Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? (2022 Edition)

Capitalist Realism Is There No Alternative? OceanofPDF.com  First published by Zero Books, 2014 Second edition published by Zero Books, 2022 Zero Books is an imprint of John Hunt Publishing Ltd., No. 3 East St., Alresford,...

Capitalist Realism Is There No Alternative? OceanofPDF.com  First published by Zero Books, 2014 Second edition published by Zero Books, 2022 Zero Books is an imprint of John Hunt Publishing Ltd., No. 3 East St., Alresford, Hampshire SO24 9EE, UK [email protected] www.johnhuntpublishing.com www.zero-books.net For distributor details and how to order please visit the ‘Ordering’ section on our website. Text copyright: Mark Fisher 2008 ISBN: 978 1 80341 430 0 978 1 80341 431 7 (ebook) All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in critical articles or reviews, no part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without prior written permission from the publishers. The rights of Mark Fisher as author have been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Design: Stuart Davies Cover design by Rebecca Wright  charcoalstrudio.co.uk UK: Printed and bound by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon, CR0 4YY Printed in North America by CPI GPS partners We operate a distinctive and ethical publishing philosophy in all areas of our business, from our global network of authors to production and worldwide distribution. OceanofPDF.com Capitalist Realism Is There No Alternative? Mark Fisher Winchester, UK Washington, USA OceanofPDF.com Mark Fisher’s writing put Zer0 Books on the map in 2009. Capitalist Realism continues to define our mission. The world lost a radical thinker when Fisher left us in January of 2017. He was highly respected both as a music writer and a theorist and wrote regularly for frieze, New Statesman, Sight & Sound and The Wire, where he was acting deputy editor for a year. He was a Visiting Fellow at Goldsmiths, University Of London, and maintained one of the most successful weblogs on cultural theory, k-punk (http://k-punk.abstractdynamics.org). Also by Mark Fisher: Ghosts of My Life: Writings on Depression, Hauntology and Lost Futures Paperback: 9781780992266 ebook: 9781782796244 The Resistible Demise of Michael Jackson Paperback: 9781846943485 ebook: 9781789042702 OceanofPDF.com To my wife, Zöe, my parents, Bob and Linda, and the readers of my website OceanofPDF.com  CONTENTS Foreword by Zoe Fisher Introduction by Alex Niven 1: It’s easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism 2: What if you held a protest and everyone came? 3: Capitalism and the Real 4: Reflexive impotence, immobilization and liberal communism 5: October 6, 1979: ‘Don’t let yourself get attached to anything’ 6: All that is solid melts into PR: market Stalinism and bureaucratic anti- production 7: ‘…if you can watch the overlap of one reality with another’: capitalist realism as dreamwork and memory disorder 8: ‘There’s no central exchange’ 9: Marxist Supernanny Afterword by Tariq Goddard OceanofPDF.com  Foreword by Zoe Fisher I vividly remember the months when Mark was finishing the last draft of Capitalist Realism. We had left London to live in Suffolk, a place that was special to him as it was full of happy memories from his childhood holidays. The breathing space our move gave him allowed Mark to devote proper, uninterrupted time to completing the book. Once in Suffolk, he told me that the ideas had come more easily and he was excited about completing the project. “I would be really pleased if it sold 500 copies”, he told me one day when we were out walking in Woodbridge. During that period, Mark was also busy trying to find lecturing work and build up his freelance writing — he did a brief stint working at The Wire as a temporary guest editor, but his main point of contact with his readers was still his blog. Those years were admittedly tough as Mark struggled to secure a permanent academic appointment, but they were also a happy and optimistic time for us. Mark enjoyed the contrast of his busy days in London with his time in Suffolk where there were fewer demands on him, allowing him to concentrate on other projects such as On Vanishing Land. By the time of the launch party for Capitalist Realism, arriving just days before we had found out I was pregnant with our son George, it felt like things were coming together, and I remember Mark having the best time that evening, surrounded by people who made him feel energised and inspired. I know that the success of Capitalist Realism really took Mark by surprise, and what followed over the next few years was Mark being able to, as he put it, “live out his dream” — lecturing at Goldsmiths — but still having time to work on his writing and traveling to various guest lectures and speaking engagements. In true Mark-style, even after our son George was born in 2010, he managed to continue to be all things to all people. He never wanted to turn down an invitation to speak somewhere or an offer to write, as these things never felt like work to him. To observe Mark lecturing or speaking at an event was to see him in his element, as exciting and fulfilling for him as the audiences he communicated with. Just as importantly, he told me that he did not have to look over his shoulder for his depression anymore, and even though I knew that those feelings of worthlessness and doubt would never magically disappear, I was relieved that they were no longer in the foreground, and I hoped they could be kept at bay. Mark was often moved by individuals who felt that they were able to share their own experiences of mental health with him, inspired by the fact that he had always been so candid and open about his own struggles, and the release of the book was a catalyst for others to speak up. Since those days, the grief and pain of losing Mark never gets smaller, but George and I have had to learn how to build a new life around it — it is the hardest thing we will ever have to do. Mark remains George’s reference point and is still strangely present in any decision or event that occurs in our family. George is beginning to consider his dad, not through the eyes of the six-year-old he was when Mark died, but through the eyes of the adolescent he is now. As George explores his emerging sense of self, I see Mark’s influence as a huge part of who he is becoming. He is very much Mark’s son; his mannerisms and expressions, his intellectual curiosity, his dedication, his insistence on having the last word in a contentious situation, his love for Marvel, football and living in Felixstowe. Over the last few years, George has begun to learn more about who Mark was in the wider world — to his friends, colleagues and followers. He will watch Mark’s lectures on YouTube, look up his writing online and see what others thought of him. I can’t comprehend the power of seeing a stranger on the underground, or at an airport, reading a book that your dad has written, but what I do know is that it fills George with a sense of pride and a knowledge that his dad was someone who was significant to many people. George and I know that we are not the only ones who lost Mark, and are not the only ones left with a space that is impossible to fill. I think back to that conversation in Woodbridge, about Mark’s hopes that 500 copies of Capitalist Realism sold would feel like success to him, and I am in awe of how much he achieved and how many people he reached. The fact that his ideas are still relevant and discussed will not bring Mark back, but there is no need for them to. He will always be a part of our lives. OceanofPDF.com  Introduction by Alex Niven ‘Dear Mark,’ began an email of January 2010 to a man I had never met: I read your book Capitalist Realism last week, and it felt like coming up for air after a long time spent underwater. I would like to thank you from the bottom of my heart for giving such eloquent expression to pretty much everything that needed to be said, and for providing a reason to hope, when I for one was just about ready to despair. Reading these phrases back now, well over a decade later, I’m slightly embarrassed by the wording, but not at all by the sentiment. At the time, I had just suffered a head-on collision with the music industry, after a long period of post-teen crisis sparked by a series of family bereavements. I was depressed, I suppose — in the trough of my mid-twenties, and looking for explanations about why even the basics of twenty-first-century work, social, and private life seemed so hard, so disempowered, so existentially thankless. For me — and for many others in a similar place both then and since — encountering Capitalist Realism really did feel like surfacing (to cite the title and central theme of Margaret Atwood’s haunting novel of 1972 — a canonical text for Mark). In a society where everything was set up to make you think that your emotional wellbeing began and ended with your own personal psychodrama, perhaps the simplest, most important thing Mark’s book did was to suggest that, just maybe, mental suffering might have something to do with structural flaws in society as a whole. Put another way, in the thick of a political system which endlessly promoted the notion that we were all ultimately alone, Capitalist Realism announced that we were all suffering together — and also, more hopefully, that if we were to realise this, and somehow make connections between our several hardships, we would be taking the first step towards doing something we seemed to have mostly forgotten about by the late Noughties: mounting an organised resistance. Before anything else, this is the vital, near-spiritual message which came along with the short, sharp, explosive text that was Capitalist Realism, published in the last weeks of 2009 on the eve of a new and tumultuous decade. At its most basic level, whatever political and theoretical nuances it might otherwise have implied, this was a book which called for a joining of human hands. This is partly why, despite my timidity, and despite the fact that I didn’t usually do this sort of thing, I worked up the courage to send its author a short thank-you note in the first days of 2010 — and received a short, encouraging response from him the following day (Mark was famously generous with time and support when it came to helping younger writers — sometimes, it must be said, to the detriment of his own workload and wellbeing). It is also why Capitalist Realism went on to become one of the seminal political texts of the 2010s, and indeed the whole of the twenty-first century thus far. Unlike most forms of writing, in all genres, this was a book which set aside solipsism, irony, and ego to imagine a community of people united by a simple belief that the way things were was not okay — and then to dangle the tantalising possibility that this imagined community might soon become a social reality capable of changing the world. As one of the most evocative chapter titles in Capitalist Realism demanded, with almost childlike clarity and hopefulness: What if you held a protest and everyone came? But in spite of such lyric universalism, Capitalist Realism was also the product of a set of specific, even bathetic local circumstances — many of which have been forgotten or passed over in the years since this peculiar essay became one of the primary texts of the modern era. The first of these is the distinctive personal journey which led to its publication. Although, somewhat incredibly, Capitalist Realism was Mark