As you all know, this event serves as something of an epilogue to the summer exhibition at Art of Space that closed a little under a month ago, titled Living with Pop, a Reproduction of capitalist realism. I'm sure many of you had the opportunity to see the show, maybe even in Dusseldorf where it originated. It's great to have such a good Dusseldorf contingent here today. So I'm very pleased to welcome also the contributors today to the symposium, Howie Chen, Mark Fisher, Dorian Mende and Evan Calder-Williams. We're really grateful
to them for committing their time to being here today and preparing their presentations. Sadly, one of the scheduled participants, Suzanne Rennert, has had to pull out at the last moment due to the ill health of her father. So we're sorry that she's not able to join us and we'll miss her insight today, but we wish her and her father the best. Suzanne was one of the co-curators of the Living With Pop exhibition at ArtisFest. As I mentioned, that exhibition was a collaboration with Kuntz-Halle Dusseldorf, where the exhibition originated in 2013. Those of you who saw the exhibition will know that it was grounded in the actions of four artists working in Dusseldorf in the 1960s, Manfred Kuttner, Konrad Lug, Sigmar Polk and Gerhard Richter. These artists collectively coined the term capitalist realism and used it as a motif in a number of important exhibitions and actions
that occurred in Dusseldorf and surrounding towns between 1963 and 1966. The term was also taken up by the Berlin-based gallerist René Bloch. He used it as a driving force for his gallery programme in the late 1960s and early 1970s. He exhibited the work of Lug, Richter and Polk, along with other artists including Capet Grimma, Karl Post-Hudica and Wolf Hostel under the capitalist realist brand, utilising the term strategically in relation to the socialist realism of East Germany. Bloch stated a far more directly political agenda for this movement than the Dusseldorf artists, pronouncing his intentions to conduct active art politics and actively intervene in social processes.
The capitalist realism of particularly Lou, Richter and Polka located itself around the invasiveness of ideology, its permeation into the fabric of life and into the images that mediated subjective experience. The realism they invoked was a wilfully empty one, there was nothing to show but banality and bureaucracy. This emptiness simultaneously managed to articulate the absence and erasure at the heart of the trauma of Germany's Nazi history and the empty aspirational drive of capital. Suzanne Rennett's research into the interweaving relations between artists and gallerists in Dusseldorf and the Rhineland in the late 1950s and early 1960s has highlighted the grounding of capitalist realism in Fluxus, a more media and close-to-hand influence than that of American pop art.
In her catalogue essay for Living with Pop, she states, The affirmative aspects of pop art are overtaken by the destructive, the intentional approach of art and life, and the tendency towards dematerialisation. Gerhard Ritter himself stated in an interview with Kuse von Bruggen that he was particularly attracted by Fluxus' cynical and destructive aspects. Renner has gone further in tracing this association with Fluxus to the taking up of material and performative concerns by Luke, Richter and Polka. Most notably, she draws a connection between the fluxus artist Wolf Foster's decollage actions, in which he used chemicals to wipe out the political articles from a popular magazine, and the blurring and deformation of the photographic image in the paintings of Polka and Richter.
