Introduction

Many associate Fredric Jameson’s remark, “it’s easier to imagine an end to the world than an end to capitalism” with Mark Fisher. For good reason: Fisher’s account of capitalist realism confronts us with capitalism’s unbearable yet unavoidable horrors. From the genocidal destruction of settler colonialism, through the demolition of cultures and modes of life that accompanies commodity production and exchange, to planet-altering anthropogenic climate change, capital subsumes the world. We can easily imagine an end to the world because under capitalism most of us confront it every day as we are forced to choose our exploitation, dispossession, and confinement. It’s easier to imagine an end to the world than an end to capitalism because capitalism is the end of the world. We witness and endure it in the ruins of everyday life—lost lives, lives of loss.

This essay salvages possibilities of communist desire from the ruins of capitalism. I begin by drawing out the key features of capitalist realism. I then use Fisher’s essay, “Exiting the Vampire Castle,” to introduce comradeship and solidarity, understanding both as indispensable to the possibility of a communist world. This lets me consider the loss of comradeship and what regaining it may enable. I explore this idea via Doris Lessing’s 1962 novel,The Golden Notebook.

Capitalist Realism

Capitalist realism has four basic features. First, it is a response to the inability to imagine an alternative to capitalism, the name for a “reflective impotence.”2 Capitalist realism is more than the sense that there is no alternative to capitalism. It’s a response to that sense, a reaction to the loss of a sense of possibility, a resignation or fatalism. Capitalism is all there is and it’s here to stay. Fisher’s point is that capitalism persists whether or not people think it is legitimate, good, or efficient: “The operations of capital do not depend on any sort of subjectively assumed belief.”3 Capitalist realism thus designates an unbearable stuckness in an unbearable system that we can’t imagine getting beyond.

Second, capitalist realism is a pathology of the left.4 It is left acceptance of defeat, the left giving up and giving in. Fisher explains that “it is the left which has had to tell itself the story that there’s no point struggling for an alternative to capitalism.”5 I would add that this tends to be accompanied by left concession to anti-communism that the lesson of the 20th century is that anything other than capitalism is death. That capitalism is itself death is denied, displaced, ignored. This concession to anti-communism may or may not be fully conscious. It’s present, though, in left practice, which leads to the third feature of capitalist realism.

Third, capitalist realism is a matter of what we do. We lower our expectations. We substitute spectacle for organizing. We may think that capitalism is an awful, exploitative system that damns most of us to selling ourselves to survive in a setting where there are ever fewer buyers – but our actions go along with the game. And this encompasses not just our economic actions, but our political ones. Anti-capitalism functions as a hipster gesture, a cynical nihilism in a knowing, more-radical-than-thou insistence that capitalism is so bad and holds us so tightly that politics can do little more than stage our misery as a spectacle.

Fourth, capitalist realism is an effect of the collapse in the belief in collective politics. This aspect of capitalist realism comes through in Fisher’s critique of the privatization of stress. Individuals are made “to resolve their own psychological distress” even though such distress is widespread.6 That capitalist realism is an effect of the collapse of belief in collective politics is further implied in Mark’s critique of the “chemico-biologization of mental illness.”7 This association of suffering with brain chemistry, he tells us, “reinforces Capital’s drive towards atomistic individualization.”8 Finally, this dimension of loss of a belief in collective politics underpins Fisher’s critique of the “consensual sentimentality of Live Aid” that “replaced the antagonism of the Miners’ Strike.”9 What’s at stake in this replacement is the absence of a collective subject, a subject that demands to be constructed.

In sum, Fisher’s concept of capitalist realism names that reflective impotence which overloads a left unable to imagine an end to capitalism, embedding it in pointless activities that sustain its self-entrapment. Once the left has no horizon beyond capitalism, once it has lost its capacity to imagine another future, it no longer believes that collective politics matters. So it sinks into individualism, aestheticism, privatization, and moralism, gesturing left without hope of getting anywhere at all.