Fisher’s first proper book, it marked the end of two decades of non- conformist intellectual questing for its author. In fact, given that Mark was 41 when it was published — a fair bit older than the average age for a first- time author — it should probably be viewed as a belated breakthrough at the end of an unusually long professional apprenticeship. And yet it was no immature Bildungsroman. In the years prior to his first authored book, Mark had made strenuous attempts to make the case that there might be a viable alternative to the received, late-twentieth-century template for writing, scholarship, and thinking. Capitalist Realism was merely the final proof that he was right. After a working-class upbringing in the English East Midlands, Mark benefited in his formative years from contact with the fertile intellectual climate of British higher education in the late Eighties and early Nineties (crucially, a time before the introduction of tuition fees in 1998 triggered the radical marketisation of the British state system). As a postgraduate student at the University of Warwick for much of the Nineties, he was one of the key members of the Cybernetic Culture Research Unit (CCRU), an ‘accelerationist’ tendency dedicated to imagining new cultural modes on the far side of late-capitalist dystopias. Though this is not the place to provide a detailed summary of the CCRU and its often occult subculture, I think we can say that Mark’s training in this aberrant faction hardwired him to avoid following a traditional career path in the years after he completed his PhD, on ‘cybernetic theory-fiction’, at Warwick in 1999. Further aided (and impeded in equal measure) by the fickleness of twenty-first-century academia, Mark would make good on his cybernetic training to become one of the first truly indispensable presences on the still- young internet in the early-to-mid Noughties. Free from the strictures of a secure academic job, Mark made a virtue of what would later be called ‘precarity’ by occupying the centre of a scene described by Simon Reynolds as a ‘constellation of blogs’. For a five-year period lasting roughly from the Iraq War to the Global Financial Crisis, this cabal of theoretical and pop- cultural discussion was home to some of the best, most entertaining writing anywhere on the planet. Circa 2006, chancing on some of the sites in this corner of the so-called blogosphere — weird avatars for their IRL authors with aliases like Kino Fist, The Impostume, blissblog, and Sit Down Man, You’re a Bloody Tragedy — you would tend to encounter long, usually pretty good natured debates, which were begun in the posts themselves and then endlessly elaborated in their byzantine comment sections. Subjects included — but were not limited to — the legacy of M. R. James’s ghost stories, the misuses of Derridean theory, the legacy of post-war state-funded broadcasting, Wu Tang Clan, V for Vendetta, the pointlessness of mainstream media, and the imaginative paucity of Arctic Monkeys lyrics. In the middle of this informal grouping, and supplying most of its ideational energy, was Mark’s seminal k-punk blog. As well as acting as a hub for the wider scene’s primitive version of social media, k-punk was also the space where Mark developed a philosophically expansive body of work, which used a series of mainly cultural examples to try to find an escape route from the airless atmosphere of the High Noughties — surely the tackiest, most desultory interlude in modern history. When the Global Financial Crisis descended to smash apart the complacency of this micro-period in 2008, Zer0 Books emerged — a lightning response to a putative ‘revolutionary moment’, as well as the culmination of years of creative brainstorming on the blogosphere. Set up by Mark and a pair of (non-CCRU) Warwick pals — the novelist Tariq Goddard and the academic Matteo Mandarini (with publicist Emma Goddard completing the lineup) — the foundation of Zer0 marked the point at which this hitherto marginal tendency — perhaps the only really authentic literary avant-garde in Britain at the time — started to make serious inroads into the mainstream of reading and reviewing. Though Capitalist Realism was not the first Zer0 book (it was preceded in 2009 by texts such as Owen Hatherley’s architecture polemic Militant Modernism — and indeed by Mark’s own edited collection, The Resistible Demise of Michael Jackson), it was clearly a manifesto of sorts for the new publishing imprint — a book-length expansion of the actual manifesto Mark wrote for the inside cover of every Zer0 book, which railed against “cretinous anti- intellectualism” and “expensively educated hacks”, and called for an “idea of publishing as a making public of the intellectual”.  Over time, Capitalist Realism would sell well over 100,000 copies in its English-language version alone, to become something like the Unknown Pleasures of the Zer0 narrative. Indeed, in ways that would later become tragically apposite, Zer0 was in a deep sense a sort of latter-day attempt to repeat the example of post-punk indie label Factory Records — with the grey, featureless landscape of twenty-first-century publishing standing in for the Seventies backdrop which lay behind Joy Division’s seminal modernist noir. As in the case of Unknown Pleasures and Factory, Capitalist Realism and Zer0 would ultimately engender a sort of filmic saga which underlined just how objectively intriguing — and how subjectively painful — it is when anti-capitalists try to turn the structures of the market in on itself in a sustained and vigorous way. But that is a story for another time and place. So much for the publishing narrative of Capitalist Realism — a sort of making flesh of the internet’s virtual energies by a maverick faction intent on reviving the best aspects of the late-twentieth-century counterculture. But what of the wider historical backdrop against which the book positions itself as both corrective and critique? As we have seen, Capitalist Realism was on one level a product of the specific environment of Noughties Britain. With hindsight, from the vantage point of our own era of creeping authoritarianism and looming ecological catastrophe, we might be tempted to look kindly on this period of relative social stability and comparatively high living standards. But we should be clear that it represented a particular kind of dystopia for Mark and for many other members of the Zer0 circle. Away from more complex debates about the deepening inequality which occurred under Third Way liberalism (of which more momentarily), it is important to grasp that much of the sense of desperation Mark harnessed in Capitalist Realism arose from a historically distinct feeling at this time that there was no visible opposition — anywhere, whatsoever — to a slowly worsening status quo. After a flare-up of anti-capitalist protest in the very early part of the decade (the heyday of Naomi Klein’s anti-globalisation screed No Logo), there was a drastic settling-down in much of the world in the mid- to late- Noughties. At some unspecified point during these years, a mood of depressive apathy came to predominate above all else. The sense that there was no alternative to globalised capitalism, to cite the central refrain of Capitalist Realism, had of course been pervasive since at least as far back as the early Nineties, when the end of Actually Existing Socialism in Eastern Europe signalled the start of neoliberalism’s imperial phase. But it was only really in the years immediately preceding the Global Financial Crisis that this apparently realistic — actually fatalistic — world-spirit became truly hegemonic. In the context of Britain, broadly representative of developed countries throughout the world, the sense of hopeless entropy had been encouraged by the political misdeeds of the presiding New Labour government. After coming to power on a wave of optimism (even among many radicals) in 1997, this centrist or centre-right administration had spent its first term in government (1997–2001) triangulating between neoconservatism (tough talk on immigration and benefits claimants, continued privatisation of public amenities, fawning support for big business) with some genuinely radical reforms, most notably in foreign policy (such as the referendums for Scottish and Welsh devolution in 1997 and the Good Friday Agreement for peace in the north of Ireland in 1998). However, by 2003 at the latest, when the Blair government’s foreign brief took a sharp turn to the right with the onset of the Iraq War, New Labour had become a far more typical neoliberal proposition in the classic Reaganite-Thatcherite mould. As privatisation reforms in the National Health Service continued apace, and as the Blair regime raised (and threatened to further raise) the university tuition fees they had first introduced in 1998, there was a strong sense of decline and fall in British culture — especially among younger people — which was nonetheless offset and obscured by a housing-market bubble and a seemingly robust economy which guaranteed a decent standard of living for many older professionals (though not, as we will see, those in the increasingly besieged public sector). The mass-media expression of this zeitgeist was a glut of ultra-derivative, weirdly hyped guitar bands like Kaiser Chiefs, Razorlight and the Zutons, and a venal celebrity culture epitomised by exploitative TV shows like Big Brother and I’m a Celebrity … Get Me Out of Here! (not to mention, at the bottom of the barrel, trashy twilight-of-print magazines like Heat, Nuts and Zoo). For the most part, in the years after the largest protest in human history (the February 2003 anti-Iraq War demonstration) was roundly ignored by Blair and his ilk, it felt as though we were trapped inside an endlessly reloading cycle of late-capitalist tawdriness, with no counterculture or coalition of dissent to offer even a modicum of friction, let alone relief. It was into this suffocating historical moment that Capitalist Realism dropped like a bomb in the run-up to Christmas 2009, after a bewildering year or so in which a tottering political system had been subject to a series of ineffectual patch-up jobs (the bailout of the banking system after the financial crisis, the election of neoliberal-lite US president Barack Obama, halfhearted attempts to “clean up” British politics after a protracted scandal about exorbitant MP expense claims, and so on and so forth ad nauseam). At a little under 25,000 words, Mark’s book was clearly no expansive work of theory or wide-ranging political survey (though it was also something more than a really succinct manifesto like that of Marx and Engels, which is half the length). Nonetheless, there were certain fundamental keynotes struck in Capitalist Realism, which distinguished it from books in the same broad literary category — notably those of Fredric Jameson and Slavoj Žižek, Mark’s immediate contemporary influences — and which ultimately gave it a purchase way beyond the more discursive work of his peers. As I suggested in talking about my own discovery of Capitalist Realism, there was a basic sense of righteousness and timeliness in the communitarian call to arms in Mark’s text, which to an extent bypassed its more specific examples and gave it a charge of emotional revelation. Nonetheless, those real-world examples were in another sense fundamental to the core message Mark was trying to get across in the book, and they helped to ensure that this was no abstract theoretical prose-poem