Capitalist Realism And Neoliberal Hegemony:
A Dialogue
Mark Fisher and Jeremy Gilbert
Abstract This is a dialogue conducted over email by Mark Fisher, author of the widely-read Capitalist
Realism: Is There No Alternative and Jeremy Gilbert, editor of New Formations. The discussion
touches on issues raised by Fisher’s book, by some of Gilbert’s work as a theorist and analyst, by some of
the political commentary in which each has engaged at various times (online and in print), as well as by
the recent prevalence of a certain identification with anarchist ideas and methods amongst activists and
online commentators whose intellectual and political reference points are otherwise very close to those of
the Fisher and Gilbert. It considers the concept of ‘capitalist realism’ as a way of understanding neoliberal
ideology and hegemony; the role of bureaucracy in neoliberal culture and the ‘societies of control’; the
types of political and cultural strategy that might be required to challenge their hegemonic position; the
relationship between political strategies which do and do not focus on conventional party politics; the
general condition of politics in the UK today. Although largely concerned with a specifically British (and,
arguably, English) political context, its consideration of abstract issues around the theorisation of ideology
and neoliberalism and the nature of political strategy have far wider applicability.
Keywords capitalist realism, neoliberalism, capitalism, ideology, hegemony, bureaucracy,
political strategy, democracy, activism, anarchism, neurotic individualism
This is a dialogue conducted over email by Mark Fisher, author of the widely-read Capitalist
Realism: Is There No Alternative and Jeremy Gilbert, editor of New Formations. The discussion
touches on issues raised by Fisher’s book, by some of Gilbert’s work as a theorist and analyst,
by some of the political commentary in which each has engaged at various times (online and
in print), as well as by the recent prevalence of a certain identification with anarchist ideas
and methods amongst activists and online commentators whose intellectual and political
reference points are otherwise very close to those of Fisher and Gilbert. It considers the concept
of ‘capitalist realism’ as a way of understanding neoliberal ideology and hegemony; the role
of bureaucracy in neoliberal culture and the ‘societies of control’; the types of political and
cultural strategy that might be required to challenge their hegemonic position; the relationship
between political strategies which do and do not focus on conventional party politics; the
general condition of politics in the UK today. Although largely concerned with a specifically
British (and, arguably, English) political context, its consideration of abstract issues around
the theorisation of ideology and neoliberalism and the nature of political strategy have far
wider applicability.
JG: Your use of the term ‘capitalist realism’ seems to designate, at its simplest, both the
conviction that there is no alternative to capitalism as a paradigm for social organisation, and
the mechanisms which are used to disseminate and reproduce that conviction amongst large
DOI:10.3898/NEWF.80/81.05.2013
Capitalist Realism And Neoliberal Hegemony
89
populations. As such it would seem to be both a ‘structure of feeling’, in Williams’ terms (or
perhaps an ‘affective regime’ in a slightly more contemporary register) and, in quite a classical
sense, a hegemonic ideology, operating as all hegemonic ideologies do, to try to efface their
own historicity and the contingency of the social arrangements which they legitimate. Is that
right? Could you correct and/or expand on that explication of the term and say a little bit
about its genesis and its specific implications?
MF: I don’t think there’s anything to correct in your description. I think, though, that we can
say that capitalist realism has effaced not only its own historicity and contingency, but also its
own existence as an ideological constellation. You could say that effacement is what defines
capitalist realism. The hegemonic field which capitalist realism secures and intensifies is one
in which politics itself has been ‘disappeared’. What capitalist realism consolidates is the idea
that we are in the era of the post-political - that the big ideological conflicts are over, and the
issues that remain largely concern who is to administrate the new consensus. Of course, there’s
nothing more ideological than the idea that we’ve moved beyond ideology. It has become
increasingly clear over the last few years, especially since 2008, that the (essentially 1990s) idea
of the post-political and the post-ideological was always a cover for neoliberal hegemony. The
increased use of the term neoliberalism since 2000 is a symptom of the weakening power of
neoliberalism. The more it is named, the less its doctrines can pose as post-political.
Nevertheless, the notion of the post-political isn’t just an ideological ruse. Membership
of political parties and trade unions really is declining. It’s a commonplace that the major
political parties in the UK and the US are scarcely distinguishable from one another. Very
few people identify themselves as political. Given this context, there’s something misleading
about describing capitalist realism, as I myself often tend to, as the belief that capitalism is
the only viable political economic system. Capitalist realism could perhaps better be seen as
a set of behaviours and affects that arise from this ‘belief ’. The dominance of capitalism, the
inability to imagine an alternative to it, now constitute a sort of invisible horizon. Few explicitly
think about ‘capitalism’ as such - the disappearance of alternatives, even if only imaginary
alternatives, make it much harder to apprehend capitalism as a specific, contingent system.