I have used the term epilogue to describe today's symposium in relation to the Living with Pop exhibition, The intention this afternoon is not to bring discursive closure to the exhibition's narration of the art historical episode of capitalist realism, but instead to see how the term continues to have resonance today while operating under dramatically altered terms in relation to its critical dimensions. Instead of retreading the ground of the execution, we've chosen this afternoon to consider the ripples and resonances that have spread outwards from the actions of the Dusseldorf artists and their parodic self-identification as capitalist realists. The presentations we'll hear this afternoon will in some instances stem from underexplored
linguistic and conceptual aspects of the artistic production labelled in the 60s and 70s as capitalist realist, and in other cases will depart from a contemporary application of the term. We're very pleased to be joined today by writer and cultural theorist Mark Fisher, whose 2009 book capitalist realism is the no alternative compellingly repurposed the term capitalist realism towards an understanding of our contemporary condition in which capitalism capitalism seamlessly occupies the horizons of the thinkable after the fall of communism in the Berlin Wall in 1989 capitalism can be seen to be no longer engaged with processes of containing and absorbing energies from outside, the processes that were implicitly articulated
in the 1960s by the Dusseldorf artists and more directly addressed by René Bloch's programme in Berlin. In Marx's words, capitalist realism today is not a particular type of realism, it is more like realism in itself. 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. This expansion of the term capitalist realism forms the second touchstone for today's symposium and the understanding of reality as uniformly structured by naturalized ideology raises questions around the shifting grounds of artistic critique and of realism as a critical strategy. In an interview in
1966 Gerhard Richter stated, I am fascinated by the human temporal real logical side of an occurrence which is simultaneously so unreal, so incomprehensible and so atemporal and I would like to represent it in such a way that this simultaneity is preserved. This This idea of simultaneity projects forward into the present and the challenges of addressing capitalism and its operations as mid-contingency, not as empirical fact and necessity. So the format for today is that each of our speakers will give a presentation around half an hour in length and after each talk there will be time for questions from the audience. We will then have a break mid-way through and depending on how we are for the time and
energy levels, there will be a discussion at the end between the four participants, with more opportunity for questions and thoughts from you, the audience. So the first two speakers today are Mark Fisher and Dori Mende. The title of Mark's presentation is Capitalist Realism Now, and his talk will bring up to date his thinking around capitalist realism that he initially outlined in his 2009 book. Mark has also recently published Ghosts of My Life, writings on depression, ontology and lost futures and both this book and the capitalist realism book were published by Zero Books where he is now a commissioning editor His writing has appeared in a wide variety of publications including Film Quarterly, The Wire, The Guardian and Freeze
He's a programme leader of the MA in Oral and Visual Cultures at Goldsmiths University of London and a lecturer at the University of East London. He was a founding member of the influential Cybernetic Cultural Research Unit at the Philosophy Department of University of Warwick, Coventry in 1995. And then we'll move straight into Doreen's talk. Doreen's presentation is titled Cafe Bremer, The Artist Should Be an Official. and will focus on the work of Cafe Bremer, a relatively under-acknowledged artist who exhibited with René Bloch in the early 1970s, both in Berlin and New York. Dorian has flown from here from London in the middle of installing a retrospective of Cafe Bremer at Raven Row, which promises to be a fascinating exhibition.
Dorian lives in Berlin and works internationally as a curator, lecturer and editor. Her concept-driven projects often involve research with image archives in relation to economics, display practices, non-Western internationalisms, non-aligned histories, solidarity and geopolitics. She has taught at the Dutch Art Institute since 2010 and received her PhD from the Curatorial Knowledge Program at Goldsmiths University of London. So without further ado, I'll hand over to Mark. Thank you. Thanks, Richard. Thanks everyone for coming.