about the coming community. At heart, the quotidian narrative of the book revolves around interconnected themes of the relationship between old and young, blocked generational handover, and the central role played by education and its professional structures in immiserating both teachers and students — and by extension, the civic and intellectual livelihood of society as a whole. Some years before debates about ‘millennials’ and ‘zoomers’ gained wide traction, Mark found an evocative metaphor for the newly vast generation gap of the twenty-first century in the plot of Alfonso Cuarón’s 2006 film, Children of Men — the summary of which supplies Capitalist Realism with its eerily arresting opening. In Cuarón’s dystopian near-future Britain (first imagined in the source text by the novelist-turned-Tory peer P. D. James), an entire society has mysteriously lost the ability to bear children. For Mark, this narrative demands to be read figuratively, as a basis for interrogating late-capitalism’s presiding mood of stasis and fatalism. Moving from the pithy hook borrowed from Žižek and Jameson — that it is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism (as embodied in the apocalyptic backdrop to Cuarón’s film) — we are then presented with a dyad of more pointed provocations: “How long can a culture persist without the new?” and “What happens if the young are no longer capable of producing surprises?” Once again, it’s useful to stress that this emphasis on cultural stagnation was partly a response to the specific atmosphere of the later Noughties (nowadays, after the series of socio-political shocks which harried the Long 2010s, we would be much less likely to talk of a world devoid of ‘surprises’). And yet the basic diagnosis of creative dearth has remained broadly accurate as a judgment on our wider historical epoch. In its outline, this theory is both an extension of the earlier Jamesonian critique of ‘postmodernism’ (as indeed Mark acknowledged), and a premonition of the discussions of ‘retromania’ (the idea that pop culture underwent a headlong retreat into its own past after the late Eighties) which would later climax with the publication of Simon Reynolds’s 2011 study of that name — and, indeed, Mark’s own 2014 anthology, Ghosts of My Life (this was very much a meme that had been nurtured and elaborated on the Noughties blog scene, of which both authors were key members).  But it was given a more solid grounding in Capitalist Realism, through a series of vignettes drawn from Mark’s experiences of precarious academia. Embedded in one of the first really widely read critiques of late-capitalist public-sector work life, Mark’s brilliant neologism ‘market Stalinism’ summed up what was actually going on in countless dismal offices and meeting rooms throughout the world at the time. In the typical public-sector workplace, Mark argued, what we have is not a direct comparison of workers’ performance or output, but a comparison between the audited representation of that performance and output. Inevitably, a short-circuiting occurs, and work becomes geared towards the generation and massaging of representations rather than to the official goals of the work itself. Indeed, an anthropological study of local government in Britain argues that “More effort goes into ensuring that a local authority’s services are represented correctly than goes into actually improving those services”. This reversal of priorities is one of the hallmarks of a system which can be characterized without hyperbole as ‘market Stalinism’. What late capitalism repeats from Stalinism is just this valuing of symbols of achievement over actual achievement. This bold naming of the capitalist ‘big Other’ was of a piece — as Mark’s adjacent allusion to Khrushchev’s Stalin-denouncing ‘Secret Speech’ of 1956 makes plain — to a wider strategy in Capitalist Realism, which is evident from the title downwards. This was quite simply and brilliantly to foreground a broad comparison between late capitalism and the system it was supposed to have supplanted: the Actually Existing Socialism of the post-war Communist Eastern Bloc. But again, and indeed in another détournement of the Western stereotype that late-twentieth-century Eastern Europe was a place of cultural impoverishment, the portrayal of a civic landscape devoid of creative energy was part of a much wider argument: that neoliberal societies such as Britain and the United States were simply not growing by this stage of capitalist (un)development. If elder academics and intellectuals were mentally boxed in and prevented from imagining new ways of being and doing, then, as Mark also suggested, the feeling of Kafkaesque helplessness and hopelessness in the face of the market-Stalinist bureaucracy was also filtering down into the minds of the young in their crucial formative years. Drawing on his own experiences of teaching in further education, Mark presented another ground-breaking diagnosis of an adolescent malaise he termed ‘depressive anhedonia’. This he defined in the following terms, as one constituted not by an inability to get pleasure so much as … by an inability to do anything else except pursue pleasure. There is a sense that ‘something is missing’ — but no appreciation that this mysterious, missing enjoyment can only be accessed beyond the pleasure principle. In large part this is a consequence of students’ ambiguous structural position, stranded between their old role as subjects of disciplinary institutions and their new status as consumers of services … Students are aware that if they don’t attend for weeks on end, and/or if they don’t produce any work, they will not face any meaningful sanction. They typically respond to this freedom not by pursuing projects but by falling into hedonic (or anhedonic) lassitude: the soft narcosis, the comfort food oblivion of Playstation, all-night TV and marijuana. Predating the hegemony of the smartphone by some years, this analysis got right to the heart of why twenty-first-century youth culture had ground to a halt, in spite or perhaps because of the seeming liberality of postmodern capitalist societies. In a historical period where the suppression of personal freedom and fulfilment (as apparently embodied in the fallen communist regimes of the late-twentieth century) was seen as the ultimate evil, why did young people feel so unfulfilled and so lacking in vitality? Going beyond stock — and by this point seriously outdated — doctrinaire Marxist talk of ‘false consciousness’, Mark presented a simple, empirically grounded, and utterly plausible explanation. Underneath the positivity and surface euphoria of the golden age of globalisation — which still just about lingered into the Late Noughties — Capitalist Realism demonstrated how the supremacy of the market had in fact led to the total subjection of citizens remodelled as consumers. Having been denied even a vocabulary of oppression by neoliberalism in the years of its ascendancy, there was radical power in Mark’s ability to put a name to the forms of social control which many people felt but few could vocalise. This was, if you like, Khrushchev’s Secret Speech remodelled for the years of reality TV, tuition fees, and the iPod Nano. If some of the writing in Capitalist Realism feels just a tad dated today, it is partly because of the book’s astonishing success in the years since its publication. Despite its substantial impact when it was first released in late 2009, the really viral spread of Mark’s text occurred slightly later, beginning with the series of events which occurred in and around 2011 — the ‘year of dreaming dangerously’ in some accounts. In a British context, the ground was laid for Capitalist Realism’s journey towards ubiquity by the student protests of late 2010 — which followed from the election of a right-wing Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition government and its fateful decision to raise university tuition fees from around £3,000 per year to around £9,000 (in line, it should be pointed out, with a recommendation in a report commissioned by the outgoing New Labour Prime Minister Gordon Brown). This was, in a sense, the moment when all the discussion in Capitalist Realism of a dystopian education system heading for disaster began to seem truly prescient. As the prospect of massively enlarged student debt combined with the first onslaught of the Coalition government’s ‘austerity’ programme (which saw savage, neoliberalism-in-extremis cuts right across the public sector), there was a feeling that a tipping point had finally been reached. While Mark had juxtaposed his diagnoses of market Stalinism and depressive anhedonia with rallying criticisms that modern students seemed ‘politically disengaged’ and ‘resigned to their fate’, the protests which erupted throughout British cities against the tuition-fee rise suggested that such provocations might have been at least partly successful. Indeed, as vast crowds of student protestors were alternately kettled by police on London streets and abruptly radicalised by sit-ins and occupations in university buildings across Britain, it was clear that Capitalist Realism had itself played a key role in achieving what Mark characterised as ‘a way out of the motivation/de-motivation binary’. In a blogpost written at the time, Mark celebrated the class composition of the student protests in London, commenting how (we) Lacan-reading hipsters were also there, alongside the ‘banlieue-style youth from Croydon, Peckham, the council estates of Islington.’ In other words, this brought together working-class culture and Bohemia in something like the same way that art schools — so crucial to UK pop-art culture since the Fifties — used to. That parenthetic ‘we’ was a characteristic gesture of modesty on Mark’s part. In fact, the demonstrators in late 2010 were far more likely to be reading his own pragmatic reworkings of Lacanian theory in Capitalist Realism than anything written by Lacan himself. As word of mouth about this almost uncannily timely book spread, and as the British protests led quickly into the far more momentous global irruptions of the Year of Dreaming Dangerously proper (the Arab Spring, Occupy Wall Street, the Spanish Indignados movement, the anti-austerity protests in Athens), it became more and more apparent that Capitalist Realism was one of the manifestos of choice for those involved in the radical outbursts of the early 2010s. As Mark had written in his stirring peroration to the book: 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. Whereas such rhetoric had seemed like mere hopeful (perhaps wishful) thinking in the late Noughties, the events of 2010–2012 ensured that it was now something like straightforward reportage. As a new mood of militancy descended to replace the apathetic torpor of the previous decade, the strange, breathless mixture of present-tense grammar forms in this utopic rallying cry began to make a powerful kind of sense. Suddenly, it really did seem as though anything might be possible again. What happened next is probably broadly familiar to most people — and now we begin to intrude onto our own ambiguous, still-unfolding present tense. Though the aftereffects of the radical breakthrough of the early 2010s rumbled on for the next decade or so, and though many leading figures on the contemporary left still credit this interlude (and its key text Capitalist Realism) as a conversion moment, it must be said that at the time of writing, much of the world seems to have fallen back