updated 4d ago
Capitalist Realism: Is there no alternative?
The reason that focus groups and capitalist feedback systems fail, even when they generate commodities that are immensely popular, is that people do not know what they want. This is not only because people’s desire is already present but concealed from them (although this is often the case). Rather, the most powerful forms of desire are precisely c
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Tara McMullin added 8d ago
The power of capitalist realism derives in part from the way that capitalism subsumes and consumes all of previous history: one effect of its ‘system of equivalence’ which can assign all cultural objects, whether they are religious iconography, pornography, or Das Kapital, a monetary value.
from Capitalist Realism: Is there no alternative? by Mark Fisher
Tara McMullin added 8d ago
The Selfish Capitalist toxins that are most poisonous to well-being are the systematic encouragement of the ideas that material affluence is they key to fulfillment, that only the affluent are winners and that access to the top is open to anyone willing to work hard enough, regardless of their familial, ethnic or social background – if you do not s
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Tara McMullin added 8d ago
The ‘rigidity’ of the Fordist production line gave way to a new ‘flexibility’, a word that will send chills of recognition down the spine of every worker today. This flexibility was defined by a deregulation of Capital and labor, with the workforce being casualized (with an increasing number of workers employed on a temporary basis), and outsourced
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Tara McMullin added 8d ago
It has resolved personal worth into exchange value, and in place of the numberless indefeasible chartered freedoms, has set up that single, unconscionable freedom — Free Trade. In one word, for exploitation, veiled by religious and political illusions, it has substituted naked, shameless, direct, brutal exploitation.
from Capitalist Realism: Is there no alternative? by Mark Fisher
Tara McMullin added 8d ago
the affects that predominate in late capitalism are fear and cynicism. These emotions do not inspire bold thinking or entrepreneurial leaps, they breed conformity and the cult of the minimal variation, the turning out of products which very closely resemble those that are already successful.
from Capitalist Realism: Is there no alternative? by Mark Fisher
Tara McMullin added 8d ago
Since it is now clear that a certain amount of stability is necessary for cultural vibrancy, the question to be asked is: how can this stability be provided, and by what agencies?
from Capitalist Realism: Is there no alternative? by Mark Fisher
Tara McMullin added 8d ago
‘Alternative’ and ‘independent’ don’t designate something outside mainstream culture; rather, they are styles, in fact the dominant styles, within the mainstream.
from Capitalist Realism: Is there no alternative? by Mark Fisher
Tara McMullin added 8d ago
What late capitalism repeats from Stalinism is just this valuing of symbols of achievement over actual achievement.
from Capitalist Realism: Is there no alternative? by Mark Fisher
Tara McMullin added 8d ago