Such an interesting book - in spite of its 80 pages it took me three days to read it, there is a lot to digest and think about. I'm pretty sure I underlined half the book, and what's the point of underlining so much?Living in 2018 it is hard, if not impossible, to imagine an alternative system to capitalism. This feeling, this sense, is what the term 'capitalist realism' is about. Capitalism engulfs anything and makes it its own ('Witness, for instance, the establishment of settled alternative or independent cultural zones, which endlessly repeat older gestures of rebellion and contestation as if for the first time. Alternative and independent dont designate something outside mainstream culture; rather, they are styles, in fact the dominant styles, within the mainstream.'), so how are you supposed to protest this?Antagonism is not now located externally, in the face-off between class blocs, but internally, in the psychology of the worker, who, as a worker, is interested in old-style class conflict, but, as someone with a pension fund, is also interested in maximizing the yield from his or her investments. There is no longer an identifiable external enemy. The consequence is, Marazzi argues, that post-Fordist workers are like the Old Testament Jews after they left the house of slavery: liberated from a bondage to which they have no wish to return but also abandoned, stranded in the desert, confused about the way forward.Fisher learned from Zizek to use items of current pop culture, especially movies, to make his points., which makes this so readable.He doesn't stop at a 'simple' critique of capitalism, he delves into mental illness (I'm again reminded of Fromm's The Sane Society, which Fisher doesn't cite - was he aware of it? Likely!), Fisher suffered from depression so it makes sense that he looks at late capitalism as a causative agent of mental illness (to him, the chemical and structural changes in the brain are (of course) real and can be 'solved' with medication, but does having to live in an insane system cause these changes? Fromm again!)Fisher looks at the counter-intuitive proliferation of bureaucracy in organisations and how almost magical it seems. Nobody knows what is required, the directives make no sense, so entirely new structures come into being, there is no final authority to appeal to anymore, workers have to become their own auditors and stress increases manifold, while nobody 'outside' cares about the auditing results. This thought of a visible system, impossible to understand, with nebulous interests, with no overall controllers or rules, that's what makes this book so interesting to read, the 'centerlessness of global capitalism'. Fisher has this neat example where, during the 2008 bank crisis, people complained about the privatising government but not about the bungling companies, he interprets that as a coping mechanism. It's easier to blame a few politicians than an incredibly complex system nobody has oversight over, and nobody understands, and nobody can map. The disavowal [of the government] happens in part because the centerlessness of global capitalism is radically unthinkable.Here comes my favorite quote in this context:The closest that most of us come to a direct experience of the centerlessness of capitalism is an encounter with the call center. As a consumer in late capitalism, you increasingly exist in two, distinct realities: the one in which the services are provided without hitch, and another reality entirely, the crazed Kafkaesque labyrinth of call centers, a world without memory, where cause and effect connect together in mysterious, unfathomable ways, where it is a miracle that anything ever happens, and you lose hope of ever passing back over to the other side, where things seem to function smoothly. What exemplifies the failure of the neoliberal world to live up to its own PR better than the call center? Even so, the universality of bad experiences with call centers does nothing to unsettle the operating assumption that capitalism is inherently efficient, as if the problems with call centers werent the systemic consequences of a logic of Capital which means organizations are so fixated on making profits that they cant actually sell you anything.At the end Fisher begins to map out how a 'new left' could react to and work with late capitalism. New ascesis could be needed, since unlimited freedom breeds only misery. The bank crisis has discredited neoliberalism so now there is an ideological hole that can be filled. Bring back the idea of the 'general will' and take back the public space from the state. The 'new left' can start by working with the desires that neoliberalism has generated, such as a reduced bureaucracy, by starting a 'new struggle over work and who controls it'. Mental illnesses should be transformed 'outward', into antagonisms against Capital.Overall extremely interesting, lots of food for thought, highly recommended if you like to think about our entire system of being.Sadly Fisher never got to develop these ideas into a full framework, he took his own life one year ago.P.S.:The way value is generated on the stock exchange depends of course less on what a company really does, and more on perceptions of, and beliefs about, its (future) performance. In capitalism, that is to say, all that is solid melts into PR, and late capitalism is defined at least as much by this ubiquitous tendency towards PR-production as it is by the imposition of market mechanisms.Now this book is a little bit older, by now Elon Musk's Tesla has perfected this approach: make a ton of PR, sell very little, miss production targets. His popularity alone somehow makes everyone ignore horrible working conditions as well as firing workers for trying to unionize. Edit 8th Feb 2018: Musk shot a car into space to the great elation of everybody, it was mostly ignored that his company quietly announced its biggest quarterly loss ever a day later.P.P.S.:It wouldnt be surprising if profound social and economic instability resulted in a craving for familiar cultural forms, to which we return in the same way that Bourne reverts to his core reflexes.Does he predict the rise of the current garbage neo-reactionaries/alt-right? Maybe, but it also goes without saying that uncertain times breed nationalism and xenophobia, we've had that a few times in history now.

- 2561- https://www.the101.world/thoughts/cap...

As many people have already pointed out, for me, Capitalist Realism is one of the best analysis of the late capitalism without the necessity of becoming too academic. Popular culture is one of the key elements to dissect the issuesit's easier to imagine the end of the world through cinema and Hollywood than the end of capitalism. Fisher's argument on how Hollywood builds an anti-capitalist narrative on the capitalist system itself it's really fascinatingthe same way thing like Live 8 exists; a global elite protest that everyone could agree with. Beyond that, there are several ideas in this book that really provoked me. The privatisation of mental illness and 'hedonic depression.'Depression might be caused by the competitive nature of the capitalist system. However, as Fisher points out, the system commodified the illness by treating the victim as having an imbalance chemical brain or unstable family background. The greatest causedthe notion of the failure of the social systemis ruled out. In recent years depression has become a huge domain for the mental institution and pharmaceutical business in gaining profits. The scheme is a looping system of capitalistic nature that produced mental illness due to its competitive nature and the business ontology between the mental institution and pharmaceutical companyif the demand for mental institution grows the market will eventually grow as well. It is also important to note, that I think the best critic of capitalism relies on the notion of how somehow rich people are still miserable. There is this sense of melancholiathe feeling of losing something without knowing what is being lostsurrounded them despite the fact that they can get whatever they want. As Fisher argues, the capitalist system itself is bi-polar divided by its hyped-up mania, bubble thinking and sudden economic depression. Quoting Oliver James, Fisher agrees on how James sees the capitalist entrepreneurial fantasy society in which filled with the delusions of that anyone can be Alan Sugar or Bill Gates. This delusion creates what Fisher coined as hedonic depression. I find this theory of 'nanny states' is also fascinating as I see this theory is actually factual in terms of Indonesian politics. The state lets corporation exploitsthe state at the same time is the only thing to blame by the people, on the other hand, the state is nurturing the corporation and let capitalism runs biopolitically on the people's lives. Culturally, the notion of 'nanny state' and how the state strategically working together with capital as a scapegoat is pretty familiar to me as I had experienced it first hand. In the end, Capital is ontologically and geographically ubiquitous that we have to always ask the same question over and over again; 'is there no alternative?' RIP Mark Fisher.