Capitalist realism as I have understood it entails this deep embedding in a world - or set of
worlds - in which capitalism is massively naturalised.
Capitalist realism doesn’t appear in the first instance, then, as a political position. It emerges
instead as a pragmatic adjustment - ‘this is the way thing are now’. This sense of resignation,
of fatalism, is crucial to the ‘realism’. Here we can distinguish between neoliberalism and
capitalist realism. Capitalist realism isn’t the direct endorsement of neoliberal doctrine; it’s
the idea that, whether we like it or not, the world is governed by neoliberal ideas, and that
won’t change. There’s no point fighting the inevitable.
It’s not an accident that I came to the idea of capitalist realism while working in a Further
Education (FE) college at the height of Blairism. New Labour was the paradigmatic example
of a formerly left-wing party capitulating to capitalist realism. For it must be recognised that
capitalist realism is a pathology of the left. It is the left which has had to tell itself the story
that there’s no point struggling for an alternative to capitalism. In other words, capitalist
realism is the left acquiescing in the narrative that the new right so aggressively pushed in
the 1980s. Thatcher was right to claim Blair as her greatest achievement. Labour’s painful
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journey from unelectability in the 1980s to government in the 1990s ended up consummately
proving Thatcher’s point that there is no alternative. When Thatcher first made that remark,
she was saying that there is no viable alternative to neoliberal capitalism. By 1997, there was
no imaginable alternative.
In the Further Education sector where I worked, you could see the practical and existential
consequences of all this. There was an acceptance amongst managers of the inevitability
that education would increasingly be modelled on business. Some managers would typically
introduce new procedures by explicitly saying that they didn’t themselves think they were a
good idea, but what could you do? This was how things were to be done now, and the easiest
option all round would be for us to go through the motions. We didn’t have to believe it, we
only had to act as if we believed it. The idea that our ‘inner beliefs’ mattered more than what
we were publicly professing at work was crucial to capitalist realism. We could have left-wing
convictions, and a left-wing self-image, provided these didn’t impinge on work in any significant
way! This was ideology in the old Althusserian sense - we were required to use a certain language
and engage in particular ritualised behaviours, but none of this mattered because we didn’t
‘really’ believe in any of it. But of course the very privileging of ‘inner’ subjective states over
the public was itself an ideological move.
Capitalist realism, then, is essentially about the depoliticisation of work and, more broadly,
of everyday life. That’s one of the saddest effects of the subduing of unions. At work, we learn
to accept worsening pay and conditions as ‘just the way things are’ in a competitive, globalised
world. ‘Politics’ becomes something that we engage in only at the ballot box, if we even consider
that to be worthwhile (and many of those who vote think of it as a pointless, impotent act) or,
if we’re of a more activist bent, it’s something that we do at protests of various kinds. In either
case, work becomes decoupled from politics. (One benefit of the occupations that happened
in educational institutions as part of the anti-fees movement in the UK in 2010 was that they
remade the link between work and politics.)
In summary, then, I think it’s best not to see capitalist realism as a political position but
as something which precludes political involvement and identification. It therefore follows
that one of the most effective first steps in the struggle against capitalist realism will be the
invention of new ways in which people can become involved with politics.
JG: What do you see as the role of bureaucratic managerialism in the neoliberal regime?
MF: The - on the face of it - strange role that bureaucratic managerialism played in neoliberal
culture was central to the formation of my thinking about capitalist realism. It became increasingly
apparent to me that we were living out a cognitive dissonance. We’d internalised the idea that it
was social democracy, socialism and Stalinism that were bureaucratic, and that neoliberalism was
against red tape of all kinds. Yet workers, particularly workers in public services, found ourselves
doing more bureaucracy than ever before. How can we make sense of this?
The first thing to say is that the nature of the bureaucracy has changed. Bureaucracy has
become decentralized. It’s not (just) something to which we are subject now; it’s something
which we are required to actively produce ourselves. In some respects, we’re in a worst of all
worlds scenario, in which the old, top down state bureaucratic apparatuses are supplemented
by a regime of self-surveillance. We’re all familiar with this regime - continuing professional
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development, performance reviews, log books, not to mention the whole machine of the
Research Excellence Framework (REF).1 We’re also familiar with the diffuse atmosphere of
light cynicism which surrounds these activities. When I was working in FE, one manager
would cheerily present us with each new initiative, openly saying that he didn’t think it was
of much value, but that we should do it to make our lives easier. He once told our team that
we weren’t sufficiently critical of ourselves in one of our performance reviews - but not to
worry because nothing would happen on the basis of any criticisms that we made. I don’t
know what was more demoralising here: the fact that we were required to denigrate ourselves
as part of our job, or the fact that the criticisms we made were a purely empty exercise.