Class, Comrades, Solidarity

In “Exiting the Vampire Castle,” Fisher extends the capitalist realism argument. He links the moralism, individualism, and privatization characteristic of capitalist realism to the disavowal of class. The loss of collectivity is the result of the abandonment of the working class, the deflection and pre-emption of class as a topic, the eclipse of class consciousness as a matter of left politics. “Bourgeois modes of subjectivity” come to dominate the movement. The underlying vision is of self-oriented individuals, politics as possession, transformation reduced to attitudinal change, and a fixed, naturalized sphere of privilege and oppression. Anchored in a view of identity as the primary vector of politics, political energy shifts away from strategic organizational and tactical questions and onto prior attitudinal litmus tests, precluding from the start the collectivity necessary for revolutionary left politics. Reasserting class provides a way out. Fisher writes:

A left that does not have class at its core can only be a liberal pressure group. Class consciousness is always double: it involves a simultaneous knowledge of the way in which class frames and shapes all experience, and a knowledge of the particular position that we occupy in the class structure. It must be remembered that the aim of our struggle is not recognition by the bourgeoisie, nor even the destruction of the bourgeoisie itself. It is the class structure – a structure that wounds everyone, even those who materially profit from it – that must be destroyed. The interests of the working class are the interests of all; the interests of the bourgeoisie are the interests of capital, which are the interests of no-one. Our struggle must be towards the construction of a new and surprising world, not the preservation of identities shaped and distorted by capital.10

Acknowledging class is acknowledging the dimension of economic situatedness – placement in the social and economic structure by virtue of one’s function in capitalist production. The goal is abolishing this structure. We aren’t trying to get it to include or recognize us. We are trying to destroy it.

Fisher associates the return to class with the reinvigoration of comradeship and solidarity. How do we hold each other to account in ways that let us go forward? How do we address and change practices of disrespect within the movement? Through comradeship and solidarity. Fisher writes, “We need to learn, or re-learn, how to build comradeship and solidarity instead of doing capital’s work for it by condemning and abusing each other.” We have to teach and encourage each other, be patient, encouraging, maybe even forgiving—especially of those who are on our side. If we aren’t comrades, we can’t fight the long fight. And even if we could, without comrades there’s not a world to win.

Let Us Be Comrades

The importance of Fisher’s emphasis on building comradeship and solidarity is born out in Doris Lessing’s The Golden Notebook. The novel depicts the decline and exodus that spread throughout the communist world in the wake of Khrushchev’s revelations regarding the purges, arrests, imprisonments, and executions occurring under Stalin. The novel provides an origin story for our present, for the loss of a world born from common struggle.

Lessing’s picture of the collapse of the symbolic order of mid-century communism is a picture of the end of the world. The end of comradeship is the unraveling of a common language, of the shared sense of the meaning of words and their relation to the world. Like Fisher, Lessing refuses to privatize mental illness: for her, the dissolution of confidence in the Party, that is, in collective struggle with communism as its horizon, expresses itself as psychosis. The scene is one of exhaustion, cynicism, hopelessness, and disarray: the best I can hope for when you are not my comrade, when there are no comrades, is a tired old liberalism.

The novel begins in 1957 with a conversation that introduces the major characters: Anna, the author of one successful novel whose notebooks constitute the bulk of the novel; Anna’s friend Molly, a minor actress recently returned from a year’s travel in Europe; Molly’s ex-husband Richard, and their twenty-year old son, Tommy. Richard is bothered by the fact that Tommy is suffering from “a paralysis of the will.”11 Tommy just sits around brooding. Richard attributes Tommy’s malaise to the collapse of the Communist Party. The impact of the last year – Khrushchev’s speech, the invasion of Hungary, the Suez crisis – has been severe. “It’s not an easy time to be a socialist.”12 Richard pushes the point: “And now what? Russia’s in the doghouse and what price the comrades now? Most of them having nervous breakdowns or making a lot of money, as far as I can make out.”13 Collapse and capitalism: this captures the sense of many of those who left the Party in the wake of Khrushchev’s revelations, the non-options available to them in a world thrown into chaos. Collapse and capitalism: our present of anxiety, depression, and despair in the extremes of climate change, inequality, and the worry that we may no longer be able to afford to live.

