Capitalist Realism // 221

to the future. But it goes to the broader point that when you have fascism, when you have communism, you need propaganda with those things you need to argue, but capitalism doesn't need you to believe it works for it to work. And apparently, according to this argument, fascism and communism are things that require you to believe them to

work for them to work. So in capitalism and capitalist realism you can have this state where I don't believe money is real, but I act as if it is, or I don't believe this works, but I act as if it does work. Right, you get into this capitalism capitalist realism is this unique situation that produces that, and the danger of interpassivity is, you know, whenever any spectacle comes along like Zorin winning or the Squad winning, or Bernie gaining ground.

you pay attention to something else. Hello, pillpods listeners. Today we're picking up on a topic we actually covered a couple of years ago now, I guess it was so I can't even remember when we did our last episode on Mark Fisher, when we did Exiting the Vampire Castle. That was a bit a bit of a different angle. But today we're going to capitalist realism, something I've wanted to read for quite a.

wing guy, like talking about working class issues. And then I also added the fun fact maybe even some of you who have listened have actually listened to the audiobook of Capitalist Realism because it is actually read by Russell Brandt in the audiobook.

so capitalist Realism. I wanted to read it at this time too because of Zorin's win and the kind of I think it seems to me like the mainstream establishment democrats at least are like those today who are most under the influence of capitalist realism, because you kind of have like the anti establishment right that seems to have taken over and I don't know what they I don't know how they would fit into the capitalist realist argument. Maybe they do, maybe you disagree, but they seem to

be not there. And then Zorin also seems to be kind of like an anti capitalist realist challenge from within anyway. It's just it was just an opportunity to use some theory to meditate on an interesting development in democratic politics in the United States as outside observers and capitalist realism. Yeah, I mean, it's just very basically, Yeah, it's the subtitle the book, right is is there no alternative? Which is

asking that question. That's rephrasing Margaret Thatcher's famous line, there is no alternative, Tina, there is no alternative to capitalism, and today that problem seems to be very dominant, especially after the fall of the USSR. Right, He's like, you know, at least in the eighties, you know, there was a clear,

actual alternative to capitalism. We say, Okay, you can just point to I don't know why everyone suddenly forgets about China after nineteen eighty nine, as if they stop being communists somehow, But okay, anyway, the fall of the USSR. Now there's no alternative, like for real it seems. And you could argue China's pretty plugged into the global capitalist market despite its avowed communism.

It goes a bit deeper than that too, because of the shift to post forwardism, which we'll have to get into as almost created a new situation in which work in labor seem to be changing drastically, and our relationships with our jobs and our families seem to be changing very draftically. Seems things seem to be in flux quite

a bit more than they used to be. And actually capitalist realism seems in many ways to pick up or provide an alternative way of conceptualizing all this to something like say Friedrich Jameson's the Logic of Postmodernism or the Logic of late Capitalism. It's another way of talking about postmodernism with some different ideas about it for those of you, for those who may be less comfortable with using postmodernism as a way to conceptualize all of these social changes

over the twentieth century and beyond. So it's not just like a simple you know, oh, there's an alternative, that's the definition of it.

this idea. But it just kind of goes towards the broader argument again of capitalist realism, right like, if it's easier to imagine the end of the world, then there really is no way we can imagine an alternative, right like our imaginative horizons have shrunk in around us in a way that means we just kind of give up. It's like this situation where now where we don't actually believe in the ideologies that we espouse. We know it's all kind of just like cynical bullshit, and yet we

have to we act as if it's all true. Everything we're saying is true, and we act as if we believe in it. But that's all I was just saying. You know, like Zorin makes these promises. In one sense, yes, he's a politician. They all want to win, and he's saying these things to win cynical disavowal. But on the other hand, like we should rally behind him because these are good things and we all want these things. And there's this sort of schizophrenia contradiction there between these two things.

to get there. I don't think Victor secretly has like major real estate investments that he's worried about and he's like hiding them and lying to us by saying no, actually there's technical problems that would be hilarious and ballsy if that were the case, and I'd love it, not really because I'd feel betrayed, but anyway, yeah, I think he's behind.

