Today, Capitalist Realismmakes for an uncanny read.1 The past decade has been nothing if not eventful — crushing austerity, war, famine, environmental collapse, Trump, Brexit, and so much more — and yet Fisher’s words still hold the power to isolate and then break through the malaise that he so effectively gave name to back in 2009. Only the greater distance between ourselves and the book’s cultural references (Wall-E, Children of Men, Live 8) stand to remind us that it was not published yesterday, but rather in the immediate wake of the global financial crash. This, of course, was Fisher’s point. As he put it, one of the consequences of capitalist realism is that “life continues but time has somehow stopped.” 2 Things happen – sometimes momentous things – but nothing changes. The future has been cancelled.

To read Capitalist Realismtoday is also to be grasped by an immeasurable sadness. With Fisher’s tragic death in 2017 we lost not only one of the most important cultural critics of a generation but a guiding voice on the Left. Sometimes controversial, always iconoclastic and vaticinal, Fisher could see clearly what the rest of us saw only obliquely, if at all. His writing style, at once dizzying and crystalline, vulnerable and self-assured, has that rare quality of making the reader feel as if they have been invited to participate in a shared intellectual and political project. Fisher knew that it would take a collective effort to shatter the edifice of our capitalist realist condition, to build a new world out of the old, and so his texts employ a properly communist ethos. To read him is to be called on to think with and alongside him. It is to inhabit a politics.

And so it is in this vein that I return to Capitalist Realism. If the book has lost none of its urgency since 2009, it is because the questions it asked back then are still our questions today. Chief among them, of course, is how to put an end to capitalist realism itself. Here, I trace one of Fisher’s responses to this question with the help of Capitalist Realismand a text that, in retrospect, I cannot help but read as its separately published final chapter: the short essay “Post-Capitalist Desire.”3 Together, these texts develop a sophisticated analysis of the role desire plays both in defeating capitalist realism and in building a communist future. What Fisher proposes is nothing less than to find the traces of a post-capitalist future right here among us today.

Capitalist Realism Versus Red Plenty

Fisher defines capitalist realism as “the widespread sense that not only is capitalism the only viable political and economic system, but also that it is now almost impossible to even imaginea coherent alternative to it.”4 The concept incorporates both Francis Fukuyama’s “End of History Thesis” and the often-repeated maxim, attributed to both Frederic Jameson and Slavoj Žižek, that “it is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism.” In fact, Fisher says that this “slogan captures precisely” what he means by capitalist realism.5 Yet as his argument proceeds, the concept takes on a much more all-encompassing character. No longer narrowly about the imagination, it begins to have a quasi-ontological sense. To borrow a phrase from Raymond Williams, it becomes a shared “structure of feeling.”6 Impersonal, comprehensive, unconscious and insidious, capitalist realism names the naturalization of neoliberalism as an ineradicable fact of life.

But — and this is crucial for Fisher — capitalist realism is only quasi-ontological. However hard it might be for us to imagine the end of capitalism, the perception that we live at the end of history is nothing more than a highly successful class project in need of constant reinforcement by the bourgeoisie. Their principal weapon in this respect is the manipulation of desire, or what Fisher would later call “libidinal engineering.”7 The trick of capitalist realism is not to make people think that capitalism is the perfect system (it clearly isn’t) but that it is the most realisticsystem. Its function is to suppress post-capitalist imaginaries and working-class power. Its ultimate aim is to make it unthinkable that a post-capitalist world might create a richer and more fulfilling life for the majority of people than capitalism will ever be able to muster.

For Fisher, the only way to combat a class project at the level of desire is with an opposing class project at the level of desire. What the Left needs is a politics that can compete with capitalism at a libidinal level and win. As Fisher sees it, the historic failure of the Left in this respect is as much to blame for the spread of capitalist realism as the Right’s successes. Fisher admonishes the Left for failing to keep up with the desires unleashed among the working classes in the wake of 1968: “If neoliberalism triumphed by incorporating the desires of the post 68 working class, a new left could begin by building on the desires which neoliberalism has generated but which it has been unable to satisfy.”8 This “New Left” is a Left that has nothing to gain from moralistically denouncing the luxuries of consumer capitalism. It is a Left that must give up the nostalgic figure of the disciplined Fordist factory worker and that cannot aim for an “anti-libidinal dampening” but that must instead construct a “counter-libido.”9 In short, it is a Left that must provide its own communal luxuries to combat the highly individualized pleasures of consumer capitalism.