into a state of paralysis not unlike that which provoked Mark’s polemical anger back in the late Noughties. In the Anglosphere, the channelling of radical energies into left-populist figures like Bernie Sanders and Jeremy Corbyn briefly dangled the possibility of large-scale political reform. But by the beginning of the 2020s, at the latest, both had been defeated with varying degrees of finality. Meanwhile, Syriza’s experiment in leftist government in Greece fizzled out long ago, and the global Occupy movement has largely become a historical curiosity. Underneath it all, the structural weaknesses of global capitalism have continued to generate recurrent crises. But capitalist governments have somehow managed to hobble on in the absence of any really cogent alternative. With ecological catastrophe now even more of a clear and present danger than it was when Capitalist Realism was written, Mark’s borrowed axiom about the end of the world being easier to imagine than the end of capitalism is, if anything, even more apposite. Perhaps demographic change will eventually lead to a great reformist breakthrough, as radically inclined millennials and zoomers come to dominate global governments in the approach to the 2030s. But we have to face the fact that while leftist ideas and attitudes are far more influential and more frequently articulated now than they were in the late Noughties, the call for a revival of protest and activism by what might be termed the Capitalist Realism generation has not yet generated any really lasting radical outcomes (let alone sparked anything like the political revolutions of the past). At the same time, fascism and the far-right are resurgent, raising the possibility of a capitalist collapse that will lead to the triumph of militarism and authoritarianism rather than any more humane egalitarian overhaul. The personal postscript to Capitalist Realism was, of course, also one of sadness and broken dreams. While the book brought Mark acclaim and a wide readership, it did not bring him the lasting professional success it merited — and regardless of its (lack of) impact on his career, the attention the book garnered in the first half of the 2010s had little effect either way on his declining mental health. It is important to make clear that Mark’s tragic suicide in January 2017 had nothing directly to do with Capitalist Realism. Nothing would be so crass — and totally unfounded — as to say that Mark’s decision to take his own life was due to disappointment that the revival of protest he had prophesied and provoked in 2009 had appeared to run aground by early 2017 — or to draw glib analogies between his personal struggles and the socio-historical narrative of the 2010s. Nonetheless, I think we can at least say that Mark’s death was indeed an event with wider social impact — mostly because it deprived us of an unusually eloquent and perceptive social commentator, and because it ruled out the possibility that there would ever be a proper sequel to the astonishing generational manifesto that was Capitalist Realism. And yet, when all is said and done, and setting aside all questions of historical relevance, we have ultimately to head the central argument of Mark’s masterpiece — which is at least as profound as anything in the philosophy of Kierkegaard, Hegel or Marx. At bottom, Capitalist Realism tells us that when a community or an individual is being oppressed, there really is no more radical or necessary act than to look beyond the apparent limitations of the present in order to believe that something other than what appears to be real and pragmatic might one day materialise — and probably sooner, and in more forceful ways, than anyone is capable of envisioning at the moment. The alternative, as Mark so passionately argued, is to deceive yourself that there is no alternative — and as he proved beyond doubt, that delusion is as ridiculous as it is damaging to the fate of human life at its most basic level of meaning. In spite of its subtexts of tragedy and frustrated idealism, there seems little doubt that because of this core message, Capitalist Realism will have many more days in the sun. OceanofPDF.com  1 It’s easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism In one of the key scenes in Alfonso Cuarón’s 2006 film Children of Men, Clive Owen’s character, Theo, visits a friend at Battersea Power Station, which is now some combination of government building and private collection. Cultural treasures – Michelangelo’s David, Picasso’s Guernica, Pink Floyd’s inflatable pig – are preserved in a building that is itself a refurbished heritage artifact. This is our only glimpse into the lives of the elite, holed up against the effects of a catastrophe which has caused mass sterility: no children have been born for a generation. Theo asks the question, ‘how all this can matter if there will be no-one to see it?’ The alibi can no longer be future generations, since there will be none. The response is nihilistic hedonism: ‘I try not to think about it’. What is unique about the dystopia in Children of Men is that it is specific to late capitalism. This isn’t the familiar totalitarian scenario routinely trotted out in cinematic dystopias (see, for example, James McTeigue’s 2005 V for Vendetta). In the P.D. James novel on which the film is based, democracy is suspended and the country is ruled over by a self-appointed Warden, but, wisely, the film downplays all this. For all that we know, the authoritarian measures that are everywhere in place could have been implemented within a political structure that remains, notionally, democratic. The War on Terror has prepared us for such a development: the normalization of crisis produces a situation in which the repealing of measures brought in to deal with an emergency becomes unimaginable (when will the war be over?)  Watching Children of Men, we are inevitably reminded of the phrase attributed to Fredric Jameson and Slavoj Žižek, that it is easier to imagine the end of the world than it is to imagine the end of capitalism. That slogan captures precisely what I mean by ‘capitalist realism’: 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. Once, dystopian films and novels were exercises in such acts of imagination – the disasters they depicted acting as narrative pretext for the emergence of different ways of living. Not so in Children of Men. The world that it projects seems more like an extrapolation or exacerbation of ours than an alternative to it. In its world, as in ours, ultra-authoritarianism and Capital are by no means incompatible: internment camps and franchise coffee bars co-exist. In Children of Men, public space is abandoned, given over to uncollected garbage and stalking animals (one especially resonant scene takes place inside a derelict school, through which a deer runs). Neoliberals, the capitalist realists par excellence, have celebrated the destruction of public space but, contrary to their official hopes, there is no withering away of the state in Children of Men, only a stripping back of the state to its core military and police functions (I say ‘official’ hopes since 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.) The catastrophe in Children of Men is neither waiting down the road, nor has it already happened. Rather, it is being lived through. There is no punctual moment of disaster; the world doesn’t end with a bang, it winks out, unravels, gradually falls apart. What caused the catastrophe to occur, who knows; its cause lies long in the past, so absolutely detached from the present as to seem like the caprice of a malign being: a negative miracle, a malediction which no penitence can ameliorate. Such a blight can only be eased by an intervention that can no more be anticipated than was the onset of the curse in the first place. Action is pointless; only senseless hope makes sense. Superstition and religion, the first resorts of the helpless, proliferate. But what of the catastrophe itself? It is evident that the theme of sterility must be read metaphorically, as the displacement of another kind of anxiety. I want to argue this anxiety cries out to be read in cultural terms, and the question the film poses is: how long can a culture persist without the new? What happens if the young are no longer capable of producing surprises? Children of Men connects with the suspicion that the end has already come, the thought that it could well be the case that the future harbors only reiteration and re-permutation. Could it be that there are no breaks, no ‘shocks of the new’ to come? Such anxieties tend to result in a bi-polar oscillation: the ‘weak messianic’ hope that there must be something new on the way lapses into the morose conviction that nothing new can ever happen. The focus shifts from the Next Big Thing to the last big thing – how long ago did it happen and just how big was it? T.S. Eliot looms in the background of Children of Men, which, after all, inherits the theme of sterility from The Waste Land. The film’s closing epigraph ‘shantih shantih shantih’ has more to do with Eliot’s fragmentary pieces than the Upanishads’ peace. Perhaps it is possible to see the concerns of another Eliot – the Eliot of ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’ – ciphered in Children of Men. It was in this essay that Eliot, in anticipation of Harold Bloom, described the reciprocal relationship between the canonical and the new. The new defines itself in response to what is already established; at the same time, the established has to reconfigure itself in response to the new. Eliot’s claim was that the exhaustion of the future does not even leave us with the past. Tradition counts for nothing when it is no longer contested and modified. A culture that is merely preserved is no culture at all. The fate of Picasso’s Guernica in the film – once a howl of anguish and outrage against Fascist atrocities, now a wall-hanging – is exemplary. Like its Battersea hanging space in the film, the painting is accorded ‘iconic’ status only when it is deprived of any possible function or context. No cultural object can retain its power when there are no longer new eyes to see it.  We do not need to wait for Children of Men’s near-future to arrive to see this transformation of culture into museum pieces. 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. Walk around the British Museum, where you see objects torn from their lifeworlds and assembled as if on the deck of some Predator spacecraft, and you have a powerful image of this process at work. In the conversion of practices and rituals into merely aesthetic objects, the beliefs of previous cultures are objectively ironized, transformed into artifacts. Capitalist realism is therefore not a particular type of realism; it is more like realism in itself. As Marx and Engels themselves observed in The Communist Manifesto, [Capital] has drowned the most heavenly ecstasies of religious fervor, of chivalrous enthusiasm, of philistine sentimentalism, in the icy water of egotistical calculation. It has resolved personal worth into exchange value, and in place of the numberless indefeasible chartered freedoms, has set up that single, unconscionable freedom — Free Trade. In one word, for exploitation, veiled by religious and political illusions, it has substituted naked, shameless, direct, brutal exploitation. 