Molly and Anna have already started to distance themselves from the Party and their former comrades. Previously, Molly was always “rushing off to organize something, full of life and enthusiasm.”14 Now she feels no obligation to continue doing political work. Anna still feels something, yet she is exhausted, confused, wrapped up in trying to understand the loss of a “great dream.”15 Anna collects newspaper clippings documenting international tension and horror: the war in Korea, the detonation of the H-bomb, the anti-communist witch-hunt in the US, purges in the Soviet bloc, and so on. The Communist Party is awful and yet it seems the only barrier to US nuclear aggression. Britain explodes an atomic weapon. The McCarran Act authorizes the US Attorney-General to create detention centers for people who might engage in conspiracy or espionage. Mau Mau rise up in Kenya. Communist leaders are hanged in Prague. Defending the Soviet Union at all costs, the Party doesn’t provide a space for grappling with the truth of the world, yet without it the world feels bereft, meaningless, condemned to a façade of liberalism that masks imperialism, authoritarianism, and colonialism. The Party hold open a gap of possibility – we aren’t doomed to an eternal capitalism – but only negatively, a negation of capitalism not a positive promise.

Tommy confronts Anna about her abandonment of her Party work. Anna says that middle-aged women can’t be expected to hold on to “youthful certainties and slogans and battle-cries.”16 But she dislikes what she hears coming out of her mouth: “I sound like a tired old liberal.”17 Tommy observes that Anna “used to live by a philosophy,” taunts her for referring to “the communist myth,” and demands to know what she lives by now.18 Anna’s reply is positive, hopeful. She describes a world capable of forward movement, a dream kept alive for a new generation of people. Tommy makes it clear that he won’t be that generation. He shoots himself. This segment of the book ends with the likelihood that he will die before morning.

A subsequent section goes back in time, to a meeting of Anna’s writers’ group in 1952. The group tries to discuss an unreadable pamphlet on linguistics written by Stalin. Anna observes a tone in their conversation that makes her uncomfortable, a tone associated with making excuses, “of course you have to remember their legal traditions are very different from ours.”19 She recalls that she once caught herself speaking this way and “started to stammer. I usually don’t stammer.”20 Anna also notes an increasingly familiar mood: “words lose their meaning suddenly. I find myself listening to a sentence, a phrase, a group of words, as if they are in a foreign language—the gap between what they are supposed to mean, and what in fact they say seems unbridgeable.”21 Comrades fail to say what they all know to be true: Stalin’s pamphlet is a symptom of “a general uneasiness about language.”22 But as comrades they can no longer speak together. They are caught in a situation where the words they can say are inadequate to what needs to be said. Anna observes that she’s prepared to believe that Stalin “is mad and a murderer;” nevertheless, she likes “to hear people use that tone of simple, friendly respect for him. Because if that tone were to be thrown aside, something very important would go with it, paradoxically enough, a faith in the possibilities of democracy, of decency. A dream would be dead – for our time, at least.”23 The tone of respect points to comradeship, to being on the same side. It’s not the same as the tone of excuses. Using the tone of respect when speaking of Stalin isn’t a sign that one is a Stalinist. It doesn’t indicate that one makes excuses for purges and camps. It indicates belief in collective struggle for a better world. And the thing is, even anti-Stalinist skeptics have to admit this much is right: the end of the twentieth century socialist experiment destroyed democracy.

Anna decides to leave the Party after she realizes that she can no longer do her Party work, which is lecturing on art. Her typical lecture involves a critique of the egotism of bourgeois art. In the middle of a lecture several months before leaving the Party, she “began to stammer and couldn’t finish.” Anna continues: “I have not given any more lectures. I know what that stammer means.”24 Her decision to leave the Party is an effect, not a cause, of the dissolution of the connection between words and meaning. In a conversation with a comrade and coworkers, she experiences this loss: again, “words lose their meaning;” she can hear their voices, but the words “don’t mean anything.”25 In the place of words, she sees images – “scenes of death, torture, cross-examination and so on” – that connect not to the words being used but to the reality they disavow. Images without meaning, a convergence of the imaginary and the Real – what Žižek describes as the decline of the symbolic.

Tommy lives – but blind. Youth continues, unwilling and unable to keep a communist dream alive. But how could it? The sense of the world that it once provided is crumbling, along with the practices of comradeship that had previously supported it. Tommy becomes a dominating “blind but all-conscious presence” in Molly’s house. Molly is trapped, both by him and a new sense that life has become a matter of “getting used to things that are really intolerable.”26 Although slow and careful, “like some kind of zombie,” Tommy seems happy. Molly describes him as “all in one piece for the first time in his life” – yet she is horrified by her own words, “matching them against the truth of that mutilation.”27 The truth is that “He enjoys it.”28 Tommy no longer has to choose; he no longer has to feel compelled to find a way forward. He can be where he is, fully occupying that place without having to analyze, understand, or see it. It’s as if blindness gives Tommy the capacity to force a maternal scene onto Molly, to envelope her into an infantile oneness that makes him complete at the cost of her misery. I should add that Molly and Tommy don’t remain intertwined. He attaches to his step-mother and then to a wife, drifting into an incoherent, formless politics of spontaneous crowds and expressive students.