What does this mean? If “bread for all, and roses too” was an essential slogan of the 1900s — a slogan that pointed towards the worker’s demands for the basics of life (bread) and for luxury too (roses), then Fisher teaches us that the slogans of the 21st century must be something like: “Everything for Everybody,” “Communal Luxury Now!,” and “Red Plenty.”10 Simply put, capitalism cannot be allowed to maintain its self-proclaimed monopoly on desire.

This conviction leads Fisher to pose a question that runs sharply against the grain of large sections of today’s Left:“Where is the left,” he asks, “that can speak confidently in the name of an alien future, that can openly celebrate, rather than mourn, the disintegration of existing socialities and territorialities?”11 In other words, where is the Left that resolutely rejects the fantasy of a return to some non-existent holism, to a national neo-Keynesian industrial strategy, to a ready-made revolutionary working class, and that will compete with capitalism at the level of desire? Where is the Left that dares to see in capitalist desires, practices, infrastructures and institutions, a nascent but corrupted desire for post-capitalism?

If this sounds a bit like accelerationism, that’s because it is. For Fisher, “Marxism is nothing if it is not accelerationist.”12 But by this he does not mean that we must vote for Trump, use innumerable plastic straws, and donate to Pegida. Fisher has in mind a more respectable communist current that begins with Marx and runs through Lenin, to Jameson, and finally to Fisher himself. In the Manifesto of the Communist Party, for instance, Marx and Engels reproach early luddite attacks on the forces of production for attempting — understandably but uselessly — to work against the tides of history.13 Similarly, they lambast “reactionary socialists” for trying to maintain a compromise solution between the new industrial era and pre-industrial relations of production and morality: “Nothing is easier than to give a Christian asceticism a socialist tinge.”14 For Marx, then, a true communist rejects nostalgic moralism and projects their desires into the present to tease out a possible post-capitalist future. As he explained in the Critique of the Gotha Programme, communism will haveto emerge in and against capitalism.15 It will need to see in the structures of capitalist society an emergent communist society.

Recall Lenin’s claim that the capitalist banking system provides the “skeleton” for a socialist system of book-keeping and distribution that need only be taken “ready-made” and “democratized” by the proletariat.16 Lenin’s proposal isolates what Frederic Jameson calls the “dialectical ambivalence” of capitalism.17 The desire for a smoothly functioning book-keeping system is hardly unique to capitalism and would be fundamental to any successful project of central planning in 1917. The challenge, then, is to turn form against content, to see how what functions as an exploitative behemoth today could be repurposed for liberatory ends tomorrow. As Jameson says, even “the most noxious phenomena can serve as the repository and hiding place for all kinds of unsuspected wish-fulfilments”.18

Jameson turns to the noxious phenomena of Walmart. While acknowledging the expected criticisms of the corporation, Jameson underlines Walmart’s properly dialectical and ambivalent character. As he says, “its capacity to reduce inflation and hold down or even lower prices to make life affordable for the poorest Americans is also the very source of their poverty and the prime mover in the dissolution of American industrial productivity”.19 Jameson wrote his essay in 2009. Today, we might want to apply the same logic to Amazon – a company whose monopoly has put an end to free market competition in its sector while undeniably resolving the problem of distribution via a now globalized system of planning, storage, transportation, and delivery. Jameson’s provocation— very much in the vein of Marx and Lenin before him — is to get us to imagine Amazon as both ruthlessly capitalist andas perhaps the most communist business in existence today. To paraphrase Lenin, once it has been put into the hands of the workers, a nationalized, or internationalized, Amazon may prove to be the skeleton of a twenty-first century socialist society; a socialism that is entirely reconcilable with today’s desire for almost instantaneous satisfaction of our wants and needs.

In “Post-Capitalist Desire,” Fisher situates himself firmly in this tradition of thought. Drawing explicitly from Jameson, he explores the dialectical ambivalence of another capitalist monstrosity: Starbucks. Ingeniously, Fisher turns the accusations that communism is generic and homogenous back onto one of the archetypal capitalist corporations: is not Starbucks itselfgeneric and homogenous? Can we not go to any Starbucks in the world, and order the same dry falafel salad, the same mediocre over-priced coffee, and sit in the same inoffensively decorated interiors? Fisher’s bold claim is that Starbucks is not successful because it satisfies supposedly capitalist desires but because it is in fact satisfying a “thwarted desire for communism,” for a shared “third space” that is neither the home nor workplace, and that is increasingly under attack, enclosed, and privatized in today’s capitalist societies.21 Once we make this shift in perspective, we can see the masses of people sitting alone in Starbucks with their laptops and coffee as participating in a sad and diminished reflection of a fuller, richer, practice of being and desiring in common. Capitalism becomes a threat to our desires rather than their precondition.