So therefore the price of houses went way up because everyone was trying to buy into market. So like, you need more than just like one policy in isolation, like you need to do more than just give people money to buy houses. You need to increase the supply of houses.

this book is good. I mean it resonates with people, I think because of the examples when he talks about, like in university, how there's this one idea I remember resonated with me a lot, was this idea of depressive hydonia as opposed to add hidonia, which like traditionally you can get diagnosed for not being able to feel pleasure, but he thinks the sort of zeitgeist of a lot of young people is actually this inability to not feel anything but constant pleasure. It's like addiction, but it kind

of numbness as a result of that. And how you would see people in his classes like wearing headphones all the time, even if they weren't listening to anything. Yeah, you know what I mean. It was just just this obsession with always wanting to be distracted. So it resonates in terms.

that they want, but not giving things them what they need. Right, it's giving them what they want but not what they need. And what is the left's role in this? Is it to like accelerate the wave of capital by you know more opening up more windows of freedom and you know, desire or is it actually to kind of be like, hey, you know what, protect us from what we want and give us what we need. Like this is the whole

point about the supernanny. The supernanny. Oh, I should really probably elaborate on this super nanny for those who don't know, is this TV show in Britain which was basically about this like very menacing, big supernanny woman who would be called in by parents who had no ability to like manage their kids, and their kids would be total delinquents, misbehaving, just.

I dad's do I say? Like featured, who would be calling it would be calling in the super nanny to go manage the kids, and she would bring in this like really harsh discipline, but like in a way that would work, not just like mindless, you know, not like just beating kids or something, but just effective discipline that would put the kid's life in order and get them to actually listen, because you need that for kids to grow up, like some level of obedience. Right, And he

thinks that's emblematic a little bit of capitalist culture. And then how it kind of destroys our discipline willpower through constant consumerism, and how it's in the system's interest to do that. And how if if a lot of people seem to actually kind of crave and to some extent, like I feel almost like I have I'm free, but

in a way that actually hinder me. You know, Young John gets at this a lot like, how now we're masters of our own exploitation, and how maybe actually there's been a collapse of authority, but in a collapse of authority except for like capitalist hierarchies, but in all these other arrangements, like the family, there's a collapse of authority, collapse of communal authority, religious authority, and all that's good

for capitalist interest to kind of colonize everything. And I thought that chapter was great, and I wish it was longer because I wish he took that logic to a bigger conclusion, because I think a lot that goes over a lot of people's heads, and that's stuff that lash in the culture and Narcissism has been saying since, you know, first book was in the seventies and in the eighties.

the beginning of his career. So he has a kind of historical materialist look at things, and he's been critical of both the left and right, Like he'd be critical of the right for not really proposing like material solutions and really speaking to superstructural things, and the left kind of actually having like weirdly capitalistic views on some like so sociocultural stuff.

like burnout society. There's definitely some big overlaps between self exploitation that that bunch Han talks about and the kind of self self surveillance that after he brought up Deluze, after Mark Fisher brings up Deluze and that that PostScript on control Society, he brings up this idea of self self surveillance, like you're internalizing these mechanisms that were once sort of seems like they were outside of you. That

there that you're being You're being performance evaluated. Your performance at work is, for example, or in an interview, it's being evaluated all the time. And there's a big complicated system that that requires. Ironically, as we move deeper into neoliberalism, the anti government ideology par excellence, we end up with more and more layers of hierarchy and bureaucracy go figure

Fisher points out. But one of the things we end up doing also is internalizing that performance review kind of structure, so we end up self monitoring, we end up and that, Yeah, that reminded me of of kind of Bunchulhan's argument about like what we do with with cell phones and the way we the way we we have to move from like a negativity of almost like cynicism towards ever achieving anything, to like this overabundance of positivity like work, work, work, and work.

passing out on the subways and stuff like that. There are some elements of that I think in here, but more of a materialist analysis as well, because it is all pinned down on I mean, one of the big tectonic shifts he points at is the movement from Fordism to Postforwardism, which is a little more maybe one of the more obscure things in here that people won't be quite as familiar with.

