A few years ago, the various authors associated with this website ran an online book club, which lasted for a couple of years. Back in August 2021, we read Capitalist Realism (2009) by Mark Fisher, an English author whose work ranges in style from academic aesthetic theory to popular commentary on the contemporary film and music scene, and who acquired a significant admiring readership among a subset of those who follow cultural criticism. Fisher committed suicide in 2017 after suffering from depression for some years. The bleak view of the world he presented in his work suggests that his decision to kill himself might in part have been to do with his discomfort at the many negative features of modern life he described, and not just the specific circumstances in which his own life was lived.
The opening chapter of Capitalist Realism is titled, “It is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism”. It is a memorable statement, and it has achieved something of an iconic status within contemporary left-wing aesthetics of which Fisher was once an active participant. However, it is not an idea that we encounter in the writings of the leading theoreticians of Marxist influenced aesthetics – Georg Lukács or Bertold Brecht, for example – who still believed in the possibility of a much better world, even if they became sceptical about its imminent arrival. As the influence of Marxism on contemporary social theory has diminished, so too pessimism about alternatives to capitalism has flourished. Post-modernism has mostly replaced hope with cynicism.
According to Fisher the term ‘capitalist realism’ means 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. Later, he adds, that the characteristic of modern society and its culture is not the incorporation of materials that seemed to possess subversive potentials, but instead, their precorporation: the pre-emptive formatting and shaping of desires, aspirations and hopes by capitalist culture. Any attempt to protest against or to subvert the mainstream, in social or political terms, is absorbed immediately by the mainstream, since there is no space other than that occupied by the mainstream. It is no longer possible, Fisher seems to say, to be genuinely opposed to the capitalist system, for we have no sense at all what any other type of system might look like.
It is not clear to me how widely shared this pessimism is. There is certainly a vogue, within some forms of academic and literary discourse, for a despondent defeatism about the modern world, which says along with Fisher, ‘I really don’t like the way the world is but I have no expectation that things will ever get any better’. This lack of confidence in human agency to remake the world differently might not be new, but it has a contemporary feel to it, which lends Fisher’s ideas a ready plausibility. And yet, to my mind, his basic premise seem far less secure than he claims. When we consider how much time and effort the Catholic church expended in seeking to extirpate heresy from pre-modern Europe, it would be foolish to infer that the entire populace was happily orthodox. Fear breeds compliance but does not nurture belief.
The American economist Tyler Cowan, subject of a recent in-depth profile by The Economist, seems at first glance to be the polar opposite of Mark Fisher. It is not just that his academic discipline is (at least nowadays) primarily quantitative rather than qualitative, but also that his website where he blogs daily – Marginal Revolution – celebrates the idea of steady social progress through multiple modest improvements in public policy making and economic organisation. Rather than lamenting the absence of a big revolution that will overthrow capitalism, as Fisher did, Cowan sees capitalism expanding and improving by means of an aggregation of numerous incremental changes. He is a happy capitalist not a depressed socialist, whose libertarian leanings tend to make him sceptical about the role of the state and confident that the market can produce optimal outcomes.
That said, it occurs to me that despite living at the opposite ends of the traditional ideological spectrum, these two public intellectuals are more similar than first appearances might suggest. Like Fisher, Cowan has something of a cult following, although in his case it is among the libertarian futurists of Silicon Valley, who think that a combination of small government and big tech will make the world a much happier place, as well as making them even richer than they already are. Also like Fisher, Cowan ranges widely in his writing, offering his readers educated commentary on travel, food, jazz and classical music, literature, history, technology, chess, and sport. Both writers seem to have a desire to know as much as they can about everything, and they both have opinions about everything they know about. Fisher finds no hope anywhere whereas Cowan sees the possibility of progress everywhere, but both share the conviction that contemporary capitalism is the default social structure in which all our hopes and dreams will either sink or swim. And in this, I think, they are both profoundly mistaken.
Recently I read the text of a conversation between Tyler Cowan and Amia Srinivasan, who is a Professor of Social and Political Theory at Oxford. I admired Srinivasan’s first book, The Right to Sex (2021), when it was published, and was intrigued to see how this discussion might go. There was plenty of intellectual arm-wrestling, as I had expected, and a couple of memorable moments, when the fundamental differences of their worldviews came to the fore.
One of my favourite moments in the dialogue occurred when Cowan started to compare the position of women in Iran and Sweden and, after Srinivasan challenged him about the relevance of his comparison, he referred to Nordic countries as “gender-egalitarian”. Srinivasan replied: That’s like calling them socialists. Yes, they are slightly more socialist as compared with the US, but the idea that they are gender-egalitarian is to just massively understate what it is that feminists envision when they’re talking about liberation from patriarchy. It’s much more than just slightly lower rates of sexual violence, a smaller wage gap.
Reading her words it became clear to me that for all their surface differences, Fisher and Cowan are fundamentally in the same camp, that is, they both think that the way we currently organise the human world is basically fixed. As I continued to read the transcript, I saw that Srinivasan is in a very different camp, one that I also inhabit. As she says: Part of why I find this whole discourse problematic is because I think we should be suspicious when we find ourselves attracted to data — very, very thin and weak data — that seem to justify beliefs that have held great currency in lots of societies throughout history, in a way that is conducive to the oppression of large segments of the population, in this particular case women. Brava!
Cowan thinks the world could be improved by some smart tinkering, led by his tech friends in Southern California (and now, also in the White House) and Fisher thought things were getting gradually worse. Neither seems able to imagine that our societies could – and should – be remade in a very different format. As Srinivasan remarks, there is nothing ‘natural’ about the way our human world has been constructed and, anyway, what is natural is not also necessary. We were not born wearing clothes, using smart phones, and listed in organisation-chart hierarchies: we acquire and make use of these things by choice. Our social and economic systems create great wealth and status for some, and poverty and stigma for others: we have made these systems by choice too. The crucial point is that what we have made we could choose to make differently.
What binds Fisher to Cowan is a lack of imagination. It would be easy to excuse them, as men of a certain age, born into wealthy Western nations, who benefited from plentiful educational opportunities that allowed them to make a living by writing and teaching, and who lived relatively privileged lives compared to most people for most of human history thus far. But Cowan is the same age as me, and Fisher was born a handful of years later. Their time and place in the world does not provide them an alibi. On the contrary, given how much knowledge about the natural, social, and political world is available to well-educated men of our time and place, and given how much Fisher knew and Cowan knows, both should be able to see that a better, more just, more equitable, and therefore much happier world could be made if we choose to make it. And, to echo Srinivasan, this better world would not look very much like the world we live in today.
There is a famous essay by Isaiah Berlin, called The Hedgehog and the Fox (1953) – which was coincidentally the first book that the book club read, back in May 2020– in which Berlin draws on the observation of the classical Greek poet Archilochus to argue that some people are like foxes, who know many things, whereas others are like hedgehogs, who know one big thing. If I may borrow Berlin’s borrowing from Archilochus, I think Fisher is a hedgehog who knows that capitalism is terrible but he simply can’t see an end to it, and Cowan is a fox who thinks there are one hundred little things we could do to optimise capitalism and hopes we will do them all. Neither Fisher nor Cowan appear to have the imagination of the migratory birds who, when their local environment is no longer to their liking, take to the wing and fly far away to warmer, more pleasant climes.
I think Srinivasan is a migratory bird, for she can imagine a human world that is very different and much better than the one we currently have, and she want us all to travel there. Me too.
Yes, political imagination is fairly limited. Partly, I think, people are scared to lose even the little they have….and conservatives stimulate this fear.