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. Yet this turn from belief to aesthetics, from engagement to spectatorship, is held to be one of the virtues of capitalist realism. In claiming, as Badiou puts it, to have ‘delivered us from the “fatal abstractions” inspired by the “ideologies of the past”’, capitalist realism presents itself as a shield protecting us from the perils posed by belief itself. The attitude of ironic distance proper to postmodern capitalism is supposed to immunize us against the seductions of fanaticism. Lowering our expectations, we are told, is a small price to pay for being protected from terror and totalitarianism. ‘We live in a contradiction,’ Badiou has observed: a brutal state of affairs, profoundly inegalitarian – where all existence is evaluated in terms of money alone – is presented to us as ideal. To justify their conservatism, the partisans of the established order cannot really call it ideal or wonderful. So instead, they have decided to say that  all the rest is horrible. Sure, they say, we may not live in a condition of perfect Goodness. But we’re lucky that we don’t live in a condition of Evil. Our democracy is not perfect. But it’s better than the bloody dictatorships. Capitalism is unjust. But it’s not criminal like Stalinism. We let millions of Africans die of AIDS, but we don’t make racist nationalist declarations like Milosevic. We kill Iraqis with our airplanes, but we don’t cut their throats with machetes like they do in Rwanda, etc. The ‘realism’ here is analogous to the deflationary perspective of a depressive who believes that any positive state, any hope, is a dangerous illusion. In their account of capitalism, surely the most impressive since Marx’s, Deleuze and Guattari describe capitalism as a kind of dark potentiality which haunted all previous social systems. Capital, they argue, is the ‘unnamable Thing’, the abomination, which primitive and feudal societies ‘warded off in advance’. When it actually arrives, capitalism brings with it a massive desacralization of culture. It is a system which is no longer governed by any transcendent Law; on the contrary, it dismantles all such codes, only to re-install them on an ad hoc basis. The limits of capitalism are not fixed by fiat, but defined (and redefined) pragmatically and improvisationally. This makes capitalism very much like the Thing in John Carpenter’s film of the same name: a monstrous, infinitely plastic entity, capable of metabolizing and absorbing anything with which it comes into contact. Capital, Deleuze and Guattari says, is a ‘motley painting of everything that ever was’; a strange hybrid of the ultra-modern and the archaic. In the years since Deleuze and Guattari wrote the two volumes of their Capitalism And Schizophrenia, it has seemed as if the deterritorializing impulses of capitalism have been confined to finance, leaving culture presided over by the forces of reterritorialization. This malaise, the feeling that there is nothing new, is itself nothing new of course. We find ourselves at the notorious ‘end of history’ trumpeted by Francis Fukuyama after the fall of the Berlin Wall. Fukuyama’s thesis that history has climaxed with liberal capitalism may have been widely derided, but it is accepted, even assumed, at the level of the cultural unconscious. It should be remembered, though, that even when Fukuyama advanced it, the idea that history had reached a ‘terminal beach’ was not merely triumphalist. Fukuyama warned that his radiant city would be haunted, but he thought its specters would be Nietzschean rather than Marxian. Some of Nietzsche’s most prescient pages are those in which he describes the ‘oversatu-ration of an age with history’. ‘It leads an age into a dangerous mood of irony in regard to itself’, he wrote in Untimely Meditations, ‘and subsequently into the even more dangerous mood of cynicism’, in which ‘cosmopolitan fingering’, a detached spectatorialism, replaces engagement and involvement. This is the condition of Nietzsche’s Last Man, who has seen everything, but is decadently enfeebled precisely by this excess of (self) awareness. Fukuyama’s position is in some ways a mirror image of Fredric Jameson’s. Jameson famously claimed that postmodernism is the ‘cultural logic of late capitalism’. He argued that the failure of the future was constitutive of a postmodern cultural scene which, as he correctly prophesied, would become dominated by pastiche and revivalism. Given that Jameson has made a convincing case for the relationship between postmodern culture and certain tendencies in consumer (or post-Fordist) capitalism, it could appear that there is no need for the concept of capitalist realism at all. In some ways, this is true. What I’m calling capitalist realism can be subsumed under the rubric of postmodernism as theorized by Jameson. Yet, despite Jameson’s heroic work of clarification, postmodernism remains a hugely contested term, its meanings, appropriately but unhelpfully, unsettled and multiple. More importantly, I would want to argue that some of the processes which Jameson described and analyzed have now become so aggravated and chronic that they have gone through a change in kind. Ultimately, there are three reasons that I prefer the term capitalist realism to postmodernism. In the 1980s, when Jameson first advanced his thesis about postmodernism, there were still, in name at least, political alternatives to capitalism. What we are dealing with now, however, is a deeper, far more pervasive, sense of exhaustion, of cultural and political sterility. In the 80s, ‘Really Existing Socialism’ still persisted, albeit in its final phase of collapse. In Britain, the fault lines of class antagonism were fully exposed in an event like the Miners’ Strike of 1984-1985, and the defeat of the miners was an important moment in the development of capitalist realism, at least as significant in its symbolic dimension as in its practical effects. The closure of pits was defended precisely on the grounds that keeping them open was not ‘economically realistic’, and the miners were cast in the role of the last actors in a doomed proletarian romance. The 80s were the period when capitalist realism was fought for and established, when Margaret Thatcher’s doctrine that ‘there is no alternative’ – as succinct a slogan of capitalist realism as you could hope for – became a brutally self- fulfilling prophecy. Secondly, postmodernism involved some relationship to modernism. Jameson’s work on postmodernism began with an interrogation of the idea, cherished by the likes of Adorno, that modernism possessed revolutionary potentials by virtue of its formal innovations alone. What Jameson saw happening instead was the incorporation of modernist motifs into popular culture (suddenly, for example, Surrealist techniques would appear in advertising). At the same time as particular modernist forms were absorbed and commodified, modernism’s credos – its supposed belief in elitism and its monological, top-down model of culture – were challenged and rejected in the name of ‘difference’, ‘diversity’ and ‘multiplicity’. Capitalist realism no longer stages this kind of confrontation with modernism. On the contrary, it takes the vanquishing of modernism for granted: modernism is now something that can periodically return, but only as a frozen aesthetic style, never as an ideal for living. Thirdly, a whole generation has passed since the collapse of the Berlin Wall. In the 1960s and 1970s, capitalism had to face the problem of how to contain and absorb energies from outside. It now, in fact, has the opposite problem; having all-too successfully incorporated externality, how can it function without an outside it can colonize and appropriate? For most people under twenty in Europe and North America, the lack of alternatives to capitalism is no longer even an issue. Capitalism seamlessly occupies the horizons of the thinkable. Jameson used to report in horror about the ways that capitalism had seeped into the very unconscious; now, the fact that capitalism has colonized the dreaming life of the population is so taken for granted that it is no longer worthy of comment. It would be dangerous and misleading to imagine that the near past was some prelapsarian state rife with political potentials, so it’s as well to remember the role that commodification played in the production of culture throughout the twentieth century. Yet the old struggle between detournement and recuperation, between subversion and incorporation, seems to have been played out. What we are dealing with now is not the incorporation of materials that previously seemed to possess subversive potentials, but instead, their precorporation : the pre-emptive formatting and shaping of desires, aspirations and hopes by capitalist culture. Witness, for instance, 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, 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 wearied 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; knew that his every move was a cliché scripted in advance, knew that even realizing it is a cliché. The impasse that paralyzed Cobain is precisely the one that Jameson described: like postmodern culture in general, Cobain found himself in ‘a 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 mean that you were the new meat on which the system could feed. But the high existential angst of Nirvana and Cobain belongs to an older moment; what succeeded them was a pastiche-rock which reproduced the forms of the past without anxiety.  Cobain’s death confirmed the defeat and incorporation of rock’s utopian and promethean ambitions. When he died, rock was already being eclipsed by hip hop, whose global success has presupposed just the kind of precorporation by capital which I alluded to above. For much hip hop, any ‘naïve’ hope that youth culture could change anything has been replaced by the hard-headed embracing of a brutally reductive version of ‘reality’. ‘In hip hop’, Simon Reynolds pointed out in a 1996 essay in The Wire magazine, ‘real’ has two meanings. First, it means authentic, uncompromised music that refuses to sell out to the music industry and soften its message for crossover. ‘Real’ also signifies that the music reflects a ‘reality’ constituted by late capitalist economic instability, institutionalized racism, and increased surveil-lance and harassment of youth by the police. ‘Real’ means the death of the social: it means corporations who respond to increased profits not by raising pay or improving benefits but by …. downsizing (the laying-off the permanent workforce in order to create a floating employment pool of part-time and freelance workers without benefits or job security). In the end, it was precisely hip hop’s performance of this first version of the real – ‘the uncompromising’ – that enabled its easy absorption into the second, the reality of late capitalist economic instability, where such authenticity has proven highly marketable. Gangster rap neither merely reflects pre-existing social conditions, as many of its advocates claim, nor does it simply cause those conditions, as its critics argue – rather the circuit whereby hip hop and the late capitalist social field feed into each other is one of the means by which capitalist realism transforms itself into a kind of anti-mythical myth. The affinity between hip hop and gangster movies such as Scarface, The Godfather films, Reservoir Dogs, Goodfellas and Pulp Fiction arises from their common claim to have stripped the world of sentimental illusions and seen it for ‘what it really is’: a Hobbesian war of all against all, a system of perpetual exploitation and generalized criminality. In hip hop, Reynolds