Some of the affective consequences of this self-surveillance regime are amply demonstrated
here: anxiety, accompanied by a sense of the meaninglessness of the activity about which
one is anxious. The word ‘Kafkaesque’ is enormously over-used, but it fits this existential
situation perfectly. So, bureaucracy becomes immanent to the fabric of work in general,
not something performed by a special kind of worker. This also means that what we might
call bureaucratic time has changed. In line with Deleuze’s highly prescient analyses in his
essay ‘Postscript on Societies of Control’, there is a shift from the punctuated time of the
periodic assessment to the more open time of the continuous assessment. The inspection
never ends. As Deleuze says, drawing on a term from Kafka’s The Trial, we are in a condition
of indefinite postponement. Our status is never fully ratified; it is always up for review. The
legalese vagueness of the criteria by which we are judged intensifies the sense of uncertainty:
can we be sure have we interpreted the guidelines correctly?
Rather than an elimination of bureaucracy, what we’ve seen under neoliberalism is just the
reverse: bureaucracy’s mad, cancerous proliferation. Increasingly, what this new bureaucracy
measures is not the worker’s ability to perform their job, but their ability to perform bureaucratic
tasks effectively. This has perverse effects on the way that institutions function, which we saw
demonstrated with New Labour’s ‘target culture’. As is now well known, the imposition of targets
led to widespread gaming of the system, and also a neglect of those areas which fell outside
the remit of the target. I’ve called this situation ‘Market Stalinism’. This isn’t just a joke; what it
highlights is the extent to which neoliberalism depends upon authoritarian bureaucratic control
systems. Again, New Labour exemplified this perfectly. The party repudiated authoritarian
Stalinism at the level of ideological content, but, at the level of form, Labour became an
increasingly authoritarian organisation. The concept of Market Stalinism also allows us to
recognise that neoliberalism was never about reducing governmental control in order to free
up the market. Market dynamics don’t spontaneously appear in public services, they have to
be constructed – and, as the examples I’ve already given show, this requires, not a trimming
back of bureaucratic agencies, but the production of new forms of bureaucracy. In order that
institutions and workers can be seen to be competing with one another, it is necessary to
produce all kinds of spurious quantificatory data. This means that, in education and other
public services, we’re not dealing with ‘marketization’ so much as a pseudo-marketization, the
simulation of market dynamics.
The question then arises - if this neoliberal bureaucracy is (in its own ‘official’ terms)
dysfunctional, if it doesn’t work to achieve its stated goals, then, what is its real purpose? I think
there are a number of answers to this. The first is that the Market Stalinist bureaucracy has an
ideological effect. If, as Althusser said, ideology is essentially ritualistic - i.e. it makes us adopt
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a certain language, range of behaviours etc. - then neoliberal bureaucracy is quintessentially
ideological. It not only naturalises and normalises the language and practices of business; it
makes the ritualised performance of this naturalisation a condition of workers retaining their
jobs. The second role that managerialist bureaucracy plays for neoliberalism is a disciplinary
function: it subdues and pacifies workers. The anxiety that neoliberal bureaucracy so often
produces should not be seen as an accidental side-effect of these measures; rather, the anxiety
is something that is in itself highly desirable from the perspective of the neoliberal project.
The erosion of confidence, the sense of being alone, in competition with others: this weakens
the worker’s resolve, undermines their capacity for solidarity, and forestalls militancy.
So it seems to me that the politicizing of managerialist bureaucracy could be extremely
fruitful from the point of view of the struggle against neoliberalism. There is a widespread
discontent with managerialism, but, in the lack of any agent or organised struggle which can
focus it, this discontent will remain impotent grumbling. This is just the kind of space that I
was referring to in my first answer, when I was talking about the kinds of struggle which could
reconnect politics to work and everyday life. For whatever reason, unions don’t yet seem to
have grasped the potential here. This is a catastrophic shame - the tendency of neoliberal
bureaucracy is to individualise (with the threat that, if individuals refuse to co-operate with
particular bureaucratic initiatives, they will lose their job). It can only be countered by the kind
of collective action which unions ought to be able to organise.
JG: Your point about capitalist realism being legitimated by the idea that the interior
conscience is the only true site of the authentic self seems quite crucial. I think one of the
implications of a properly anti-individualist philosophy has to be at least a certain scepticism
towards the assumption, inherited from the confessional tradition, from Romanticism and
from depth psychology, that the interior life is the privileged site of authentic selfhood. That’s
hardly a new observation I know, but your point lends it a new kind of critical urgency I think.