I'm in danger of disappointing everybody today, because there will be people here who have read the book, and there will be people who haven't read the book. in the future but if i don't know it's a bit of a tough one and it's a shame i missed the show here limited knowledge of the original use of the term capitalist realism useful and
in my mind that we have them that no reference to the average in the sixties james is that the obvious in relation to social i'm not sure people now of social in a way they probably would have done in the 60s. But okay, so what I'm going to try and do is then, as I said, the risk of war, and there's a good book, go over the main thesis of the claim about what capitalist realism is, also give a bit of personal contextualisation,
where the idea came from, And then a bit of extrapolation and a bit of a sense of where we are now, five years after the book came out. The joke I would make is, you know, when, bear in mind, the book was being finished in 2008, 2009, right at the point at which the financial crisis erupted. and you know it really did seem as if the book would be out of date before it even came out because of this kind of major trauma for capitalism you know it just obviously didn't work out that way at all and perhaps the book is some explanation of why there's the case of why the financial crisis didn't bring about a serious
the economic crisis didn't bring about a serious kind of ideological crisis capitalism or at least one not one that has cost it thus far very much. Okay, well, the thing I usually say about capitalist realism in my sense is that it's fairly easy to spot it, but it's harder to define it, actually. You know, one could say that it's a belief. It's a belief that capitalism is the only viable political economic system. And a lot of the book came out of a riff from the phrase from Frederick Jameson, although he attributes it to some lameness third party,
the idea that it's easy to imagine the end of the world and the end of capitalism. The problem is, whose belief is this? and also the very use of the term capitalism is problematic because it's precisely one could say what's at stake in the concept of capitalist realism in my sense is the very disappearance of the concept of capitalism as such capitalism is so naturalized that it no longer appears as a specific kind of mode of social relations political organization it received into being
and the background that disappears because it's not as if the majority of the population is spending a lot of time thinking about capitalism clear so that's what I mean by whose belief is this whose belief is it that that capitalism is the only viable economic system, political economic system. Putting it like that, there's a belief that's clearly some kind of shorthand actually. Another way of getting at it, what capitalist realism is, would be as an attitude, a kind of fatalistic submission there. A sense that,
you know, capitalism is inevitable, there's no point fighting it. Again, I think this is too individualized a way of grasping it. It's a kind of useful first sketch of capitalist realism, but ultimately it's too individualized, it's too psychologized a way of grasping capitalist realism itself. But in lots of ways these attitudes and these beliefs are really the symptom of something more deeper, more transpersonal, an impersonal ideological field. A quotation in which is read out in the book, this diffuse atmosphere, I think captures more closely what the state of capitalism is.
So within a most prominent definition on a side and that's kind of approached this in a crab-like, emotional, sideways. I mean, capitalist realism, as I understand it, the pathology of the left broadly understood. I mean, in the broadest sense of the left, including the very, very soft left of the parliamentary politics. And which I don't, so I mean Richard mentioned 1989 as the major threshold the disintegration of state socialism actually existing, communism leading us only with actually existing capitalism but that's the second big threshold
the first big one of course was a decade before that 1979, 1980, the arrival of Reagan and Thatcher And one can say that broadly speaking, the 80s was the period in which capitalist realism was fought for, was implemented. The 90s was when it was secured. You know, they all joke about Tony Blair being Margaret Thatcher's greatest achievement. You know, it's certainly true in many respects. Capitalist realism, I think in the sense I understand it, really only emerged in the 90s.
And I think it was somewhat parallel with Clinton and Blair. I mean, in the UK, I think the Labour Party had been using this rhetoric of realism, even before Thatcher actually, right at the end of the 70s. There was a sense that things couldn't carry on as we'd been carrying on, that kind of social democratic, broadly social democratic post-war settlement in the UK was no longer sustainable. and you know that that that that that that that started to be used by local politicians in the 70s intensifying in the 80s as then this narrative about
time started to emerge I think this is this kind of crucial to campus realism is this as this big story about the development history and what modernization means the meaning of modernization. Absolutely crucial to Blair's vision was this notion that the Labour Party could not be elected if it didn't modernize. That's certainly true, but what was his meaning of modernization? His meaning of modernization was simply neoliberalization.
And, you know, there was a successful imposition of this kind of historical narrative that the attachment of, most of the attachments of the Labour Party to organised labour, etc. were old fashioned, unsustainable. Hence the whole use of the term new labour was established as temporality. New labour versus old, of course who can be on the side of the old, who can be against modernisation? Now the effect of this, and although this is really, more than actually modernizing the Labour Party, of course the real effect of this was to surrender modernity to neoliberal capitalism.
