Capitalist Realism thread

From wiki:
Capitalist Realism: Is there no alternative? is a 2009 book by British theorist Mark Fisher, published by Zero Books. It explores Fisher's concept of "capitalist realism," which he takes to describe "the widespread sense that not only is capitalism the only viable political and economic system, but also that it is now impossible even to imagine a coherent alternative to it."

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Everytime.
Sage for off topic.

It's been a while, but is the vampire castle a supplement to this or something that should be taken in by itself?

It's a Saturday and this board is slow fam.

Just finished giving this book a quick read.

My first impression is that the author is moving between two or three perspectives. The first is capitalism as a socio-economic system but this isn't the focus of the book. The second perspective is that of capitalism and its effect on art/culture. This forms the bulk of the text and provides examples. The third perspective is the influence of capitalism on people's consciousness itself, which is perhaps the most interesting part.

I'm going to digest this then skim the book again before I post more thoughts.

i really didn't make any connections between Vampire Castle and Capitalist Realism, although the former is definitely interesting, esp. when you see how much hate Fisher got for writing it.

tl;dr me on what Vampire Castle is and why he got hate for it plz

It is a short enough read, and you will immediately see why it pissed off the social justice crowd. It was all about how they silence dissent and undermine efforts to accomplish anything.

SJWs bullied him into suicide for explaining how they're emotionally manipulative/abusive.

He had a long history of depression, his death probably had nothing to do with twitter.

There's a difference between not being the only factor and not being a factor.

Also calling your enemies vampires and witches and whatever else probably contributed to that reaction. Anyways, the social-justice left isn't the boogeyman lurking under your bed.

...

A lot of anti-idpol people seem like opportunists to me. Ah, gee, how are we going to get Bernie Sanders elected president if these idpol vampires and witches and monsters are storming his stage and making a big mess of things??? Either way, there's an underlying assumption here that the proletariat – including female proletarians – aren't interested in feminism and so on, which is mistaken but that mistake reflects an opportunistic mentality. This usually means dumping more radical political demands (BLM et al.) in favor of reformist economism like trade unions, Bernie, whatever.

Anyways this is a sidetrack from capitalist realism.

The proletariat by and large does not know what feminism is, largely because feminists cannot decide what feminism is.

It's the emancipation of women. You should try thinking for yourself sometimes instead of just parroting what you have heard from Milo and Sargon of Akkad.

Yeah there's a lot of "culturally conservative" succdems that use it to promote their shit pragmatic workerism and "socialism is when the capitalist state helps workers" discourse. But BLM is also shit because its interclassist "anti-racism" discourse does not affirm proletarian unity and it erases non-"black" victims of police violence (ie: native americans, who have a higher rate of victimization than "blacks", "latino" proles, "white" proles, etc..)

They're correct. Try actually reading canon feminist theory (beauvoir, kristeva, firestone, federici, dworkin, butler…) from the 1960's to the current era. "feminism" encompasses a whole spectrum of opposing theories are don't necessarily share any consistent point of unity, not even "upholding the interests of female-sexed persons" can be agreed on by all, and there are huge disparities between the different definitions of basic categories like 'patriarchy', 'women' and 'emancipation'. Learn to accept the fact that a lot of left critiques of feminism come from anti-sexists who have spent a long time actually engaging with feminist theory and who question it because of legitimate concerns.

...

To some feminists. Others believe in a version that doesn't require that. Most spread ideology that diectly opposes it. Shit like demanding men help women often just calcifies the idea that men do while women merely are. Much if not most of feminism today is in a psychological cage where they can't see the walls. We're at the point where women need to assert subjectivity but this is a problem for people who have the subject/object binary embedded too deep or are averse to the risk (responsibility) that comes with agency.

A lot of women don't even want the responsibility of deciding which restaurant to go to.

And guess what - you say socialism to the average person and they don't know what you mean either. You have people like Sanders who aren't even explicitly on the side of labor. You have tards like Elon Musk claiming to be a socialist for no clear reason. This kind of muddying words is a real problem. Marx had to deal with this shit in his lifetime with both socialism and Marxism.