It’s been clear for a long time that neoliberalism effectively offers us a bargain whereby we
accept the lack of collective control over our physical or social environment in return for
a very high level of personal autonomy outside the sphere of work: the logical correlate of
that is to accept a mode of subjectivity which ultimately accords all value and intensity to
an entirely private domain of personal consumption. But one further problem here is that
many contemporary forms of labour are all about the production and reproduction of affects
and relations…so to some extent there has to be an increasingly demarcated boundary, a
sort of psychic cordon sanitaire, between this posited domain of interior authenticity, and the
whole remainder of a subject’s social, affective, relational and emotional life … I wonder if
what we’re talking about here is something like the logic of Oedipalisation as described by
Deleuze and Guattari (D&G) … which is rather different from the classical psychoanalytic
understanding of Oedipus as simply a function of all possible civilisation. Of course Zizek
tries to tackle this complex of issues a bit in his interesting essay ‘Whither Oedipus?’ from
a few years ago, but he’s still, I think, coming from a perspective that doesn’t quite grasp
D&G’s point that the experience of desire-as-lack, which is partly dependent upon the
demarcation of the interiority of the subject (where lack is experienced as the truth of our
experience) from the rest of existence, is actively produced by capitalism rather than simply
being given a particular meaning by it. Any thoughts on this?
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MF: This set of issues seems to me to represent a major tension in capitalist culture at the
moment. On the one hand, as you say, it is increasingly difficult to separate life from work.
In conditions of mandatory entrepreneurialism, where we are continually enjoined to sell
ourselves, it is in one sense almost impossible to set up the cordon sanitaire to which you refer.
This isn’t only a matter of duties extending beyond the workplace - via email and the like - it
is also because it is our own subjectivity that is for sale. It’s not enough to just do our jobs;
we have to be seen wanting to do them. What we do in our ‘spare time’ becomes an asset we
can market at work, while activities that are ostensibly beyond work, such as updating our
Facebook profiles, are work in the sense that they create value - but we are not remunerated
for this value-creation.
Seen from another angle, that kind of cordon sanitaire, far from being impossible to maintain,
loooks like a condition of work now. It’s what characterises alienation in the classic sense. We
acquiesce at work because work and ‘what we really are’ have to remain separate.
We live in a new age of Oedipus. It seems to me that the basic Deleuze and Guattari story
- that capitalism actively produces neurotic individualism, that Oedipus is the reterritorialized
face of a capitalism that is, at its other pole, increasingly abstract, impersonal, ‘dehumanised’
- has been strongly confirmed by recent political and cultural developments.
Since around the turn of the millennium, there’s been a shift in culture towards a neurotic
individualism. On social networks, we become anxious curators of our own identities. With
reality TV such as Big Brother, television talent shows and business-based TV programmes such
as The Apprentice and Dragon’s Den, there’s been a strong emphasis on individuals competing
with one another, and an exploitation of the affective and supposedly ‘inner’ aspects of the
participants’ lives. This is another dimension of capitalist realism. It’s no accident that ‘reality’
became the dominant mode of entertainment in the last decade or so. The ‘reality’ usually
amounts to individuals struggling against one another, in conditions where competition is
artificially imposed, and collaboration is actively repressed.
Now let me ask you some questions.
MF: It’s hard not to have some sympathy for the anarchist critique of parliamentary politics
at the moment. How can we counter this - what reasons are there to be in any way optimistic
about change coming through parliament?
JG: Well firstly let’s acknowledge the validity of the first part of your opening remark. It’s
hard not to have sympathy for a highly reductive critique of parliamentary politics - which
would see it as effectively useless from a progressive, radical or democratic perspective because representative politics across Europe, North America, Australasia, and even in South
Africa, seems to have been able to deliver very little beyond various degrees of accommodation
to the demands of neoliberalism for several decades now, despite the widespread unpopularity
of that programme in most instances. That’s the most immediately visible fact about the
relationship between formal representative politics and any set of - even quite minimally egalitarian political objectives in recent years. If we think that there’s any point in getting
involved with representative politics at all - and I think we both do - then initially it’s up to us
to respond to that observation by explaining why.
The first thing I would say is that, when thinking about this kind of question, we always have
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to look at actual history. What has and hasn’t been achieved in the past by whatever means,
that might lead us to expect certain outcomes from certain types of action in the future? On
this basis it’s very clear that the history of anything we could really designate as ‘anarchist’
politics has delivered almost nothing, or at least nothing on its own, in terms of achieving
either revolutionary or reformist objectives in any sustained way, despite having been around
since the 1860s at the latest. Despite the habitually self-congratulatory tone of, for example,
self-styled ‘anarchists’ around the Occupy movement (which I think has been very important,
but not because it has actually achieved anything) anyone who wants to claim that it did have
any such success has to refer to the existence of a few Spanish communes during the civil war
that managed to last for a matter of months each.
On the other hand, the at least partial success of parliamentary reformism is pretty palpable.