This word flexibility comes up, and these flexible supply lines on demands, manufacturing supply lines that are ready to sort of shift and break and pop up somewhere else. Rather than having these very stable, secure, long term supply lines, you also have you know, the offshoring of a lot of works and the diversification and globalization of all these

like logistics lines too. So like Japan is one of the big then the Japanese car industry is one of the big pioneers of like on demand shipping for example, where you have very very carefully timed and tuned supply lines. You don't just have these big factories and with like tons of like parts in them anymore. Everything is on demand,

on time. Everything has to be tightly regulated. But then at the same time, this flexibility creates a lot of instability too, and so Postfordism is kind of this move towards also markets where it's not about a stable commodity, it's about you know, creating new desires, shifting to accommodate what consumers are saying. And by the way, people are more considered as consumers. Now we're very used to being referred to as consumers, which is kind of a type development.

just you know, assembly lines. It's a company, sorry, a country where you're exporting goods for other people to consume, whether it be weapons or whatever, materials cars like America was producing more than it consumed for a while and then and you could say the ideology of that was more what Weber might call the Protestant work at you know, which is, you know, you should be a little bit more austere, you shouldn't consume too much, you should work hard,

you should be disciplined. But then the shift from a consumer economy, which comes with world trade and globalization and people are consuming more and now the main way for people to get rich is to sell stuff to Americans and First World countries like in Britain, France, Canada, and so you know, with that you get an ideology that changes, like you get this is the basin superstructure thing with Marxism is like, when you people and capitalists have a

means of getting rich one way, ideologies are going to kind of shift in ways that benefit that. It's not really conspiratorial, it's just that, you know, obviously it's going to mesh together just due to the nature of the interests, Like, you know, what ideologies are better for a consumer economy, one that doesn't tell you to be guilty about consuming, one that tells you actually should be guilty for not

living your best life, for not consuming. And that's the kind of also get like these sort of liberation movements on the left, there's a constant debate between the like proletarian feminist wing, which I support, and the sex positive wing of feminism, which is more like, you know what, we should like legalize all sex work and let's do all that, and which I think accelerates the trends that I've got us here, you know, kind of it's a whole other topic. We don't have to go into that.

But what I what I just mean is like a lot of the ideologies I think more people when they have issues with the left, they have issues with certain sociocultural tendencies, and that comes out of the sixties, which comes out of this post fort is transition, right.

We move much more towards like a dual income gig economy where work is contractual and expected to be temporary and you're not expect the company is no longer expected to you know, have your back on healthcare and pension and all these other things. Like the so called sort of nanny state did or forced them to do. The kind of welfare state idea corporate or at least like a kind of corporate welfare state type of consensus. Postfwordism

kind of does away with that. And that's also connected to this flexibilizing of supply lines, this offshoring, this of production, this transition to a consumer economy. And he even talks about, you know, he's him and being again in this sort of I guess community college like system where he's seeing kids coming in from families that now have like overworked, dual income parents, and the parents have a lot less

time to spend with the child. So he's saying, like, you know, the kids I'm seeing are seem to be like almost less and less socialized because they haven't had that like attention that a single income sort of you know, fordist family could could afford for them. Postfortism makes this makes it a lot more demanding to even have a family, which is he says, is ironic because neoliberalism depends so

heavily on the factory. It's the it's the fact that the family is the fact factory of the consumers that need to buy the products that that are being made.

family as something to replace the safety net. But you know that is like taking Reaganist rhetoric and like the right wing faction of neoliberalism, because that's where I think this point of view ignores is that there is very much a left wing faction in neoliberalism. There's both the right and the left faction neoliberalism. And they'll say, yeah, of course the right will sometimes say the family is

like the haven and the heartless world. I mean, that's not the that's actually a Marx Marx quote, but this idea of like says that about religion, though, But the family is like this thing that will replace that should be exist, but the welfare state should be abolished. But the thing is the regardless of what anyone says, is the family was just declining. You know, you see a broader decline of the family, no, regardless of what's happening.