writes, ‘To “get real” is to confront a state-of-nature where dog eats dog, where you’re either a winner or a loser, and where most will be losers’. The same neo-noir worldview can be found in the comic books of Frank Miller and in the novels of James Ellroy. There is a kind of machismo of demythologization in Miller and Ellroy’s works. They pose as unflinching observers who refuse to prettify the world so that it can be fitted into the supposedly simple ethical binaries of the superhero comic and the traditional crime novel. The ‘realism’ here is somehow underscored, rather than undercut, by their fixation on the luridly venal – even though the hyperbolic insistence on cruelty, betrayal and savagery in both writers quickly becomes pantomimic. ‘In his pitch blackness’, Mike Davis wrote of Ellroy in 1992, ‘there is no light left to cast shadows and evil becomes a forensic banality. The result feels very much like the actual moral texture of the Reagan-Bush era: a supersaturation of corruption that fails any longer to outrage or even interest’. Yet this very desensitization serves a function for capitalist realism: Davis hypothesized that ‘the role of L.A. noir’ may have been ‘to endorse the emergence of homo reaganus’. OceanofPDF.com  2 What if you held a protest and everyone came? In the cases of gangster rap and Ellroy, capitalist realism takes the form of a kind of super-identification with capital at its most pitilessly predatory, but this need not be the case. In fact, capitalist realism is very far from precluding a certain anti-capitalism. After all, and as Žižek has provocatively pointed out, anti-capitalism is widely disseminated in capitalism. Time after time, the villain in Hollywood films will turn out to be the ‘evil corporation’. Far from undermining capitalist realism, this gestural anti-capitalism actually reinforces it. Take Disney/ Pixar’s Wall - E (2008). The film shows an earth so despoiled that human beings are no longer capable of inhabiting it. We’re left in no doubt that consumer capitalism and corporations – or rather one mega-corporation, Buy n Large – is responsible for this depredation; and when we see eventually see the human beings in offworld exile, they are infantile and obese, interacting via screen interfaces, carried around in large motorized chairs, and supping indeterminate slop from cups. What we have here is a vision of control and communication much as Jean Baudrillard understood it, in which subjugation no longer takes the form of a subordination to an extrinsic spectacle, but rather invites us to interact and participate. It seems that the cinema audience is itself the object of this satire, which prompted some right wing observers to recoil in disgust, condemning Disney/Pixar for attacking its own audience. But this kind of irony feeds rather than challenges capitalist realism. A film like Wall-E exemplifies what Robert Pfaller has called ‘interpassivity’: the film performs our anti-capitalism for us, allowing us to continue to consume with impunity. The role of capitalist ideology is not to make an explicit case for something in the way that propaganda does, but to conceal the fact that the operations of capital do not depend on any sort of subjectively assumed belief. It is impossible to conceive of fascism or Stalinism without propaganda – but capitalism can proceed perfectly well, in some ways better, without anyone making a case for it. Žižek’s counsel here remains invaluable. ‘If the concept of ideology is the classic one in which the illusion is located in knowledge’, he argues, then today’s society must appear post-ideological: the prevailing ideology is that of cynicism; people no longer believe in ideological truth; they do not take ideological propositions seriously. The fundamental level of ideology, however, is not of an illusion masking the real state of things but that of an (unconscious) fantasy structuring our social reality itself. And at this level, we are of course far from being a post-ideological society. Cynical distance is just one way … to blind ourselves to the structural power of ideological fantasy: even if we do not take things seriously, even if we keep an ironical distance, we are still doing them. Capitalist ideology in general, Žižek maintains, 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 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 Žižek, 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. Corporate anti- capitalism wouldn’t matter if it could be differentiated from an authentic anti-capitalist movement. Yet, even before its momentum was stalled by the September 11th attacks on the World Trade Center, the so called anti- capitalist movement seemed also to have conceded too much to capitalist realism. Since it was unable to posit a coherent alternative political- economic model to capitalism, the suspicion was that the actual aim was not to replace capitalism but to mitigate its worst excesses; and, since the form of its activities tended to be the staging of protests rather than political organization, there was a sense that the anti-capitalism movement consisted of making a series of hysterical demands which it didn’t expect to be met. Protests have formed a kind of carnivalesque background noise to capitalist realism, and the anti-capitalist protests share rather too much with hyper- corporate events like 2005’s Live 8, with their exorbitant demands that politicians legislate away poverty. Live 8 was a strange kind of protest; a protest that everyone could agree with: who is it who actually wants poverty? And it is not that Live 8 was a ‘degraded’ form of protest. On the contrary, it was in Live 8 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 - hoards them. Yet it is not capitalism but protest itself which depends upon this figuration of the Father; and one of the successes of the current global elite has been their avoidance of 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. Indeed, it was of course the global elite itself – in the form of entertainers such as Richard Curtis and Bono – which organized the Live 8 event. To reclaim a real political agency means first of all accepting our insertion at the level of desire in the remorseless meat-grinder of Capital. What is being disavowed in the abjection of evil and ignorance onto fantasmatic Others is our own complicity in planetary networks of oppression. What needs to be kept in mind is both that capitalism is a hyper-abstract impersonal structure and that it would be nothing without our co-operation. 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 is a sense in which it simply is the case that the political elite are our servants; the miserable service they provide from us is to launder our libidos, to obligingly re-present for us our disavowed desires as if they had nothing to do with us.  The ideological blackmail that has been in place since the original Live Aid concerts in 1985 has insisted that ‘caring individuals’ could end famine directly, without the need for any kind of political solution or systemic reorganization. It is necessary to act straight away, we were told; politics has to be suspended in the name of ethical immediacy. Bono’s Product Red brand wanted to dispense even with the philanthropic intermediary. ‘Philanthropy is like hippy music, holding hands’, Bono proclaimed. ‘Red is more like punk rock, hip hop, this should feel like hard commerce’. The point was not to offer an alternative to capitalism – on the contrary, Product Red’s ‘punk rock’ or ‘hip hop’ character consisted in its ‘realistic’ acceptance that capitalism is the only game in town. No, the aim was only to ensure that some of the proceeds of particular transactions went to good causes. The fantasy being that western consumerism, far from being intrinsically implicated in systemic global inequalities, could itself solve them. All we have to do is buy the right products. OceanofPDF.com  3 Capitalism and the Real ‘Capitalist realism’ is not an original coinage. It was used as far back as the 1960s by a group of German Pop artists and by Michael Schudson in his 1984 book Advertising, The Uneasy Persuasion, both of whom were making parodic references to socialist realism. What is new about my use of the term is the more expansive – even exorbitant – meaning that I ascribe to it. Capitalist realism as I understand it cannot be confined to art or to the quasi-propagandistic way in which advertising functions. It is more like a pervasive atmosphere, 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. If capitalist realism is so seamless, and if current forms of resistance are so hopeless and impotent, where can an effective challenge come from? A moral critique of capitalism, emphasizing the ways in which it leads to suffering, only reinforces capitalist realism. Poverty, famine and war can be presented as an inevitable part of reality, while the hope that these forms of suffering could be eliminated easily painted as naive utopianism. Capitalist realism can only be threatened if it is shown to be in some way inconsistent or untenable; if, that is to say, capitalism’s ostensible ‘realism’ turns out to be nothing of the sort. Needless to say, what counts as ‘realistic’, what seems possible at any point in the social field, is defined by a series of political determinations. An ideological position can never be really successful until it is naturalized, and it cannot be naturalized while it is still thought of as a value rather than a fact. Accordingly, neoliberalism has sought to eliminate the very category of value in the ethical sense. Over the past thirty years, capitalist realism has successfully installed a ‘business ontology’ in which it is simply obvious that everything in society, including healthcare and education, should be run as a business. As any number of radical theorists from Brecht through to Foucault and Badiou have maintained, emancipatory politics must always destroy the appearance of a ‘natural order’, must reveal what is presented as necessary and inevitable to be a mere contingency, just as it must make what was previously deemed to be impossible seem attainable. It is worth recalling that what is currently called realistic was itself once ‘impossible’: the slew of privatizations that took place since the 1980s would have been unthinkable only a decade earlier, and the current political-economic landscape (with unions in abeyance, utilities and railways denationalized) could scarcely have been imagined in 1975. Conversely, what was once eminently possible is now deemed unrealistic. ‘Modernization’, Badiou bitterly observes, ‘is the name for a strict and servile definition of the possible. These ‘reforms’ invariably aim at making impossible what used to be practicable (for the largest number), and making profitable (for the dominant oligarchy) what did not used to be so’. At this point, it is perhaps worth introducing an elementary theoretical distinction from Lacanian psychoanalysis which Žižek has done so much to give contemporary currency: the difference between the Real and reality. As Alenka Zupancic explains, psychoanalysis’s positing of a reality principle invites us to be suspicious of any reality that presents itself as natural. ‘The reality principle’, Zupancic writes, is not some kind of natural way associated with how things are … The reality principle itself is ideologically mediated; one could even claim that it constitutes the highest form of ideology, the ideology that presents itself as empirical