The ambivalence of Walmart, Amazon, and Starbucks is already apparent in their customers. No one actually likesshopping at Walmart or Amazon, no one enjoys Starbucks coffee, without at the same time being critical of their capitalist content: they don’t pay their taxes, they don’t permit unions, it’s too expensive, the supply chain is ethically unacceptable, and so on. While we could take the Žižekian route and say that this is precisely how capitalist ideology works — by maintaining a gap between the subject and the Big Other — Fisher asks whether it might be more politically salient to also try to imagine this as a nascent and corrupted desire for something fundamentally better: the same form but with a different, explicitly post-capitalist, content.

We can push this logic further. In the UK there is a chain of pubs called Wetherspoons. Wetherspoons’ chairman, Tim Martin, is a right-wing, pro-Brexit, millionaire. The company’s business model is to take historic buildings that might otherwise be destroyed and to turn them into standardized pubs. The result is an incongruous mixture of frequently beautiful buildings with drab, miserable, replicated interiors. It’s immensely popular. It’s popular among the elderly, among stag and hen parties, students, and young professionals. It’s probably one of the few places in the UK where you see these groups intermingling in the same space. And why is this? It can’t just be the cheap alcohol — although that helps. It can’t just be the food — which is unremarkable at best. It must also be because we put a premium on collectivity and sociality that is everywhere suppressed. Even the British, the possessors of a culture that is infamously emotionally repressed and withdrawn desire this kind of space. Wetherspoons holds open the thwarted promise of a collective experience, of a collective enjoyment, of red plenty.

During the Brexit campaign, Wetherspoons issued beermats with right-wing pro-Brexit slogans on them leading to some parts of the left boycotting the chain. But rather than resorting to this strategy — which was clearly doomed to fail since it was premised on coming between people and a cheap pint — why not see this for what it is: a remarkable strategy in an ongoing class struggle? What we need, as the organization Plan C has suggested, is a Wetherspoons of the left.23 What we need is a dialectical attunement to already existing infrastructures and practices whose form can be read against their content. We should be able to imagine providing a better version of this highly successful generic, homogenous, and standardized space than capitalism has thus far provided for us.

Fisher’s call to annex the form of capitalist infrastructures and practices to use them against their content is a fundamentally Marxist gesture that is applicable in more ways than today’s dominant Leftist currents have thus far dared to imagine. Could we not, for instance, follow this logic to its end and say that capitalism’s dialectical ambivalence extends up to and includes the state? This was Lenin’s point in The State and Revolution.24 The capitalist state is systematically used in the interests of the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie. But what kind of a desire does the state make possible when it is taken into the hands of the proletariat?

The rise of Jeremy Corbyn has perhaps given us a taste of this ambivalence. Corbyn’s presence in national politics holds open a space of desire that the ruling classes know to be a threat. How else are we to make sense of Theresa May’s full-throated defense of capitalism in September 2017 as “the greatest agent of collective human progress ever created”?25 Such a speech would have been simply unimaginable when Capitalist Realismwas first published. Perhaps one of Fisher’s challenges to us today, then, is to find the post-capitalist kernel in Corbyn’s social-democratic project, bearing in mind, as Fisher warns in his conclusion to Capitalist Realism, that capitalist realism might outlast neoliberalism by compromising with precisely such social-democratic projects.26