so modernization as I said then simply is understood to equal neoliberal capitalism and this equation is accepted kind of blindly and a lot of the news outlets in the UK would often use modernization in this unquitical way you know if there's a if there's a strike and they'll often be narrated as the the the workers are resisting modernization so the underlying of the underlying notion which which kind of dying of
Blair, I think, also said that I think it was a power of Clinton as well, but perhaps the most explicit, the postmodern messianism of Blair, made it much more zealous in his explicit advocacy of this position. I think the book Capitalist Buddhism is a book about Blair and Blairism fundamentally it's a book about that. That was the, well, what's that? Reducid saying about that, but that was the initial inspiration. and the simple idea that capitalism is the
under game in town and all we can do is adjust to it and there's no adjustment I think this is what it is to be realistic so you know a series of moves have happened then so one is to consign the the old left to the past but it's not Of course, it's not only the old left that gets consigned to the past, it's really the left has such a main role. Blairism becomes this model of capitalist realism, copied by many other parties in Europe particularly. Where the model is, okay, we broadly accept capitalism, but we hope to introduce some kind of small measures of social justice around the outside.
That's the best one can hope for a man. And this talking down of expectations is meant by realism. You know, once it was possible to struggle against capitalism, but it's been put no longer. That's an explicit or implicit message of those politicians who have accepted capitalist I mean, partly why I came to all this was really working in a Blairite institution.
that's I was working as a teacher at a further education college in the early two, from the early two thousands to early to late from the, yeah, so most of the decade, most of the last decade and further education colleges are things like community colleges here all experience and you know how that manifests itself that obviously control regulation by
of bureaucratic login books performance reviews planning documents that vast exercises in simulation or which were only a limited relationship to anything that anyone thought would actually ever happen in the classroom. But of course, no one thought this was good. No one in the college, the other teachers, and crucially, the management was imposing. No one thought, this is really going to improve my practice as a teacher. If we do this, if I fill in this logbook, if I do this performance review, I will be a much better teacher after this. No one believed that. So, on behalf of the fellow workers, what you have is an attitude of kind of way of resignation. We just have to do this.
generally in this respect. The attitude of the managers was kind of more complicated typically. It was similarly fatalistic. But they had to sort of push these measures through, so they had to make some sort of case for them. But the case was not that they would do anything they liked or they were supposed to do. It's just the path of least resistance. If we do this stuff, then our lives would be easier if we try to not do it. Really, I think part of the context of this thing is that there's no sense that this could be politically struggled against.
The background here was one of radical deep political civilization. And that's part of realism. It's just how things are now that we have to do this stuff. We didn't used to have to do it, but now we do. And the future only holds the prospect of adding more and more of this kind of work. And so the managers will say, this is just how things are done now. I don't like it much more than you do. But it's pointless to find it.
I think I'd, in the book, kind of give that anecdote of one of the managers who, when my colleagues and I completed one of these self-assessment documents, said, the manager said, yes, okay, be just not critical enough of yourselves in this book. So this form of what I call market stars, it was also this kind of market malism, this demand for self criticism. But that wasn't the worst bit about it. The worst bit about it was the fact that he then said, look, you can make lots of criticisms of yourself, nothing will ever happen. You know, so the sheer kind of utter cynicism. That, you know, the end, to be, first of all, required
to go through this kind of ritualistic self-denigration, and then to be told that it's just an empty exercise of simulation that is utterly meaningless anymore. I don't know which is worse, but certainly the two together are horrible. I mean, I think it was kind of crucial to this, and anti-capitalist realism in general is the idea that it's not necessarily good, these things, but they are inevitable. And I think that this is the... I don't think, for instance, neoliberalism has managed to sell itself to the majority of the population, actually. It's the best way of running things. But it has managed to sell itself as on the side of the force that is going to win.