fact (or biological, economic…) necessity (and that we tend to perceive as non-ideological). It is precisely here that we should be most alert to the functioning of ideology. For Lacan, the Real is what any ‘reality’ must suppress; indeed, reality constitutes itself through just this repression. The Real is an unrepresentable X, a traumatic void that can only be glimpsed in the fractures and inconsistencies in the field of apparent reality. So one strategy against capitalist realism could involve invoking the Real(s) underlying the reality that capitalism presents to us. Environmental catastrophe is one such Real. At one level, to be sure, it might look as if Green issues are very far from being ‘unrepresentable 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, Wall-E 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 simulacra, its 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. But Green issues are already a contested zone, already a site where politicization is being fought for. In what follows, I want to stress two other aporias in capitalist realism, which are not yet politicized to anything like the same degree. The first is mental health. Mental health, in fact, is a paradigm case of how capitalist realism operates. Capitalist realism insists on treating mental health as if it were a natural fact, like weather (but, then again, weather is no longer a natural fact so much as a political-economic effect). In the 1960s and 1970s, radical theory and politics (Laing, Foucault, Deleuze and Guattari, etc.) coalesced around extreme mental conditions such as schizophrenia, arguing, for instance, that madness was not a natural, but a political, category. But what is needed now is a politicization of much more common disorders. Indeed, it is their very commonness which is the issue: in Britain, depression is now the condition that is most treated by the NHS. In his book The Selfish Capitalist, Oliver James has convincingly posited a correlation between rising rates of mental distress and the neoliberal mode of capitalism practiced in countries like Britain, the USA and Australia. In line with James’s claims, I want to argue that it is necessary to reframe the growing problem of stress (and distress) in capitalist societies. Instead of treating it as incumbent on individuals to resolve their own psychological distress, instead, that is, of accepting the vast privatization of stress that has taken place over the last thirty years, we need to ask: 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 that the cost of it appearing to work is very high. The other phenomenon I want to highlight is bureaucracy. In making their case against socialism, neoliberal ideologues often excoriated the top- down bureaucracy which supposedly led to institutional sclerosis and inefficiency in command economies. With the triumph of neoliberalism, bureaucracy was supposed to have been made obsolete; a relic of an unlamented Stalinist past. Yet this is at odds with the experiences of most people working and living in late capitalism, for whom bureaucracy remains very much a part of everyday life. Instead of disappearing, bureaucracy has changed its form; and this new, decentralized, form has allowed it to proliferate. The persistence of bureaucracy in late capitalism does not in itself indicate that capitalism does not work – rather, what it suggests is that the way in which capitalism does actually work is very different from the picture presented by capitalist realism. In part, I have chosen to focus on mental health problems and bureaucracy because they both feature heavily in an area of culture which has becoming increasingly dominated by the imperatives of capitalist realism: education. Through most of the current decade, I worked as a lecturer in a Further Education college, and in what follows, I will draw extensively on my experiences there. In Britain, Further Education colleges used to be places which students, often from working class backgrounds, were drawn to if they wanted an alternative to more formal state educational institutions. Ever since Further Education colleges were removed from local authority control in the early 1990s, they have become subject both to ‘market’ pressures and to government-imposed targets. They have been at the vanguard of changes that would be rolled out through the rest of the education system and public services – a kind of lab in which neoliberal ‘reforms’ of education have been trialed, and as such, they are the perfect place to begin an analysis of the effects of capitalist realism. OceanofPDF.com  4 Reflexive impotence, immobilization and liberal communism By contrast with their forebears in the 1960s and 1970s, British students today appear to be politically disengaged. While French students can still be found on the streets protesting against neoliberalism, British students, whose situation is incomparably worse, seem resigned to their fate. But this, I want to argue, is a matter not of apathy, nor of cynicism, but of reflexive impotence. They know things are bad, but more than that, they know they can’t do anything about it. But that ‘knowledge’, that reflexivity, is not a passive observation of an already existing state of affairs. It is a self- fulfilling prophecy. Reflexive impotence amounts to an unstated worldview amongst the British young, and it has its correlate in widespread pathologies. Many of the teenagers I worked with had mental health problems or learning difficulties. Depression is endemic. It is the condition most dealt with by the National Health Service, and is afflicting people at increasingly younger ages. The number of students who have some variant of dyslexia is astonishing. It is not an exaggeration to say that being a teenager in late capitalist Britain is now close to being reclassified as a sickness. This pathologization already forecloses any possibility of politicization. By privatizing these problems – treating them as if they were caused only by chemical imbalances in the individual’s neurology and/or by their family background – any question of social systemic causation is ruled out. Many of the teenage students I encountered seemed to be in a state of what I would call depressive hedonia. Depression is usually characterized as a state of anhedonia, but the condition I’m referring to is constituted not by an inability to get pleasure so much as it by an inability to do anything else except pursue pleasure. There is a sense that ‘something is missing’ – but no appreciation that this mysterious, missing enjoyment can only be accessed beyond the pleasure principle. In large part this is a consequence of students’ ambiguous structural position, stranded between their old role as subjects of disciplinary institutions and their new status as consumers of services. In his crucial essay ‘Postscript on Societies of Control’, Deleuze distinguishes between the disciplinary societies described by Foucault, which were organized around the enclosed spaces of the factory, the school and the prison, and the new control societies, in which all institutions are embedded in a dispersed corporation. Deleuze is right to argue that Kafka is the prophet of distributed, cybernetic power that is typical of Control societies. In The Trial, Kafka importantly distinguishes between two types of acquittal available to the accused. Definite acquittal is no longer possible, if it ever was (‘we have only legendary accounts of ancient cases [which] provide instances of acquittal’). The two remaining options, then, are (1) ‘Ostensible acquittal’, in which the accused is to all and intents and purposes acquitted, but may later, at some unspecified time, face the charges in full, or (2) ‘Indefinite postponement’, in which the accused engages in (what they hope is an infinitely) protracted process of legal wrangling, so that the dreaded ultimate judgment is unlikely to be forthcoming. Deleuze observes that the Control societies delineated by Kafka himself, but also by Foucault and Burroughs, operate using indefinite postponement: Education as a lifelong process… Training that persists for as long as your working life continues… Work you take home with you… Working from home, homing from work. A consequence of this ‘indefinite’ mode of power is that external surveillance is succeeded by internal policing. Control only works if you are complicit with it. Hence the Burroughs figure of the ‘Control Addict’: the one who is addicted to control, but also, inevitably, the one who has been taken over, possessed by Control.  Walk into almost any class at the college where I taught and you will immediately appreciate that you are in a post-disciplinary framework. Foucault painstakingly enumerated the way in which discipline was installed through the imposition of rigid body postures. During lessons at our college, however, students will be found slumped on desk, talking almost constantly, snacking incessantly (or even, on occasions, eating full meals). The old disciplinary segmentation of time is breaking down. The carceral regime of discipline is being eroded by the technologies of control, with their systems of perpetual consumption and continuous development. The system by which the college is funded means that it literally cannot afford to exclude students, even if it wanted to. Resources are allocated to colleges on the basis of how successfully they meet targets on achievement (exam results), attendance and retention of students. This combination of market imperatives with bureaucratically-defined ‘targets’ is typical of the ‘market Stalinist’ initiatives which now regulate public services. The lack of an effective disciplinary system has not, to say the least, been compensated for by an increase in student self-motivation. Students are aware that if they don’t attend for weeks on end, and/or if they don’t produce any work, they will not face any meaningful sanction. They typically respond to this freedom not by pursuing projects but by falling into hedonic (or anhedonic) lassitude: the soft narcosis, the comfort food oblivion of Playstation, all-night TV and marijuana. Ask students to read for more than a couple of sentences and many – and these are A-level students mind you – will protest that they can’t do it. The most frequent complaint teachers hear is that it’s boring. It is not so much the content of the written material that is at issue here; it is the act of reading itself that is deemed to be ‘boring’. What we are facing here is not just timehonored teenage torpor, but the mismatch between a post-literate ‘New Flesh’ that is ‘too wired to concentrate’ and the confining, concentrational logics of decaying disciplinary systems. To be bored simply means to be removed from the communicative sensation-stimulus matrix of texting, YouTube and fast food; to be denied, for a moment, the constant flow of sugary gratification on demand. Some students want Nietzsche in the same way that they want a hamburger; they fail to grasp – and the logic of the consumer system encourages this misapprehension – that the indigestibility, the difficulty is Nietzsche. An illustration: I challenged one student about why he always wore headphones in class. He replied that it didn’t matter, because he wasn’t actually playing any music. In another lesson, he was playing music at very low volume through the headphones, without wearing them. When I asked him to switch it off, he replied that even he couldn’t hear it. Why wear the headphones without playing music or play music without