I mean, in very crude terms, if you look back to the early twentieth century, and you look at the
places were anarchism and revolutionary communism were strongest - Eastern and Southern
Europe - and then you look at the countries of Northern and Western Europe, then on one
level you have to say that the forms of social democracy that emerged in the latter context
have proven ultimately more effective at protecting workers from exploitation than anarchism
and communism in the former. Wages are higher, working hours are shorter, inequality is
less, in countries with strong welfare states than in countries that were once soviet republics
or hotbeds of anarchism; so everything I’m saying here goes very much for people who want
to launch a revival of ‘communism’ as well. This isn’t to say that the anarchist and indeed the
soviet critique of both the state and traditional modes of left organisation are without validity,
but it is a point worth keeping in mind.
And in terms of how we counter a naive ahistorical anarchism: to be honest I think the
single most important thing we can do is to study both the recent and longer term history
of radical politics and to encourage others to do the same. The worst problem which afflicts
activist culture, at least in the UK, is the fact that young political activists generally know
almost nothing about their immediate antecedents or about the broader political history of
institutions like the Labour Party. The phrase you hear from such people all the time is ‘party
politics never changes anything’ - but at best this assertion is normally based on disappointment
with the Blair government (which did, in fact, enact a series of significant reforms such as the
minimum wage, subsidised childcare, improved maternity and paternity rights, etc. which it’s
very clear the kind of vicious anti-welfare neoliberalism being embraced by the Conservatives
would never have tolerated); at worst it’s just an article of faith based on no evidence at all.
Invariably, in my experience, such activists either know or remember nothing about the
recent past of extra-parliamentary radicalism, and how little it has achieved (or what it has
achieved when it has achieved anything). I think the most effective way to combat this kind of
ignorance would be to start trying to consolidate and publicise the history of radical politics
in the UK and elsewhere over recent decades. That would be the way to combat the kind of
naive anarchism - a manifestation of what I’ve called before ‘the activist imaginary’ - that I
think you’re referring to.
Having said this I think I would want to differentiate somewhat between a very vulgar
anarchist critique of parliamentary democracy - which thinks that you should simply oppose
and/or ignore it in toto - and the kind of critique that we might associate more with the Marxist
tradition, and even what we might call the left wing of social democracy (and I’m sure lots of
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95
self-professed ‘anarchists’ would endorse this more complex view as well).
The latter view would tend to stress the need to use the mechanisms and institutions of the
existing state in order both to achieve immediate social reforms but also to create and potentiate
new forms of collective power, without falling for what I’ve called before (I’m sure I wasn’t the
first) ‘the Fabian fantasy’ - the belief that government is simply a neutral instrument that can
be used by any political group to implement any agenda. I would have to say that I think that
this myth is just as dangerous as the anarchistic belief that you can simply ignore or destroy
those institutions. You can’t just ignore or destroy them, but you can’t simply occupy them
while making no attempt to transform and ultimately supplant them, and expect to achieve
progressive ends, other than very short-term ones. In my experience most Labour MPs seem to
be completely deluded on this point. They might recognise that New Labour got captured by
neoliberalism, but they think that this happened basically because Tony Blair was persuaded by
Andrew Adonis that neoliberalism was a good idea or because Gordon Brown didn’t have the
guts to stand up to Murdoch. They have no idea that there might be real structural impediments
to using the existing institutions of the British state to do anything other than implement the
interests of finance capital. They really believe that all they have to do to pursue a different
agenda is to achieve ministerial office and maintain good intent, and somehow they will be
able to administer social justice from Whitehall. At best they tend to think that you need to get
more people ‘involved’ in politics, but this basically translates as attending local party meetings
and participating in local campaigns around discrete issues, rather than making any substantial
reform of democratic procedures and institutions themselves. In fact I think that to a large
extent the popularity of a simplistic anarchism amongst activists connected with projects like
Occupy is as much as anything a mirror-image of this kind of idiotic parliamentarism, which is
reproduced most uncritically not by parliamentarians themselves, but by the whole profession
of political journalists and professional commentators. It’s worth stressing here actually that
I’ve spoken to a number of very bright MPs who don’t hold this naive view, but I think I’ve
met even fewer professional journalists in recent years who don’t.
I don’t make this analysis on the basis of a theoretical position but merely on the basis of
an objective consideration of the relevant history. How have political goals which effectively
redistributed both wealth and power actually been achieved in the past? If you look at something
like the National Health Service - it wasn’t built by anarchists and revolutionaries, but it also
didn’t come about just because some well-meaning mandarins and ministers decided it would
be a good idea (which is what your average well-meaning Oxford PPE graduate has been
taught and sincerely believes). It was only an assemblage including a very well-organised labour
movement - including both the trade unions and the democratic socialist wing of the Labour
party led by Nye Bevan - and a certain kind of technocratic modernising tendency within the
parliamentary Labour Party and even sections of the Civil Service - that made such lastingly
significant reforms possible.
