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Foreword
Mark Fisher
Capitalist realism posits capitalism as a system that is free from
the sentimental delusions and the comforting mythologies that
governed past societies. Capitalism works with how people
actually are; it does not seek to remake humanity in some (idealised) image, but encourages and releases those ‘instincts’ of
competition, self-preservation and enterprise that always re-
emerge no matter what attempts are made to repress or contain them. The well-known paradox of neoliberalism, however,
was that it required a deliberative political project, prosecuted
through the machinery of the state, to reassert this image of
the human. Philip Mirowski has argued that neoliberalism can
be defined by a double (and somewhat duplicitous) attitude
towards the state: on the exoteric level of populist polemic, the
state is to be disdained; on the esoteric level of actual strategy,
the state is to be occupied and instrumentalised. The scope and
ambition of the neoliberal programme to restore what could
never be expunged was summarised by Margaret Thatcher’s
infamous remark that the method was economics, the goal
was to change the soul –the slogan of market Stalinism. The
libidinal metaphysics that underlies neoliberalism might be
called cosmic libertarianism; beyond and beneath the social,
political and economic structures that constrain enterprise is
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a seething potential waiting to be released. On the face of it,
then, the goal of politics, according to neoliberalism’s exoteric doctrine, is essentially negative: it consists in a dismantling of those structures that keep enterprising energies locked
down. In actuality, of course, and as Thatcher’s remark indicated, neoliberalism was a constructive project: the competitive economic subject was the product of a vast ideological and
libidinal engineering project. And, as Jeremy Gilbert, drawing
upon Michel Foucault’s work, has observed, neoliberalism has
in fact been characterised by a supervisory panic; its rhetoric
of releasing individual potential obfuscates its suppression
and fear of collective agency. Collectivity is always stupid and
dangerous; the market is able to work effectively only if it is a
decorticated mass of individuals; only then can it give rise to
emergent properties.
Far from being a system liberated from fictions, capitalism
should be seen as the system that liberates fictions to rule over
the social. The capitalist social field is cross-hatched by what
J. G. Ballard called ‘fictions of every kind’. Ballard was thinking of the banal yet potent products of advertising, PR and
branding, without which late capitalism could not function,
but it is clear that what structures social reality –the so-called
‘economy’ –is itself a tissue of fictions. It must be stressed here
that fictions are not necessarily falsehoods or deceptions –far
from it. Economic and social fictions always elude empiricism, since they are never given in experience; they are what
structures experience. But empiricism’s failure to grasp these
fictions only indicates its own limitations. Experience is only
ever possible on the basis of a web of immaterial virtualities –
symbolic regimes, ideological propositions, economic entities.
We must resist any temptation to idealism here: these fictions are
not cooked up in the minds of already existing individuals. On
the contrary, the individual subject is something like a special
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effect generated by these transpersonal fictional systems. We
might call these fictions effective virtualities. Under capitalism, these virtualities escape any pretence of human control.
Crashes caused by arcane financial instruments, automated
high-speed trading … but what is capital ‘itself’, if not an enormous effective virtuality, an inexorably expanding black hole
that grows by sucking social, physical and libidinal energies
into itself?
Capitalism has not, apparently, been weakened by the
crash of 2008. While right-wing populism has been terrifyingly successful, anti-capitalism has not proved to be a sufficient mobiliser. Provocatively, we might hypothesise that the
emergence of anti-capitalism can be correlated with the rise
of capitalist realism. When actually existing socialism disappeared –with social democracy soon to follow –the radical left
quickly ceased to be associated with a positive political project
and became instead solely defined by its opposition to capital.
As capital’s cheerleaders endlessly crow, anti-capitalists have
not yet been able to articulate a coherent alternative. The production of new economic science fictions therefore becomes
an urgent political imperative. Capital’s economic science fictions cannot simply be opposed; they need to be countered by
economic science fictions that can exert pressure on capital’s
current monopolisation of possible realities. The development
of economic science fictions would constitute a form of indirect action without which hegemonic struggle cannot hope to
be successful. It is easy to be daunted by the seeming scale of
this challenge –come up with a fully functioning blueprint for
a post-capitalist society, or capitalism will rule forever! But we
shouldn’t be forced into silence by this false opposition. It is
not a single-total vision that is required but a multiplicity of
alternative perspectives, each potentially opening up a crack
into another world. The injunction to produce fictions implies
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an open and experimental spirit, a certain loosening up of
the heavy responsibilities associated with the generation of
determinate political programmes. Yet fictions can be engines
for the development of future policy. They can be machines
for designing the future, and fictions about what, say, a new
housing, healthcare or transport system might look like inevitably also entail imagining what kind of society could house
and facilitate these developments. Fictions, that is to say, can
counter capitalist realism by rendering alternatives to capitalism thinkable. Not only this; fictions are also simulations in
which we can get some sense of what it would be like to live
in a post-capitalist society. The task is to produce fictions that
can be converted into effective virtualities –fictions that not
only anticipate the future but that can already start to bring it
into being.