I think that's another sense of what was at stake in capitalist realism is that sense that we can't find it, it's going to win anyway. We might not like it, but we have to do it. But, you know, I quickly sort of, I suppose, reflected on the fact that there's something strange is going on here. in that there was a clear kind of dissonance between what we were living as teachers and more broadly as public service workers because of this kind of new regulatory apparatuses that we were subject to in the teaching profession were also being imposed across public services
under the language. There was a clear dissonance between the what we were living as workers in those institutions and the narrative that we were given, the broad narrative we were given about life under neoliberal governments. Simply, bureaucracy was supposed to be exactly the kind of thing that neoliberalism had delivered us from, wasn't it? You know, that wasn't bureaucracy, you know, exactly the kind of thing that, you know, this superseded state socialist monoliths imposed on us. How do we get rid of all that? How is it then that professors like teachers found themselves subject to increasing unprecedented amounts of bureaucracy under a system of governance which allegedly was opposed to bureaucracy?
There's a clear inconsistency. There is a difference, though. There is a difference between this new bureaucracy and the older bureaucracy. The new bureaucracy is typically a form of self-believing. This bureaucracy is outsourced to individuals. You know, bureaucrats don't fill in the forms for us, we fill in self-assessment forms ourselves. The old regulatory agencies, well, I mean, that's only part of the story.
It's not as if the old regulatory agencies had disappeared. They disappeared for capitalists, but not for us. So we had a lot of the old, already existing bureaucratic regulatory mechanisms on top of those with this proliferation of self-surveillance machineries as well. Which would multiply by the week. I think the further thought here is that What do these things really end at? I think that's what we have to ask. We're all subject to these things, almost no matter what the level of work is, there is this requirement for self surveillance, this performance of self regulation.
what is this really about given that manifesting does not meet the goals that it tends to be supposed to as I said before no one really believes this improves performance or increases the efficiency of working no one can believe that the very fact you're doing that means you're decreasing your efficiency as a worker actually, means you're distracted from what you've done your core task as an educated thing to be. So the real aim of this stuff is precisely the affective consequences that it brings about, i.e. the anxiety that these things bring about is their real aim of
in a deep, disables agency of the worker. It's part of a project of re-subordinating workers with it. Keeping workers in a perpetual state of anxiety, anxiety is highly functional in that way. And this brings to one of the other key themes, strands of the book, is mental health, politics of mental health. I think that in some ways, to be a bit crude and schematic about it, you could chart the rise of capitalist realism on one axis, the decline of anti-psychiatry on the other hand, actually. As an anti-psychiatry kind of waned,
so capitalist realism could emerge. But I mean, anti-psychiatry in the 60s was organized around quite extreme conditions, such as schizophrenia. I think that the kind of politics of capitalist, realist mental health are concentrated around much more banal and widespread conditions such as depression. to depression. This being part of what I call privatisation of stress in the book. This is a very efficient mechanism I think for as part of this project of resubordination, part of a project of responsabilisation which I think is key to the kind of neoliberal world.
If your working conditions decline, if you're getting paid less, if you're going to do more work for effectively the same or less money, those are objective stresses, right? Those things clearly just make your life worse. It isn't your fault. but the I think the dominant paradigms, the dominant stories about mental health encourages us to take responsibility for those things so crudely speaking when those things have happened you go to a trade union official or engage in struggle against them now we're encouraged to
go to the doctor and get a chemical solution or else tell ourselves a more positive story about things. These are two dominant approaches, right? It's kind of the chemical balance story and the kind of therapy-like, cognitive behavioural therapy story. It's not that neither of these things are working sometimes, but quite clearly, I don't think they're getting to the real causation of widespread mental health problems such as depression. I mean just simply put, even if depression is a chemical imbalance in the brain, it doesn't
tell us anything about what's causing that chemical imbalance in the brain. And certainly, by most metrics, there's been an increase in depression, rates of depression, particularly amongst the young. It seems to me that it's pretty obvious why depression would have grown, particularly amongst the young. And exactly these conditions of increased precariousness, casualisation, generalised insecurity, you know, these conditions will produce more anxiety. That anxiety will inevitably be manifested in pathologies such as depression.