If you want to defend socialism you either specify what kind or you do it somewhere the kind is assumed (most here are "new old left" - class focused scientific socialism). If you want to defend a version of feminism do that instead of defending the word itself.

From a slavery that is ill-defined and not readily apparent. Of course, the advantage to feminists in that lack of coherent definition for their struggle is that every time they get something that they want it can be replaced on their endless list of increasingly petty complaints with something trivial or even entirely imaginary (eg. the Wage Gap, Mansplaining, or the World Wide Mad Deadly Communist Gangster Patriarchy). "Feminism" stopped meaning anything coherent in 1930.

Your enemies that pretend, not just that they're on your side, but that they're LITERALLY YOU? "Vampire" is sympathetic, "beanpod person" would be more accurate.
Indeed, they're the shapeshifting tyrants controlling every formal organization your political tendency ever erected, after infiltrating them and kicking out everyone who used to occupy leadership positions.

And infiltrating the Sanders campaign to sabotage it from the inside, and rigging DNC procedure to sabotage the Sanders campaign from the outside, and screaming about "muh Russkies muh 1331 h@x0rz" when caught red handed, and accusing Sanders/Stein/Nader/etc of being alt-left communazi MRApist gamergater Russian spies, and…
Because, polls show, they aren't. It's a widely acknowledged fact that western feminism accomplished every legitimate goal it ever could decades ago, and the 3rd-wave feminazism that persisted past the 1970s is simply an endless, pointless supremacist hate movement.

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Why are the MRAs derailing the reading thread now?
This shit needs to fucking stop.

(checked)
started it

Done
Let us read in peace.

Maybe next time we could read a feminist book so people actually have something concrete to talk about instead of avoiding each others arguments.

I nominate Luce Irigaray's "The Sex Which is not One."

We have a thread for the book club and the polls allow you to add your own options.

Speaking of… I'll post the next poll in a bit so we can vote while reading Capitalist Realism.

Seriously eat my cock.

I find this book unsatisfying partly because of that since the arts isn't my area of interest and Mark Fisher's focus was culture and the arts. Putting that aside, the work remains unsatisfying. Why? Maybe because Fisher's writing seems to lack a real coherency or argument. He drifts from one topic to another. The writing itself, the flow, the construction of imagery - this is all good. But it doesn't seem to go anywhere. There is too much movement between different perspectives but nothing that really unifies his work along the way. The author has a point and it's not a complicated one but the scattered themes he presents don't build up as one might hope.

bump

Don't forget the useless references to cultural artefacts that only people who were born in London in 1968 will understand.

does anyone have a positive view of the book?

So far not really. My verdict at this point is that Fisher could have made his point in less than 10 pages but bloated it to reach a book length to justify selling it as such instead of publishing a free pamphlet.

he could have gone the opposite direction as well by expanding the work into a systematic critique of culture under capitalism, but instead he meditates on issues without really investigating them or drawing conclusions.

i can think of at least one big counter-example to his thesis: star trek. the human federation is a post-capitalist society. this is explicitly stated in Next Gen, which ironically began in the late 80s as neoliberalism and capitalism seemed to be winning across the globe. it's possible that by the time Fisher wrote this book he no longer saw this example as being relevant enough to the cultural mainstream, but putting forward counter-examples to his thesis would have made the work stronger.

I guess when the site went down today it fucked up the pdfs, might want to reupload for anyone coming in very late.

True, but even then I don't think that would have been served by his meandering pace and probably could have been done with the number of pages in the book.
I would go along with Star Trek, including the excellent Next Generation or DS9, not being relevant today simply because their most recent incarnations have significantly toned down the post-capitalist elements in favor of…more popcorn oriented storytelling. The point of post-capitalist futures not being thought of is generally true, even in instances where a self-described communist makes a film it solely deals with a strike in our current situation instead of thew possibility of what comes after capitalism.

A lot of BLM's demands are dumb, tho, and people are absolutely right to put their economic interests as workers (not white workers, just workers in general) ahead of appeasing BLM. Not to mention, that showing was bullshit - the idea that Bernie was alienating black people was bullshit, and there was basically this campaign to distract from Bernie's policy by characterizing him as an old white man whereas Hillary was a vagina. That was Clintonites taking advantage of idpol believers, and it wasn't radical in the least, it was embarrassing. But it embodies the actual direction in which that brand of idpol tends to move.