wearing the headphones? Because the presence of the phones on the ears or the knowledge that the music is playing (even if he couldn’t hear it) was a reassurance that the matrix was still there, within reach. Besides, in a classic example of interpassivity, if the music was still playing, even if he couldn’t hear it, then the player could still enjoy it on his behalf. The use of headphones is significant here – pop is experienced not as something which could have impacts upon public space, but as a retreat into private ‘OedIpod’ consumer bliss, a walling up against the social. The consequence of being hooked into the entertainment matrix is twitchy, agitated interpassivity, an inability to concentrate or focus. Students’ incapacity to connect current lack of focus with future failure, their inability to synthesize time into any coherent narrative, is symptomatic of more than mere demotivation. It is, in fact, eerily reminiscent of Jameson’s analysis in ‘Postmodernism and Consumer Society’. Jameson observed there that Lacan’s theory of schizophrenia offered a ‘suggestive aesthetic model’ for understanding the fragmenting of subjectivity in the face of the emerging entertainment-industrial complex. ‘With the breakdown of the signifying chain’, Jameson summarized, ‘the Lacanian schizophrenic is reduced to an experience of pure material signifiers, or, in other words, a series of pure and unrelated presents in time’. Jameson was writing in the late 1980s – i.e. the period in which most of my students were born. What we in the classroom are now facing is a generation born into that ahistorical, anti-mnemonic blip culture – a generation, that is to say, for whom time has always come ready-cut into digital micro-slices.  If the figure of discipline was the worker-prisoner, the figure of control is the debtor-addict. Cyberspatial capital operates by addicting its users; William Gibson recognized that in Neuromancer when he had Case and the other cyberspace cowboys feeling insects-under-the-skin strung out when they unplugged from the matrix (Case’s amphetamine habit is plainly the substitute for an addiction to a far more abstract speed). If, then, something like attention deficit hyperactivity disorder is a pathology, it is a pathology of late capitalism – a consequence of being wired into the entertainment- control circuits of hypermediated consumer culture. Similarly, what is called dyslexia may in many cases amount to a post-lexia. Teenagers process capital’s image-dense data very effectively without any need to read-slogan-recognition is sufficient to navigate the net-mobile-magazine informational plane. ‘Writing has never been capitalism’s thing. Capitalism is profoundly illiterate’, Deleuze and Guattari argued in Anti-Oedipus. ‘Electric language does not go by way of the voice or writing: data processing does without them both’. Hence the reason that many successful business people are dyslexic (but is their post-lexical efficiency a cause or effect of their success?) Teachers are now put under intolerable pressure to mediate between the post-literate subjectivity of the late capitalist consumer and the demands of the disciplinary regime (to pass examinations etc). This is one way in which education, far from being in some ivory tower safely inured from the ‘real world’, is the engine room of the reproduction of social reality, directly confronting the inconsistencies of the capitalist social field. Teachers are caught between being facilitator-entertainers and disciplinarian- authoritarians. Teachers want to help students to pass the exams; they want us to be authority figures who tell them what to do. Teachers being interpellated by students as authority figures exacerbates the ‘boredom’ problem, since isn’t anything that comes from the place of authority a priori boring? Ironically, the role of disciplinarian is demanded of educators more than ever at precisely the time when disciplinary structures are breaking down in institutions. With families buckling under the pressure of a capitalism which requires both parents to work, teachers are now increasingly required to act as surrogate parents, instilling the most basic behavioral protocols in students and providing pastoral and emotional support for teenagers who are in some cases only minimally socialized. It is worth stressing that none of the students I taught had any legal obligation to be at college. They could leave if they wanted to. But the lack of any meaningful employment opportunities, together with cynical encouragement from government means that college seems to be the easier, safer option. Deleuze says that Control societies are based on debt rather than enclosure; but there is a way in which the current education system both indebts and encloses students. Pay for your own exploitation, the logic insists – get into debt so you can get the same McJob you could have walked into if you’d left school at sixteen… Jameson observed that ‘the breakdown of temporality suddenly releases [the] present of time from all the activities and intentionalities that might focus it and make it a space of praxis’. But nostalgia for the context in which the old types of praxis operated is plainly useless. That is why French students don’t in the end constitute an alternative to British reflexive impotence. That the neoliberal Economist would deride French opposition to capitalism is hardly surprising, yet its mockery of French ‘immobilization’ had a point. ‘Certainly the students who kicked off the latest protests seemed to think they were re-enacting the events of May 1968 their parents sprang on Charles de Gaulle’, it wrote in its lead article of March 30, 2006. They have borrowed its slogans (‘Beneath the cobblestones, the beach!’) and hijacked its symbols (the Sorbonne university). In this sense, the revolt appears to be the natural sequel to ’s suburban riots, which prompted the government to impose a state of emergency. Then it was the jobless, ethnic underclass that rebelled against a system that excluded them. Yet the striking feature of the latest protest movement is that this time the rebellious forces are on the side of conservatism. Unlike the rioting youths in the banlieues, the objective of the students and public- sector trade unions is to prevent change, and to keep France the way it is. It’s striking how the practice of many of the immobilizers is a kind of inversion of that of another group who also count themselves heirs of 68: the so called ‘liberal communists’ such as George Soros and Bill Gates who combine rapacious pursuit of profit with the rhetoric of ecological concern and social responsibility. Alongside their social concern, liberal communists believe that work practices should be (post) modernized, in line with the concept of ‘being smart’. As Žižek explains, Being smart means being dynamic and nomadic, and against centralized bureaucracy; believing in dialogue and cooperation as against central authority; in flexibility as against routine; culture and knowledge as against industrial production; in spontaneous interaction and autopoiesis as against fixed hierarchy. Taken together, the immobilizers, with their implicit concession that capitalism can only be resisted, never overcome, and the liberal communists, who maintain that the amoral excesses of capitalism must be offset by charity, give a sense of the way in which capitalist realism circumscribes current political possibilities. Whereas the immobilizers retain the form of 68-style protest but in the name of resistance to change, liberal communists energetically embrace newness. Žižek is right to argue that, far from constituting any kind of progressive corrective to official capitalist ideology, liberal communism constitutes the dominant ideology of capitalism now. ‘Flexibility’, ‘nomadism’ and ‘spontaneity’ are the very hallmarks of management in a post-Fordist, Control society. But the problem is that any opposition to flexibility and decentralization risks being self-defeating, since calls for inflexibility and centralization are, to say the least, not likely to be very galvanizing. In any case, resistance to the ‘new’ is not a cause that the left can or should rally around. Capital thought very carefully about how to break labor; yet there has still not yet been enough thought about what tactics will work against capital in conditions of post-Fordism, and what new language can be innovated to deal with those conditions. It is important to contest capitalism’s appropriation of ‘the new’, but to reclaim the ‘new’ can’t be a matter of adapting to the conditions in which we find ourselves – we’ve done that rather too well, and ‘successful adaptation’ is the strategy of managerialism par excellence.  The persistent association of neoliberalism with the term ‘Restoration’, favored by both Badiou and David Harvey, is an important corrective to the association of capital with novelty. For Harvey and Badiou, neoliberal politics are not about the new, but a return of class power and privilege. ‘[I]n France,’ Badiou has said, ‘‘Restoration’ refers to the period of the return of the King, in 1815, after the Revolution and Napoleon. We are in such a period. Today we see liberal capitalism and its political system, parliamentarianism, as the only natural and acceptable solutions’. Harvey argues that neoliberalization is best conceived of as a ‘political project to re-establish the conditions for capital accumulation and to restore the power of economic elites’. Harvey demonstrates that, in an era popularly described as ‘post-political’, class war has continued to be fought, but only by one side: the wealthy. ‘After the implementation of neoliberal policies in the late 1970s,’ Harvey reveals, the share of national income of the top 1 per cent of income earners soared, to reach 15 per cent … by the end of the century. The top 0.1 per cent of income earners in the US increased their share of the national income from 2 per cent in 1978 to over 6 per cent by 1999, while the ratio of the median compensation of workers to the salaries of CEOs increased from just over 30 to 1 in 1970 to nearly 500 to 1 by 2000. … The US is not alone in this: the top 1 per cent of income earners in Britain have doubled their share of the national income from 6.5 per cent to 13 per cent since 1982. As Harvey shows, neoliberals were more Leninist than the Leninists, using think-tanks as the intellectual vanguard to create the ideological climate in which capitalist realism could flourish. The immobilization model – which amounts to a demand to retain the Fordist/disciplinary regime – could not work in Britain or the other countries in which neoliberalism has already taken a hold. Fordism has definitively collapsed in Britain, and with it the sites around which the old politics were organized. At the end of the control essay, Deleuze wonders what new forms an anti-control politics might take: One of the most important questions will concern the ineptitude of the unions: tied to the whole of their history of struggle against the disciplines or within the spaces of enclosure, will they be able to adapt themselves or will they give way to new forms of resistance against the societies of control? Can we already grasp the rough outlines of the coming forms, capable of threatening the  joys of marketing? Many young people strangely boast of being “motivated”; they re-request apprenticeships and permanent training. It’s up to them to discover what they’re being made to serve, just as their elders discovered,