Anna feels herself breaking down. “Words mean nothing.”29 They are more and more just “a series of meaningless sounds, like nursery talk.”30 Anna falls in love with Saul Green, an American socialist boarding in her house. Saul is himself breaking down. Saul talks compulsively, saying nothing. Anna writes, “I was listening for the word Iin what he said. I, I, I, I, I – I began to feel as if the word I was being shot at me like bullets from a machine gun.”31 This compulsive talking, this I, I, I, I, I becomes a mark of Saul’s madness. It sometimes carries streams of political jargon that Anna can identify by time and tendency: “Trotskyist, American, early 19-fifties. Premature anti-Stalinist, 1954.”32 Anna herself becomes sicker and sicker, obsessed with Saul and spending more time sleeping and dreaming. They begin to call each other comrade, using the word “with an ironical nostalgia” born of “disbelief and destruction.”33 Saul observes: “As I crack up out of that 100 per cent revolutionary, I notice I crack up into aspects of everything I hate.”34 He wants more than anything to return to the happiness of a time where he believed with others that they could change the world. Saul begins again with the compulsive “I, I, I, I like a machine-gun ejaculating regularly.”35 Anna writes: “I was listening and not listening, as if to a speech I had written someone else was delivering. Yes, that was me, that was everyone, the I, I, I, I. I am. I am. I am going to. I won’t be. I shall. I want. I.”36 At one point, Saul cries out, “My God, what we’ve lost, what we’ve lost, what we’ve lost, how can we ever get back to it, how can we get back to it again.” 37 Then he switches back to the I, I, I, I, as Anna curls up in a sick and drunken ball of pain.

The book ends with Tommy going into business with father (that is, moving from collapse to capitalism). Tommy embraces the class privilege patriarchy affords. He rationalizes his decision by saying that “the world is going to be changed by the efforts of progressive big business and putting pressure on Government departments.”38 Molly gets married. Anna works as a marriage counselor. It’s as if Lessing knew Thatcherism was coming: “There’s no such thing as society. There are individual men and women and there are families.” The loss of the Party, of the organizing role of communism in twentieth century life, is the loss of a perspective that lets society be seen. Tommy, his generation, can’t see the world his mother and Anna saw. Former comrades turn to private life as the space and possibility of politics contracts to ethics and economics.

The world that Lessing depicts is the world of the Left not just after 1956 but also after 1968 and 1989. It’s our world that seems too exhausted even for tired, old, liberalism. The end of comradeship is the end of the world: non-meaning, incoherence, madness, and the pointless, disorienting, insistence on the I.

Conclusion

From the loss of comradeship Lessing describes, we can salvage the comrade as form of political relation among those who desire collectivity, who see themselves as on the same side of a struggle for communism. As a generic, abstract figure of political belonging, comrade promises alienation and fulfillment: liberation from the constraints of racist patriarchal capitalism and a new relation born of collective political work toward an emancipatory egalitarian future. Exceeding a sense of politics as individual conviction and choice, comrade points to expectations of solidarity as indispensable to political action. When we do things out of comradeship, we show up to meetings we would miss, do political work we would avoid, and try to live up to our responsibilities to each other. We experience the joy of committed struggle, of learning through practice. We overcome fears that might overwhelm us had we no choice but to confront them alone. My comrades make me better, stronger, than I could ever be on my own.

Some on the Left are skeptical of such political belonging. Seeing comradely discipline only as constraint rather than as a decision to build collective capacity, they substitute the fantasy that politics can be individual for the actuality of political struggle and movement. This substitution evades the fact that comradeship is a choice. It also ignores the liberating quality of discipline: when we have comrades, we are freed from the obligation to be and know and do everything – there is a larger collective with a line, program, and set of tasks and goals; we are freed from the cynicism that parades as maturity because of the practical optimism that faithful work engenders. Discipline provides the support that frees us to make mistakes, learn, and grow. When we err – and each of us will – our comrades will be there to catch us, dust us off, and set us right. We aren’t abandoned to go it alone.