So the short answer to your question is that history suggests that radical and democratic
politics won’t get anywhere if it doesn’t engage with mainstream party politics. More
theoretically we could say that if we accept the basic Gramscian (and by no means only
Gramscian) proposition that political change can only really be brought about by broadbased social coalitions, then it’s pretty clear that right now in a country like the UK, the only
organisations with anything like the necessary resources to begin to make such a thing possible
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are the trade unions and the Labour Party, which is why it remains the case that you can’t win
any serious progressive objectives without winning the argument inside Labour.
But having said all this one can equally say that another condition of possibility for political
progress under these circumstances is for the leaderships of such organisations to accept their
own limited capacities and the need to build up new centres of collective and democratic power.
It’s this that I think should actually form the core demand of the Left in relation to, for example,
the Labour leadership in the UK: they don’t need to have a programme for implementing
radical social reform, until political conditions exist which might make a genuinely progressive
project actually viable, but they at least need to have a programme aimed at trying to make
such reforms politically possible in the future. I think a lot of left criticism of New Labour was
very confused on this point - a lot of it was framed in terms that seemed to imply that after 18
years of Thatcherism, the demolition of the unions, the complete corporate take-over of the
media, the evisceration of local government etc. it would have been possible simply to resume
the post-war social democratic project, or some updated, more libertarian version thereof.
That would never have been viable. But a Labour government coming to power under such
circumstances could have implemented a programme aimed at reversing each of those trends:
rebuilding local government, sponsoring the development of an alternative media sector,
reinvigorating the unions. Yet they did nothing of the kind, and that’s what they should have
been attacked for, repeatedly and relentlessly. To answer your second question then - there is
no hope of change coming through parliament alone, just as there is no hope of it coming
through mechanisms which don’t involve parliament at all. Radicals should engage with
parliamentary politics precisely to try to ensure that time and opportunities are not wasted
pursuing either of these sterile options, as well as trying to ensure that however useless the
next Labour government is, pressure can be brought to bear on it take those measures that it
realistically could take in order to transform the broader strategic situation.
MF: Yes, there’s a sleight of hand in many anarchist lines of argument. The reformist, social
democratic left is judged by what it has actually done, whereas anarchism is judged by what
it would do, in some ideal society. Setting things up like this obscures what the parliamentary
left actually achieved, while distracting us from anarchism’s meagre achievements. There’s
an anarchist fatalism which is the other side of capitalist realism. According to this logic,
both parliament and mainstream media are irredeemably corrupt, and we should totally
disengage from them. This is given extra force by the appeal to networks and new technology,
which allegedly make the mainstream media (or MSM) and the state irrelevant. I think these
arguments should be rejected tout court. The first problem is that this view of politics and
media isn’t making a break from the currently dominant hegemonic position; it only echoes
it. Franco Berardi said of Berlusconi that he is the clown who mocks the place of power while
occupying it. We might say something similar about Boris Johnson. Johnson profits from the
atmosphere of cynicism that settled over politics. His personal appeal derives in large part
from his seeming distance from the earnestness of party politics. Yet this distance doesn’t stop
Johnson occupying a position of power. That leads to my second problem with the disdain for
mainstream politics and media. Elements of the left seem to earnestly believe what they say
about the irrelevance of the state. The neoliberal right has been much more pragmatic. It might
have relentlessly propagandised against the state, but it also made sure that it controlled the
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97
state. (Of course, in practice neoliberalism was only ever opposed to certain state functions,
such as social security, spending on public services etc.) The point is - if we withdraw from
the state and the media, this doesn’t mean that the state and the media will cease to have
any power. It just means that we will cease to have any influence over the shape that power
takes. The problem is that these critiques essentialize both media and party politics. We need
to remember that neither of these spaces is fixed for all time; that they are terrains shaped
by struggles. Anarchist fatalism maintains that a leftwing Labour Party is impossible – what
a contrast with the ambition and can-do spirit of the neoliberals who took over the Labour
Party. If only they had been so fatalistic!
All of this is meant to echo your point. It’s not that only activity within mainstream media or
party politics counts. On the contrary, these terrains will only change when they are put under
pressure from outside. But that pressure must be exerted; and producing ‘radical’ networks
that see their function as bypassing MSM and parliament will only allow the right to retain
control of the so-called centre ground. One of the major problems with New Labour was that
it never moved past stage 1 of a project for hegemonic takeover. It won power, but then – after
introducing the measures that you mentioned, such as minimum wage, subsidised childcare
etc. which are by no means insignificant – it became stuck on a Sisyphean wheel, where the
only goal was winning re-election. Blair likes to chide ‘Old Labour’ for being stuck in the past,
but he never really moved beyond 1996 – with power close enough to be touched, but extreme
caution necessary to ensure that it was won. The contrast with the Thatcher government, or
indeed the current coalition, is as striking as it is painful. Thatcher succeeded in changing the
definition of the centre ground, but, after more than a decade of New Labour government, the
centre remained more or less where Thatcher had left it. This failure to re-define the centre
meant that, when the coalition came in, it could immediately drag everything to the right.