We Still Have A World to Win

What does it mean to read Capitalist Realism today? What political valences does it offer us? A decade after Capitalism Realism’s initial publication, as wildfires rip through California, as UK-sponsored famines tear apart Yemen, as ice sheets spin off into the mid-Atlantic, and as the Right is everywhere in resurgence, it might seem truer than ever that it is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism. But if Capitalist Realism has taught us anything, it is that now is not the time to give way on our post-capitalist desires. With Fisher, we must ask ourselves: what would happen if we organized a protest and everyone came?27 And how dowe sustain the traces of post-capitalist desire already here among us? To read Capitalist Realism today, then, is to ask ourselves whether it is still the case that it’s easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism. Could it not be that the Left has allowed it to become more enjoyableto imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism? That we are guilty of a kind of disavowed left melancholia? Not the kind that Wendy Brown speaks of when she describes a Left that is “attached more to a particular political analysis or ideal… than to seizing possibilities for radical change in the present”28 but the kind that Jodi Dean speaks of when she says that the Left has ceded on its desire, that it has given up and sold out — to which I would add with Fisher that it has renounced the responsibility to think the dialectical ambivalence of capitalism.29 This is what it means to read Capitalist Realismtoday. It is to feel the wind at our backs, urging us to think, inciting us to act in the face of almost impossible odds… because the impossible happens. Above all, it is a reminder that we still have a world to win. Fisher’s contribution — and it is the most we could ever ask for — was to give us a new set of tools to win it with and another comrade, tragically taken from us, in whose name to win it.

1. Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? (Winchester: Zero Books, 2009).
2. Mark Fisher, Ghosts of My Life: Writings on Depression, Hauntology and Lost Futures, First Edition (Winchester, UK: Zero Books, 2014) 6.
3. Mark Fisher, “Post-Capitalist Desire,” in What We Are Fighting For: A Radical Collective Manifesto, ed. Federico Campagna and Emanuele Campiglio, First Edition (London: Pluto Press, 2012) 131–39.
4. Fisher, Capitalist Realism 2.
5. Capitalist Realism 2.
6. Raymond Williams, Marxism and Literature, New Edition (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1978) 128–36.
7. Mark Fisher, “For Now, Our Desire Is Nameless,” in K-Punk: The Collected and Unpublished Writings of Mark Fisher, ed. Darren Ambrose, New edition (London: Repeater, 2018) 587.
8. Capitalist Realism, 79.
9. Fisher, “Post-Capitalist Desire” 134–35.
10. Mark Fisher, “Abandon Hope (Summer Is Coming),” in K-Punk: The Collected and Unpublished Writings of Mark Fisher, ed. Darren Ambrose, New edition (London: Repeater, 2018) 577.
11. “Post-Capitalist Desire” 133.
12. Mark Fisher, “Terminator Vs Avatar,” in #Accelerate: The Accelerationist Reader, ed. Robin Mackay and Armen Avanessian (Falmouth, United Kingdom, Berlin: Urbanomic Media Ltd.; in association with Merve, 2014) 340.
13. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, “Manifesto of the Communist Party,” in Karl Marx Frederick Engels: Collected Works, 1845-48, Vol. 6, Digital Edition (New York: Lawrence & Wishart, 2010) 492.
14. Marx and Engels, “Manifesto” 508.
15. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, “Critique of the Gotha Programme,” in Karl Marx, Frederick Engels: Marx and Engels Collected Works 1874-83: 24, Digital Edition (Lawrence & Wishart, 2010), 85.
16. V. I. Lenin, “Can the Bolsheviks Retain State Power?,” in V.I. Lenin Collected Works Volume 26 September 1917-February 1918, Third Edition (Progress Publishers, 1977) 106.
17. Fredric Jameson, “Utopia as Replication,” in Valences of the Dialectic, 1 edition (London, Brooklyn, NY: Verso, 2010) 423.
18. Jameson, “Utopia as Replication” 415–16.
19. “Utopia as Replication” 421.
20. “Post-Capitalist Desire” 136.
21. Plan C, “For a ’Spoons of the Left,” We Are Plan C (4 July 2016).
    www.weareplanc.org/blog/for-a-spoons-of-the-left/
22. V. I. Lenin, “The State and Revolution,” in V.I. Lenin Collected Works Volume 25 June - September 1917, 2nd printing edition (Progress Publishers, 1974) 385–499.
23. Elliott Larry, “Theresa May to Champion Free Market in Bank of England Speech,” The Guardian (27 September 2017).
    www.theguardian.com/business/2017/sep/27/theresa-may-to-champion-free-market-in-bank-of-england-speech
24. Capitalist Realism 78.
25. Capitalist Realism 12.
26. Wendy Brown, “Resisting Left Melancholy,” Boundary 2 26.3 (1999): 20.
27. Jodi Dean, The Communist Horizon (London; New York: Verso, 2012) 71.