comfortable getting help). He tries to claim that dyslexia has increased because ... people don't read since we have a lot of visual information? And... We don't have evidence for this because, like all learning disabilities, we... don't have full numbers of how many dyslexic people existed in the past and throughout time that writing has existed).

It's just... not good, very vapid, and sloppy. I cannot understand how it constantly gets referenced beyond it having a catchy title, a somewhat well-known author, and a few quotable lines.

Um livro curto, com ideias muito grandes, apresentadas e ilustradas de uma forma bem interessante.
A ideia principal do livro é construir uma teoria de que a situação em que o mundo se encontra hoje é uma na qual o capitalismo é tido como sinônimo de realidade. O titulo do primeiro capitulo é basicamente tudo o que o livro quer explicar: Por que é mais fácil imaginar o fim do mundo do que o fim do capitalismo? (pense em alguma ficção pós apocaliptica e perceba como isso é o padrão)

Não diria que é um livro possivel de entender completamente sem ter algum conhecimento prévio, pra se manter curto e focado, o livro não gasta muito do seu tempo explicando algumas teorias/ideias já de certa forma estabelecidas na filosofia: ele não vai te explicar as ideias de Deleuze, Lacan e Jameson, nem o que é territorialização/deterritorialização (alguem realmente sabe?). Mas acredito que se você estiver curioso e interessado em aprender tais ideias, o livro tem muitas, e faz ilustraçoes interessantes. (No meu caso, por exemplo, eu sabia da existencia de uma teoria do "grande Outro" mas nunca tinha a visto sendo ilustrada/explicada, e achei que o capitulo que fala sobre isso foi muito bom, inclusive divertido com umas metáforas e exemplos engraçados)

Em poucas páginas o livro explica diversas posições diferentes de normalização da situação pós moderna, querendo substituir esse conceito por realismo capitalista, da normalização da burocracia, à medicalização de problemas sociais no ambito da saude mental. Ótimo quantidade de conteúdo compreendível e agregador para a sua pequena quantidade de páginas. Gostaria que essa fosse a segunda, terceira leitura.