So let me ask a further question.
MF: What strategies can we pursue to break neoliberal hegemony?
JG: Strategically any kind of hegemonic or counter-hegemonic intervention is always about the
co-ordination of interests. Exactly what form that co-ordination has to take is dependent upon
the circumstances. Given that the old form of the highly uniform and relatively monolithic
political party - Gramsci’s ‘modern Prince’ - is clearly unlikely to return to efficacy any time
soon, I think it’s necessary to keep thinking about how the very divergent elements of an
assemblage which could challenge neoliberal hegemony might work together, or at least
towards mutually-supportive goals. In the context of a very diverse and fragmented culture, we
can’t expect any one organisation or leadership to do all or even most of the necessary work.
On the other hand, given the general depoliticisation of the culture which you’ve referred
to, it’s hard to imagine this happening at all without there being a viable alternative and the
will to work for it coming from a visible section of the political class. To put it crudely, without
a degree of explicit sympathy for a populist anti-neoliberal position being expressed by the
political leaderships of the mainstream Left, we’re not likely to get very far. At the same time,
I take it to be the main point of your first question that it’s important for radicals to recognise
that unless they themselves form constituencies to whom politicians on the mainstream Left
might realistically look for support in the pursuit of such a project, then those politicians are
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never going to have the courage to express such sympathy.
In more substantive terms I would say that any successful strategy against neoliberalism
will have to possess several key characteristics. Firstly, it has to set itself - philosophically,
aesthetically, and politically - in opposition to the competitive individualist ideology which is
the core of neoliberalism and its basis presuppositions (what Macpherson called ‘the political
theory of possessive individualism’). Secondly it has to avoid the trap of doing this simply by
invoking a conservative communitarianism, be it nationalist, localist or religious in character.
This is the terrible mistake being made by the current Labour leadership in the UK: trying
to respond to neoliberalism with an explicitly conservative appeal to ‘faith, flag and family’
(in the words of ‘Blue Labour’ guru Maurice Glasman), conceiving these as the very entities
which must be defended from the depredations of neoliberal capitalism and which only the
state - or a completely undefined ‘community - can protect.
The problem with this approach isn’t just that it’s obnoxious. It also won’t work. It promises
something that simply can’t be delivered: a return to some unspecified, pre-neoliberal past.
And above all, it makes the catastrophic mistake of adopting a purely negative attitude to the
main vectors of current social change. Any successful strategy against neoliberalism surely
has to try find ways to connect with those aspects and elements of such change which might
be articulated to a democratic project: for example the popularity of social networking could
surely be channelled into something more potent than the generation of commodifiable market
data. But for this to happen would require political leaders actually to take an interest in the
general project of radicalising democracy, creating new types of democratic institution which
are more participatory and accountable than parliamentary institutions (as is happening today
in Latin America), and this would require them to accept that the inherited institutions of
parliamentary government are ultimately limited in their usefulness in the 21st century. This
is a huge gulf to cross and in this country at least I’m afraid we’re still nowhere close to it; but
given how obvious this truth it is to the rest of the populace, it may be surprisingly easy to
convince a few enterprising MPs and trade union leaders to take this line. Maybe. Probably
not though.
MF: Yes. Part of the problem with the Blue Labour position is that isn’t the break from the
current hegemonic field that it presents itself as. ‘Community’ is often posited as the alternative
to neoliberalism, but in actuality it has functioned as part of the same political imaginary, in
which we are offered an alternative between radically isolated individuals and homogeneous,
stable, communities. This pseudo-opposition is the one that Thatcherism installed. Blue
Labour doesn’t challenge the racism that Thatcherism required as a supplement to neoliberal
economics, it further embeds it. Actually existing neoliberalism has always depended upon a
commitment to traditionalism. Faith, flag and family, after all, are values that Thatcher fully
supported. Reagan and Thatcher’s success, in fact, was largely a consequence of their capacity
to square the circle, and achieve a kind of rainbow coalition of the right, which could bring
together economic liberals with the religious right. We’ve talked a great deal about the problems
of the left, but it’s worth remembering that, the parliamentary right has a very serious crisis of
its own. Look at the Republicans’ catastrophic campaign in the last US election, and the very
tepid support that David Cameron managed to drum up at a time of deep unpopularity for
Labour. The fix Cameron is in – trying to ‘modernise’ a party whose core support is reactionary
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– shows that the old Thatcherite formula of neoliberal economics plus social conservatism and
authoritarian populism won’t work anymore. It is the advances that the left has actually made
during the period of neoliberal domination - the bringing into the mainstream of anti-sexist,
anti-racist and anti-homophobic agendas - which have contributed to the crisis of the right.
JG: Good point.
MF: Blue Labour is cynical and fatalistic; it believes that racism is inevitable, especially among
the working class, and its whole strategy is geared up to appealing to that racism, while
dressing it up as ‘community’. But there’s a reason that National Socialism has a bad name!
