The second sense of the breakdown of capitalist realism is one of turning the breakdown of capitalist realism into a breakthrough, as R. Capitalism, for Fisher, is consonant if not coterminous with catastrophe: “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.” 4 The breakdown of capitalist realism seems to coincide with the breakdown of capitalism. Capitalist realism appears to be stretched to its limit as in our increasingly apocalyptic present alternatives seem more likely to take fascist forms than communist. It first refers to our experience of crisis and austerity, which capitalist realism is supposed to naturalize and justify. The dual form of this substance is why it is important to consider the breakdown of capitalist realism in a dual sense. In Fisher’s statement for the Zero Books series, in which Capitalist Realism appeared, Fisher declares the need to go beyond “interpassive stupor” to achieve another kind of discourse: “intellectual without being academic, popular without being populist.” 3 This is writing for students, on their behalf, and for us all as students. 2 This is not in a patronizing fashion of condescending to them.
As with the Walter Benjamin of “The Life of Students,” Mark Fisher is a writer for students. This call, as we will see, involves a process of the education of desire to both free us from capitalist realism and to develop a non-capitalist life. Certainly, few could be as devastating as Fisher in making resonant and felt the “political phenomenology of late capitalism,” in which we experience “a system that is unresponsive, impersonal, centreless, abstract and fragmentary.” 1 There is, however, another “substance” at work in the book, which is those desires, experiences and lived moments that call to another collective order not oriented to value. The substance of the book is not simply the substance of capitalist realism. That is why I want to return to the “substance” of the book, but in a particular fashion.
The success of the title is at the expense of the book.
Capitalist Realism, the book, has, in ten years, become a phrase: “what Mark Fisher calls ‘capitalist realism’” or ‘as Mark Fisher has described, “capitalist realism.”’ Fisher’s diagnosis is accepted but the risk is that the substance of Capitalist Realism the book is uncannily absent.
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