So doesn't really matter what I think is actually the overall just factual trend is that Postfordism saw a decline of the family. And it's I and I think people throw in that stuff which is like, oh, the neoliberals

wanted to keep the family. No, it's that they were more like, they weren't idiots, and they knew that if you threw people off the welfare state there would be consequences to some extent, and that you had they preferred the family over you know, the welfare state, whereas a left where often prefer the welfare state over the family. I think we should have support both. Like, I think both are pretty damn important.

more difficult and expensive. And of course, but the right he tends to take this criticism and say, like the left is against family is the postmodern neo Marxist culturalists are actually like directly opposed to any kind of family.

do you get there in this modern state? And you know, most people think that it's going to be the administrative state. And if you look at the way the left talks about childcare, like the radical left, because a lot of some some marksists supported a lot of anarchists support it, and you know, some like academics, left wing progressive academics support it, but it's not a really popular position.

to say, All these different phenomena are connected there. Yes, Postfwardism is like the movie Heat compared to like older gangster movies like The Godfather and Goodfellas are like are like the paradigmatic Fordist situations, because in The Godfather and Goodfellas you have this very traditionalist ghost of the old world Italian gangsters with these family structures and these like well, these like hard one value system that holds their almost

very kind of almost slightly mysterious and ritualistic kinds of hierarchies in place, as opposed to Heat, which is just like a bunch of guys who are doing a job and aren't really like connected and to anything and not clearly not part of a family. Because at one point one of the characters wants to get married, and one of the crime bosses is like, how do you expect

to help me if you're tied down with marriage? Like the idea of like rootless criminals who have no attachment to and they're much more on a hey, I kind of just compares those The Heat is like analogous to the difference.

not the actual mechanism. And I do actually feel like maybe the family is like an important kind of question here that uh that like that I again, and I've said this before on the podcast on past topics, that uh, you know, the left is maybe not equipped enough or like too wary because of how conservative right wing coded talk about the family is and religion.

Like the rise of mental illness is is really something unpressed in it that we've been seeing and it's does zact like it's merely as a result of people now just being open about it. Like I mean, it's completely utter bowl like the fact that you have such high depression rates and suicide rates in the most rich countries. May I add I think Han takes Mark Fisher's analysis

to a more strong conclusion. Like Young Johan talks about the family, but he also talks about religion and decline of rituals, where he says the decline of ritual of religion has not been completely emancipatory process because while we can say, like organized religion was really repressive and some of the superstitions of some religions were very backward and unenlightening, he thinks that you think the core strength of religion is rituals, and rituals are something that are actually good,

and that is very much missing in the capitalist society. And yeah, like I think, I mean, he goes as far to say that is the cause of depression, and I think that's certainly part of it.

attention deficit hyperactivity disorder is a pathology. It is a pathology of late capitalism. I'm like, yeah, I'm late capitalism man produced by money slamming together and Lena Hadrian Collider and then I popped out, and also my mother and father. But they're inconsequential to my birth. No, I mean, I take his point. These are depression and ADHD and mental health are conditions that are obviously neurologically instantiated. It's not like the scientists who are studying these things are just

crazy ideologues hallucinating genes and cells and brain activity. But these sorts of things are also reflective of I don't know if he asks this in the right way, Like obviously they're biologically instantiated, but what causes them? Like what is their cause? And obviously the answer will be will like ADHD, for specifically, is one of the most genetic

things they've identified, like out of out of anything. If you see someone with ADHD, like there's a huge chance that like one of their parents will have it too. It's very heritable. So that's how they would answer. But he's you know, I take his point to.

unable to effectively integrate into the existing society. When in the case of ADHD, it's like it's not like a it doesn't make you violent, it doesn't make you completely dysfunctional. Maybe yes, but like it's just like, you know, maybe you're not as productive as you should be.

Or once the refrigerator is invented and we're not curing all of our meat, okay, like now stomach cancer is going to change its distribution, and it's the problem of separating kind of I guess subject and object in that sort of way too. It's like, okay, well, then what's is refrigeration the cause of heart attacks? Like they you know it doesn't of course, of course there's like it's so there's lots of different ways to explain those sorts

of things, and ADHD and depression are examples. But then you know it's no coincidence that you have this like massive pharmaceutical company. I remember the last time they changed my my ADHD medication. I can't remember if I mentioned this. I'm not on it anymore, but last time they just changed it on me without asking, and I looked at it and the new place the factory was located in Israel. It went from a factory from Sweden to a factory

of in Israel. And then I was just like, and they didn't think that like asking me about this.

sure where to fit it in. Just to comment about this the sort of thought experiment that I've mentioned before that I've used with students about, you know, it's easier to imagine the.