And there’s a popular cosmopolitanism which has practically no-one in parliament speaking
for it. We saw this cosmopolitanism celebrated in the Olympic opening ceremony and in the
Olympics themselves last year. When Tories started grumbling about ‘lefty multiculturalism’,
they not only came off as a racist, but out of touch. The appeal to community almost always
has an anti-modern as well as an openly racist dimension to it. The left needs to argue for
a model of collectivity which doesn’t depend on a backward-looking and insular notion of
community.
JG: I agree entirely. Having said all this about what should happen at the level of political
leadership, however, I think it’s also necessary to think about what would have to happen at the
‘molecular’ level (as Deleuze and Guattari, but also Gramsci - who uses the word ‘molecular’
several times in the Prison Notebooks, to mean much the same thing as D&G - would put it). To
really make a political challenge to neoliberalism viable, we would need to see some significant
cultural upswell of radically democratic, libertarian yet anti-individualist sentiment. I’m afraid
it’s very hard to see any sign of this right now - even in the rather banal form of something
like the rave culture of our youth. The older I get, the longer I live with neoliberalism and
the challenges it poses, particularly now trying to raise a family, the more convinced I become
that we can’t really get anywhere without a resurgence of something that would look in many
ways like the counterculture of the 1960s and 1970s, (and I include in this category the most
daring strands of the feminist movement, for all that they themselves were reacting against the
implicit misogyny of sections of the New Lefts and Rock culture in the 1960s). Unless there’s
a real movement to try to put into question - from an egalitarian, libertarian, anti-individualist
perspective - the basic social forms of the household, the school, etc., and the core aesthetic
presuppositions of liberal capitalist culture (for example the obsession with the individual, the
private and the competitive which is the basis for celebrity culture, for the dominance of TV
by ‘reality’ formats, and for the depressing centrality of columnists and opinion-journalists
even to middle-brow media output) - it’s hard to imagine anything but the most timid political
reforms becoming viable. This isn’t something we can plan for, legislate for, or even strategise
for; but we might at least try to arrive at a situation wherein the leaders of the labour movement
are not so completely unable to connect with the radical energy of such a movement once it
emerges - or even threatens to emerge - as they were at every previous moment of opportunity
from the end of the 1960s, when Jim Callaghan’s rejected ‘the permissive society’, right up to
the 1990s, when the movement didn’t have a clue what to do with the constituencies who had
been radicalised by rave and Reclaim the Streets.
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What might actually make any of this possible? Well - on the cultural, ‘molecular’ side, I
think this is pretty well impossible to answer. We’ll know when it happens, I hope. It’s partly the
job of cultural theorists like us to keep looking out for such possibilities and to try to persuade
key sections of the political class not to be terrified of them if and when they start to emerge.
I think one very interesting kind of intervention would be to make some effort to reclaim
the festival form - which for decades was the key cultural form of the counterculture and its
legatees - from the wholly sanitised and corporate state it’s now in (there was an interesting
discussion about this on the Open Democracy website last year): maybe we need something
like a British Burning Man. Maybe Burning Man is itself part of the problem, given its general
ethic of antipoliticality. I’m not sure.
On the ‘molar’ side of political leadership I think there are good things that can be done
very deliberately. In Britain, the organisation Compass is doing great work in trying to bring
together people on a spectrum of opinion that runs from radical Greens to mainstream Labour
members and even Liberal Democrats in the ‘social liberal’ tradition. In concrete tactical
terms that work probably needs to include some deliberate efforts to think about recruiting
and training future political leaders, because one of the problems that we are faced with very
acutely at the present time is the consequences of the narrowing and hyper-professionalisation
of the Labour party’s young activist base at the end of the 80s: from that moment on, for a very
long time, becoming a Labour MP just wasn’t an appealing prospect for anyone who wasn’t
a ruthless careerist or a political geek (and the latter types tends to have no real affective
instinct for shifting popular moods and their political potentialities, even if they might have
a very sincere commitment to some abstract notion of social justice). That might have already
changed - but we would need to make sure that it had before having any real prospect of an
effective political alternative to neoliberalism crystallising in the UK. I’m not sure how these
observations would translate into other national contexts, but I’m sure there are parallels as
well as significant differences with what’s happening in many other countries.
Notes
1. The Research Excellence Framework, within which British university departments are subject to a cycle of regular
assessments of the quality of their research output, occurring at roughly 5-6 year intervals, the results of which heavily
determine the level of research funding that they will receive in coming years. While its predecessor, the ‘Research
Assessment Exercise’, was originally conceived, in the dying days of Thatcherism, on a wholly ‘open-competition’ model,
elite universities have increasingly lobbied government to introduce mechanisms intended deliberately to skew the
distribution of research funds resulting from the exercise in their favour.
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