So it seems to me anyway that these two dimensions of experience of the late capitalism experience of bureaucracy and the experience of mental, so-called mental health issues were potentially fruitful areas for politicization. Because the very point about them is that they are de-politicized. As I said, bureaucratic procedures were accepted as how things were, not the subject of political struggle. Mental health conditions were accepted as just a biological... I don't know, down to biology, to family background.
And I think particularly with mental health issues, so many people are suffering from them. I think that's an opportunity there to effectively reframe narratives people have got about themselves and the world around them. moving away from this compulsory, punitive, responsibilisation that's been so much a feature of neo-governmental capitalism and towards looking at the impersonal causation of what goes on in so-called interior life. But such a personalisation is not easy, to say the least.
given the destruction of the agents who might have carried out, such as trade unions, and the failure of any new agents to emerge, which could replace those older agents in a sustained way, I think. Also, clearly what we're looking at here is not just a political program now in the final, it's something that has been imposed throughout culture and can call upon widespread support for its basic tenets and the basic tenets of capitalist realism. One example of that would be reality TV, I think.
I think there's no accident that the term reality in reality TV, that reality TV should become the dominant entertainment form of the first decade of the 21st century. The period of high capitalist readers might think, the late 90s, early 21st century before 2009. That coincided with the rise of reality TV. The naturalisation of competition, which is key to virtually any model of reality TV actually. Although actually if you look at reality TV, that competition amongst individuals or groups almost always has to be artificially paid. And then alongside that, there's explicit kind of business propaganda in some forms of the LTT, like in front of us.
Just normalize the perspective of business and demands that we adjust to this as precisely the model of reality. So, I mean, what we've seen is a successful struggle, weighed by the writer, many thought simultaneously. I mean, they understand how to win the game. The trouble with the writer, at least it was, that they know what to do and they do it. We don't have that problem. I mean, just simply, two fronts, carrot and stick,
the attack on organized labor, both practically and ideologically, which Tony Blair celebrated, he's famously proud of the fact that Britain, And as he said, if Britain has got some of the most stringent anti-tradean legislation in the world now, I thought it was great. So on one hand, the attack on organised labour, the demotion of the whole model of organised labour, and collectivism to belong to some superseded memory of the past, and on the other hand, the seduction to individualized consumerism. This, as I said, the key battleground, as I think it was in the 80s, the right sort of halfs to the fruits of that in the 90s.
So the effect of this is the defaults are resetting, defaults are resetting over the society and particularly in institutions. I mean, one thing you have to bear in mind here is the neoliberal slight of hand that allows this to happen, where a disdain for the state, you know, it's typical of neoliberalism, is a rhetorical disdain for the state, at the same time as neoliberals make sure they occupy the state and instrumentalise the state for their project. Now, their project is a project of occupying and controlling the state, quite clearly. And as I educate the start of the talk, it's a crisis that's clearly not enough to overthrow capitalism, In some ways the crisis, the financial crisis is intensified capitalist realism, particularly the heartlands of capitalist realism here in the UK.
Austerity, austerity programs really only possible on the basis of the kind of underlying capitalist realist kind of infrastructure, kind of psychic infrastructure. But the capitalist realism did change tone after the crisis. The gambit shifted. Before the crisis it was join us or die. If you don't come with us you'll be crushed by the juggernaut of capitalism or left to die in your own piss. completely ignored and no one can. It's up to you. Afterwards, it was joining us on a little fucklet. I think this is the term now, really. And that's particularly, you know, brazen in the UK
with the Tory-led coalition governments phrase, you know, we're all in this together. I mean, that's clearly been used to then, The crisis has been used to further embed capitalist realism in its deep cradles. Social security is unfordable. This is part of the term we've got. It might be nice, you might like to do it, but it's not adult or responsible to do it. We can't be romantic about it. Public services are bloated, need to be cut back. Pension schemes are unaffordable, unworkable, etc. In the UK this became a kind of form of nearly almost, I think I have to understand this more as neuro-linguistic programming actually.