relatively simp Mass destruction is like not complicated. Making sure that everybody has like a good material means is complicated.

satisfy their sort of hedonistic desires. Well, that's not really going to do it in a way because I mean it may might help, right, like I mean just giving people stuff, but maybe like the more fundamental problems that Fisher is talking about in this book, well we're not really just going to solve them necessarily by just giving people like more liberal freedom in the sense of just

more or more hedonistic freedom. And then so like even so as my point of bringing that up and rehashing that is, like we are noticing the complexity because there's like so many like competing interests and desires and concerns about like what actually constitutes a good life that's worth living in a society. What's a thing that constitutes a good society. Well, maybe it's rituals and patterns and family.

I mean, these are like I'm saying, these are complicated problems, right, these are not This is not like like imagining an alternative that addresses all of those things that we've been talking about is seems to me to be actually like a huge puzzle.

some panic going around. And so apparently for them, it is easy to imagine the end of capitalism because a New York mayor could end capitalism, apparently by the way they're reacting. But that's the point, right, how do you distinguish their rhetoric from the reality that they're like, they're not talking about a reality at all. Anyway, as far as Zorin can go, he's just going to be able to draw a happy face, which is fine.

or affirms something that is already happening under capitalism. A good example is this authority question, like the family arguments, you often hear in favor of abolishing the family, or against the likes of you know, Biancho Han's view, or the likes of Christopher Lash's view, or just anyone who wants to defend the family. They'll say, well, the existing family is oppressive, and that sometimes you know, if when kids are and don't have you know, real freedom, I mean,

their parents have custody and all that. If you have a bad parent, you're fucked. And now they're not wrong about that. However, their solution is to look at broken families and to say, you know what the solution is, we should just do away with the family. And I think it's silly and naive, because yes, this is something that is bad, like that some people have really bad luck.

In fact, a lot of the people who make this very argument come from broken families, which gives them a sort of bias in the where they'll say, you know, if they'll project what is really ultimately a family trauma onto their politics, and I think, damn, don't ruin it for the rest of us. But like, also, it's just

not a great solution. What I think we should look at is why not that we should get rid of the structure necessarily, or like I don't think there's only one structure, but that we should think that we're wise enough that we have figured out this clear alternative to like the family structure. I think, you know, you have we really careful before you embrace the politics of like, you know, let's get rid of that.

side like to use Nietzsche. They like to use Nietzsche and kind of forget about as aristocratic hierarchical politics and just take the kind of anti authority part and you know, embrace that kind of like Adulus doayes this actually, you know, and how he uses Nietzsche, And a lot of the people who find themselves attracted to this sort of thing, they think in their own shoes and that's it. They think, well, you know, I can, I can be a free thinking

individual and I'm perfectly fine without any authority structures. You know. It's to say that everyone can't be can be like that, And it's like, one, you're probably an adult. Two, if you are a kid, this would be bad. Three. Also, not everyone is like you. This is the thing that a lot of people who are intellectuals get attracted to this politics because they are by default people who are inclined to this sort of freethinking, free spirited view. Not

everyone wants to be like that. Not everyone wants to be like that for everything in every matter. Like I'll give you an example. I'm very like, you know, forward thinking, free thinking on political matters, intellectual matters. But when it comes to like I don't know, deciding where to eat or deciding certain thing. I prefer other people decide. I like. I love it when people decide, you know. I love it when someone who knows their shit about something just goes and does it.

authority politics. It went well with neoliberalism, partially because you know, when you get this crackdown on the welfare state that comes largely from the right, starting already with the seventies, but you have, like, at the same time, the new left politics is so anti bureaucracy, and part of that's you know, legitimated, Like it's part of that's legitimate and that there is a real critique of bureaucracy. But it'll have as like libertarian politics that actually mesh very well

with the new spirit of capitalism. You know, the new spirit of capitalism was all about getting government off your back, about delegating stuff to the market. I think sometimes man like, because I had never found the systems of the Soviet Union appealing. If I was alive in the sixties, I could see myself getting going from a you know, new leftist to a you know, neoliberal. I mean, a lot

of left ease became neoliberals. That is a fact. In fact, there's this book called the left Wing Origins of Neoliberalism that's about how a lot of like people used to be like full on Marxist Soviet sympathizers, and after they got disenfranchised, they thought, well, you know what, maybe the market is the way to a freer society, maybe even a socialist society, because you have like this, it's more liberating than the state. And it's we look back on that like, oh, that's like a you know, I would

never believe that, But I don't know. Man. The way the the left has marked pro I would call like the dominant form of feminism today market feminism gender ideology, This idea of choosing a million genders it's so marketized. Think about it like the marketplace of genders, the marketplace of ideologies.