Zero Books is like that. Somehow you have to make money I guess.

Are you trolling?

A tiny minority of people are murdered, but everyone is subject to class society, which the police exist to defend.

If the police defends class society and abolishing class society is their economic interest, then supporting BLM would be their economic interest too.

But BLM critique is fundamentally flawed, because it ignores the complicity of black cops and porkies, and the many non-black victims of police violence, in favor of its idpol world view.

BLM doesn't like black cops and they were the ones talking when that white dude got gunned down in a hotel by a cop. BLM is flawed because they cling to liberalism and serve as the launching pad for careerist pundits like Deray or Shawn White, not because of shit they don't do.

To play the devil's advocate, they would just claim that black cops "internalised whiteness" or something. A lot of black leftist movements use "white" as a code word for capitalism, which makes them susceptible to COINTELPRO. This is why I was positively surprised by "Sorry to bother you" because aside from the voice thing, it really wasn't race baiting but much more class conscious (the director is a Maoist).

The voice thing is an actual racism + capitalism thing though. Many whites are uncomfortable with people who speak differently from them and economically speaking you're better off affecting a white voice since non-whites are less likely to be offended and there are more easily offended whites anyway. Inoffensiveness is just a way to safeguard revenue.

Yeah, I know. The voice was designed to especially make fun of annoying marketer assholes who are well off and sharpen their knifes when they smile at you. The movie worked with the race issues completely with a class analysis, they even made fun of a typical "house negro" that tried to suck up to the establishment by kicking down (the guy with the eyepatch). In that sense, it is much better than Get Out! that was making fun of liberals very well but remained unmaterialist.

presupposes the philosophy of Max Stirner as much as that of
Adam Smith or Hayek in that it regards notions such as the
public as 'spooks', phantom abstractions devoid of content. All
that is real is the individual (and their families). The symptoms
of the failures of this worldview are everywhere - in a disintegrated social sphere in which teenagers shooting each other has
become commonplace, in which hospitals incubate aggressive
superbugs - what is required is that effect be connected to structural cause. Against the postmodernist suspicion of grand narra￾tives, we need to reassert that, far from being isolated, contingent
problems, these are all the effects of a single systemic cause:
Capital. We need to begin, as if for the first time, to develop
strategies against a Capital which presents itself as ontologically,
as well as geographically, ubiquitous.

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Ah, yes, the usual "I did not read Stirner and do not understand his philosophy but I feel the need to namedrop him" line.

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Why is this so common? Reading the spook book and stirner's critics is not difficult. Is Marx's butthurt over the spookman so palpable that a century later his adherents must misrepresent stirner in shitty pop-socialist novellas?

I'm done. Is page 37 blank for everyone else?

I had three blank pages, which kind of sucked. Probably torrent/upload poisoning or bad transcoding.

yeah, page 37 was blank.

Requesting that screengrab of an user explaining how the whole SJW phenomenon is a Federal operation to sow dissent. Can't find it, but the gist is that idpol was introduced on purpose to stop praxis against the system, for example a anticapitalist movement being too white

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forgot to explain webm. Fat is obviously unhealthy, but being against fatshaming is part of idpol. Through guilt by association, leftism is discredited because it is associated with liberalism. "muh SJW's" is the catchall response to any leftist critiquing capitalism.

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this is it

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Holy fuck this poster is hilariously retarded

Yeah, that guy is Zig Forums. Almost nothing he says is based on traceable information, especially the whole "antifa gets big paychecks from Soros" type of thing. I don't like the radlibs from antifa either, but I still want to see where in what instance they actually received money from the government, because that's the number one right-wing meme.

It's also completely delusional to claim that SJW types turn to NazBol while simultaniously declaring Zig Forums the SJW board, when it is Zig Forums that has been taken over by NazBols/economically left-leaning Zig Forumsyps, just check ANY thread on women on here.

Book title sounds like some Nick Land tripe