What happened with the Cameron government. Just obsessively repeating false mantras. until they didn't matter that they were false they kept saying and they became taken for reality I mean the key thing there being that the overspending of late government which caused the financial crisis something which they were allowed to keep saying over and over and as the New Economics Foundation put it and I think part of the success of the right in managing the crisis has been its simple narrative It's got a simple story explaining it. The story is Blairite governments overspent on social services, etc. That's why the government is.
The story about the banks, global finance, virtual capitalism, a lot more complicated to try and tell them. And I think that the right is profitable. Of course we have seen opposition, but I think we'd all have to say that which has not succeeded. Whether it be the Occupy region, which is obviously much more significant here than in the UK, it's a bit less rewarding to be honest. In the UK we also had student militancy for a brief period in the end of 2010 and riots in 2011. But none of these proved capable of mounting a kind of sustained assault on capitalist realism. And it's partly because capitalist realism is just not susceptible to direct action.
It's imposed by direct action, it's imposed by indirect action. This is the work of ideologies, is indirect action. You could say, what is ideology? It's not what you believe, it's what you believe the other believes. And so it's the other, we have to persuade, not ourselves in a certain way. And this involves this indirect mediation. What is taken from reality is generated ideologically. There's no escape from ideology as such. But we need to seize the controls of reality production, of where reality is, of what counts as reality is produced. And, you know, that, I think, that has to involve so-called mainstream media, what male anarchists call MSN, and parliamentary politics at some level has to be involved in.
It's not that these things in themselves will solve anything. I think one dimension of capitalist reason is perhaps to form anti-capitalism itself, it's taken on perhaps to form anti-capitalism as such, you could say, in a certain way. But certainly the kind of justified cynicism about mainstream media and about parliamentary politics, I think that the direct consequences of Blairism and Clintonism, you know, I think a whole generation, if not more than one generation, has been utterly disillusioned by what happened with Blair and Clinton and probably also as a barman as well.
But I think it's fairly clear that unless we've got some input there, unless we've got some influence in the mainstream parties, mainstream media, then we'll be condemned into this marginal position. will be condemned into this position of being subordinated to a reality which is still being defined by capital. But I mean, it's clearly that we shouldn't fall into the opposite solution of thinking you can just solve things from within mainstream politics or within mainstream media. media that was the fallacy of that but part of what made Blairism what was was
the disintegration of the wider movements around you know the Labour Party around other similar parties around the world that's the disarticulation between parliamentary parties and the wider movements that you know what to once the once these parties come to power they've got nothing to fall back on And I think that anti-cow-person-Romeo has intensified that disarticulation and that split. I think we need to kind of reverse that. Who can be naive now about that? Who can be naive about the possibility of parliamentary politics? Nobody. But at the same time, a kind of complete disdain for that, I think, just plays into the hands of the neo-Reverals.
as I say, they want control of the state. They want us to get up on that terrain. They want it for themselves. They've had it. So, you know, uncontested for the last 30 years. So, I mean, I think it's become increasingly clear that sporadic oppositionism won't work and we need to be in a business of, old-fashioned business of again building. And that involves, I think, a problem of coordinating resources, of building heterogeneous alliances. I mean, if you look at the success of the right,
that's what the right does very well. It builds up alliances between very unlikely groups. I mean, it's founded mobile regularism with the religious right plus free market liberals, what have they got in common with each other? Nothing. Yet, you know, again, it's the right who seems to learn this lesson about taught by people like Stu, or better than the left, about the contingency of any connections, the contingency of any articulations, that heterogeneous things can be articulated together. What is presented to us as natural is actually a series of articulations which can be disarticulated. Equally, things which seem to have no natural fit together can be articulated together.
The right knows this, it does out all the time to our cost, I think. I think around that though, I mean, we need generation of new forms of solid editing, which is extremely difficult. Alongside that, which may emerge from these new sites of struggle that I indicated before, such as bureaucracy or mental health, or not so much new sites of struggle in the case of mental health, but a former site of struggle which needs to be reoccupied. I think to end on a somewhat optimistic note, the right clearly hasn't got many new ideas now.