Disorganized Leftists too often remain entranced by the illusion of everyday people spontaneously creating new forms of life that will usher in a glorious future. This illusion fails to acknowledge the deprivations and decapacitations that forty years of neoliberalism have inflicted. If it were true that austerity, debt, the collapse of institutional infrastructures, and capital flight enabled the spontaneous emergence of egalitarian forms of life, we would not see the enormous economic inequalities, intensification of racialized violence, declines in life expectancy, slow death, undrinkable water, contaminated soil, militarized policing and surveillance, and desolate urban and suburban neighborhoods that are now commonplace. Exhaustion of resources includes the exhaustion of human resources. People often want to do something, but they don’t know what to do or how to do it. They may be isolated in non-unionized workplaces, over-burdened by multiple flex-time positions, stretched thin caring for friends and family. Disciplined organization, the discipline of comrades committed to common struggle for an emancipatory egalitarian future, can help here. Sometimes we want and need someone to tell us what to do because we are too tired and over-extended to figure it out for ourselves. Sometimes when we are given a task, we feel like our small efforts have larger meaning and purpose, maybe even world-historical significance in the age-old fight of the people against oppression. Sometimes just knowing that we have comrades who share our commitments, our joys, and our efforts to learn from defeats makes political work possible where it was not before.

Some Leftists agree with everything I’ve said thus far…and add “but.” But won’t we end up disappointed and betrayed? Won’t it all ultimately fail (as it has so many times)? What about the harms comrades have inflicted on each other in the name of comradeship? What about the persistence of sexism and racism, bigotry and bias? What happens when we are no longer on the same side, when we cannot say “we” or acknowledge a side? The critical tendency to reject an idea because of a slew of possible future failures is widespread in left milieus. An intellectual façade masks a failure of political will that would be unconvincing in any other context – don’t meet that person for coffee in case you fall in love and later have an expensive and hateful divorce. Worries about the end foreclose possibilities of beginning. Relationships end. Failures happen. But failure is nothing to fear – it’s something to learn from, a next step. We lose our comrades. The fact of an end should not forestall beginning.

1. This paper was originally delivered on January 18th, 2019, as the second annual Mark Fisher memorial lecture, Department of Visual Cultures, Goldsmiths University, London.
2. Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism (UK: Zero Books, 2009) 21.
3. Fisher, Capitalist Realism 13.
4. Jodi Dean and Mark Fisher “We Can’t Afford to Be Realists: A Conversation,” Reading Capitalist Realism, eds. Leigh Claire LaBerge (Des Moines: University of Iowa Press, 2014) 27.
5. Mark Fisher and Jeremy Gilbert, “Capitalist Realism/Neoliberal Hegemony: A Dialogue,” New Formations 80/81 (Autumn/Winter 2013): 89-101, 90 – 91.
6. Capitalist Realism 19.
7. Capitalist Realism 37.
8. Capitalist Realism 37.
9. Capitalist Realism 66.
10. Mark Fisher, “Exiting the Vampire Castle” (24 November 2013), openDemocracyUK. Originally published in The North Star.
11. Doris Lessing, The Golden Notebook, (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1962) 223.
12. Lessing, Golden Notebook 24.
13. Golden Notebook 24.
14. Golden Notebook 136.
15. Golden Notebook 51.
16. Golden Notebook 223.
17. Golden Notebook 223.
18. Golden Notebook 234.
19. Golden Notebook 258.
20. Golden Notebook 258.
21. Golden Notebook 258.
22. Golden Notebook 258.
23. Golden Notebook 259.
24. Golden Notebook 299.
25. Golden Notebook 301.
26. Golden Notebook 323.
27. Golden Notebook 323.
28. Golden Notebook 323.
29. Golden Notebook 407.
30. Golden Notebook 407.
31. Golden Notebook 475.
32. Golden Notebook 504.
33. Golden Notebook 533.
34. Golden Notebook 533.
35. Golden Notebook 537.
36. Golden Notebook 537.
37. Golden Notebook 538.
38. Golden Notebook 567.