just like what opened us up with the housing thing. Right, Like we would all agree on affordability, but maybe not all of us would agree that freezing housing prices is the pathway to affordability in that in at least in where housing comes into it. But I think also, you know, saying okay, all these genders and reflects some kind of market ideology, and then even that, what's the problem with that?

There's there's a certain level of analysis lackings that I can't agree or disagree with statements like that because I just don't know what the fuck, where the fuck they're even coming from and what the problem is in the first place. But anyway, that is to say, I don't know the answer to the gender stuff there.

Maybe I'm mixing it up. She basically said, like she's not going to increase taxes on anyone, like she just said, and because she's been asked like, are you gonna do the things that are necessary for like him to implement his policy to for example, create like a like childcare in New York City, like she would need to or he would need to appropriate like funding, and the only way that he can do that is by going to the state capitol.

can do. I mean, maybe he can so to freeze rents he needs so, I know that there's like something called like the Rental rate like review board in New York City, and the mayor does have the power to appoint those members, but the mayor can't directly like freeze rents.

a true Marxist. He has critiques of capitalism, but there are critiques from within capitalists and.

anti capitalism for me. And whether or not he does is obviously just a question that has to be left to the future. But it goes to the broader point that when you have fascism, when you have communism, you need propaganda with those things you need to argue. But he's saying here, the role of capitalist this is a quote, the role of capitalist ideology is not to make explicit and explicit case for something in the world that propaganda does, but to conceal the fact that the operations of capital

don't depend on any sort of subjectively assumed belief. Capitalism doesn't need you to believe it works for it to work, and apparently, according to this argument, Fascism and communism are things that require you to believe them to work for them to work. So in capitalism and capitalist realism, you can have this state where I don't believe money is real, but I act as if it is, or I don't

believe this works, but I act as if it does work. Right, you get into this Capitalism capitalist realism is this unique situation that produces that. And the danger of interpassivity is, you know, whenever any spectacle comes along like Zorin winning or the squad winning or Burnie gaining ground, right, the danger is that it can relax us into passivity because it's like we see, it's obviously the media system that we're not going unless you're going in person to their

rallies and hearing them speak. You're probably getting this information from the media. So you have a spectacle of anti capitalism and you relax and say everything's good, and you pay attention to something else. You go back to, you resume your Lord of the Rings movie or whatever you were watching.

frankly aren't very political at all. But every now and then, and they're like three hour long analysis of Harry Potter or whatever film or video game, they'll say something something late capitalism, and it's almost like a ritual and that's the disavowal you mentioned, you know, like this fetishistic disavowal, which is to be like, yeah, I acknowledge it, but you know, whatever is Usually he talks a lot about this.

How like the way in which Mao is China would deal with criticism, you know, like in Dissent, he quotes Mao at a meeting, how he would say, okay, guys, whatever criticisms you have of our party, just shit it out. Let it out like a shit. And the way describing it like a shit, like just get it out, like just out of the way so we can move on life as usual. It is kind of the way we

treat like sometimes like our ritualistic anti capitalism. You know, it's like okay, you know, yeah, it's bad whatever, not think about it.

say is real also somehow affects what is real. And I guess the point is, you know, you can have a reality show and then the audience can react, and you can incorporate audience reactions back into the supposedly realistic and unscripted show, and there's a feedback loop between what people are saying and what is happening, and then so what is real in that circuit, like it becomes a

little less clear. And that matches the point too of interpassivity and the fact that capitalist ideology doesn't require a case to be made for it. In fact, capitalist ideology works best when you're not making a case for it, and so you can behave in whatever way you want, you know, as long as you believe this is all bullshit, then you can still do it. And I'm sure every Silicone Valley capitalist.

they'll do the same stuff and nothing will change. Capitalism will continue.