I mean, it's had its chance, it doesn't have anything left. It doesn't seem to have, it's had whatever, five years since the financial crisis, it hasn't got anything else. I mean, neoliberalism is the best it can offer, and all it has offered is neoliberalism mark 2. That puts us in quite a different situation to what we have been, I think, for quite some time. The right could always be relied upon to have some kind of improvisational strategy in place in order to seize control of the future. I don't think it has that anymore. It's been a shift in some ways from neoliberalism to nihiliberalism, where no one believes this stuff anymore, but it just carries on.
So I think that is a space of opportunity for us. They don't have any big projected story going forward. All they've got is the same old one continuing. And this is our chance for intervention in this moment, perhaps unprecedented in many ways. OK, we'll leave it there. We've got immediate questions. I think now will be your time to take a few before we move on to Doreen. I have one question mark, and it's more to kind of take a step back a little bit, I guess,
and to ask you about just this very act of naming capitalist realism, of re-adopting capitalism as something that existed in a different form of greenery state, but just in the very act how do you perceive that as being moving towards this disturbance of naturalized ideologies kind of to take that naming act as a critical moment because I'm thinking in a way towards the art historical precedence in the 60s that kind of action made me with a slightly parodic act yes it was a kind gesture towards kind of irony around the artistic movement and the collectivisation of that as it
kind of career gesture almost. Yeah, but I think it's also in that case about, you know, drawing attention to the ways in which things like advertising, functioned analogies, historians, propaganda, etc. But I think probably that's the chief contribution that I've made with the book was being able to name this. I mean you could say that, you know, if it weren't for that, it would just reinforce the very conditions that were describing this. But, so I think naming of capitalist leaders and then was a provisional act of denatilization. So, and the repoliticization, you could say, we could all start to check ourselves whenever
we start to do that shrub of, this is how things are now, just got to accept it, sort of do. There's that set of kind of behavioral and linguistic tropes which we fall into. We could certainly identify and could identify them as, you know, as political consequences of a political strategy from the other side, actually. So I think that is perhaps the most important thing that I did with the name, actually. Thanks, Mark, for your presentation. I'm curious what you think about the ecological crisis. And I think that Brian Lee Klein's book
that's about to come out called called this changes everything capitalism versus the climate and for her the ecological crisis is a game changer in terms of re-energizing an energy that we haven't seen before at least not recently in terms of an anti-capitalist a direct anti-capitalist struggle so how do you see that how do you see ecology and the looming crisis in relationship to capitalist realism yeah yeah I think you mentioned it very briefly in the book, but I think it could be the crucial thing. But I think here we really confront the strong distinction between capitalist realism and the real.
The ecological crisis is absolutely real, but it can't be accommodated to realism. It can't be accommodating to capitalism. I think here we see the real point of extreme friction here. That it's not realistic to implement such measures that would save our own and by our total destruction. So people can focus on at one and the same time saying, capitalism is the only realistic political system and it's going to burn out our environment somehow. The problem is how that dissonance can persist here.
I think to solve the ecological crisis we need a kind of collective agency such as we've never seen we've never seen before and it would be precisely something that is completely unrealistic from the current ordinance we've got but you know the unrealistic I guess part of the point of what I'm saying is what counts as realistic or unrealistic is politically determined and not determined by the actual conditions that have been applied. So, yes, I mean, I believe that this could become crucial,
though people do seem to go and manage this system as quite effectively. And there is a danger it's feeding into it. The crisis is feeding into this sense of kind of nihilistic hopelessness, I think. And less than the emergence of an ancient, which can grasp that. I think many people think, yeah, well, that's inevitable, capitalism is inevitable as well. There's not a lot we can do about it. I think in order for it to just break capitalism down, people need a sense that they can actually do something about it. And that is what is lacking.