The Liberal Labyrinth

May 5, 2025

Welcome back to Revolutionary Restraint. Let me apologize again for the delay. Life has been quite eventful since the birth of my son, plus I may have gotten a bit carried away with my commentary at a few points. (I know brevity was a goal, but it’s my website so I’ll make an exception where I see fit) Also, I must apologize, the length of this essay along with my desire to get on to other subjects means my editing here is even less thorough than usual. I hope that what follows proves to have been worth the wait. At any rate, at least we now have the opportunity for a May 5th themed song.

We left off having established Karl Marx as the most significant influence on the left’s unstoppable downward spiral into desolation. Our mission today will be to explore the influence that Marx and his thought have had on the left down to the present day so that we might begin to better understand the desperate state of futile, degenerate impudence that has come to characterize the contemporary left. At the same time, however, we will remain on the lookout for goals and sentiments of the left with which we can sympathize to establish some degree of solidarity with the left, as well as to suggest ways that the left might reform itself in order to more effectively pursue leftist goals and values. As indicated in our last discussion, reforming the left will require the overthrow of the dogma, established by Marx, by which it is compelled to ceaselessly attack all tradition and authority and to carry society down the path toward total ruin and to replace that dogma with new principles that conserve vital traditions and institutions, while at the same time respecting the progressive aspirations of the left to ensure that humanity may continue to reach to ever greater heights. 

By any measure, the events of the twentieth century should have dealt a decisive blow against Marx and his thought. Every practical attempt to implement his ideas proved to be abject failures, if not worse. Whatever hope might have been present at the outset of the Russian Revolution was quickly drowned by the blood of the Tzar and the chaos of civil war. As the cult of personality grew up around Lenin, the promise of liberation appeared ever more remote, and it was completely abandoned as Stalin consolidated power in the wake of Lenin’s death. Now the Soviet Union was nothing more than a totalitarian dictatorship, suppression of dissidents and democide the new law of the land. China, Korea, Cuba, Cambodia, the pattern was repeated again and again in locales across the globe, at times surpassing even the Soviets in the ostentatiousness of their all out assaults on human decency. In Korea, Kim Il-Sung established a cult of personality the likes of which not even Stalin would dare to create. Mao’s revolution in China killed far more than Stalin’s, setting off an orgy of death, destruction , and cruelty, which, in at least one hellish instance, went so far as to descend into mass cannibalism. And the brutality of Pol Pot’s killing fields in Cambodia can hardly be overstated (can’t pass up the opportunity for some Dead Kennedys). No matter how many times it was tried, the communist utopia Marx had promised was nowhere to be found. And as the century came to a close, the Soviet Union collapsed and the United States prevailed in the Cold War, it appeared to many that communism had been dealt one last defeat upon the stage of history, a defeat all the more decisive than the defeats it had already suffered on the theoretical stage. But as we discussed last time, Marxism is no mere economic or political theory. It is a dogmatic ideology that inspires a religious-like faith capable of filling the void meant for genuine religious faith and influencing the actions of its adherents with the same force. As a result, the adherents of this dogma are often averse to all evidence against their faith, even when it stares them directly in the face. They are ever ready to rationalize and make excuses; whatever it takes to maintain faith that Marx’s promises will prove right; if we are just willing to wait a little longer for the proper time to arrive. Thus, Marx refuses to die. He infects the brains of his followers, causing them to, like zombies, rise up again and again, and spread their infection to ever more helpless victims. 

Over the course of the twentieth century, the keepers of the faith devised a multitude of ways to rationalize and cope with these events that should have relegated Marx and his theories to the dustbin of history. Those who maintained an idealistic, humanistic interpretation of Marx’s thought dismissed those who carried out such atrocities as false disciples who only succeeded at giving Marx’s theories a bad name. Others were more willing to bite the bullet. They declared that though the violence of the revolutionaries might have been distasteful, it was necessary to ensuring that the revolution prevailed. The proper conditions under which a communist utopia might appear have not yet obtained and, in the meantime, we need a dictatorship of the proletariat to carry us forward to that point. It is unfortunate that so many had to die, but, rest assured, all those killed were hopelessly backward reactionaries, traitors, whose very existence threatened the success of the revolution. We might file both of these approaches to rationalization under the heading “orthodox Marxism,” for, despite their antagonism toward each other and their diverging interpretations of Marx, both of these camps are steadfast in their commitment to Marx and see their interpretation as the one he intended. In desperately clinging to the words of their master, the Marxist orthodoxy has become an object of scorn and ridicule; hopeless fools for other factions to make sport of. Whatever form they took, the orthodox responses to the horrors of the twentieth century left much to be desired, therefore we must not concern ourselves too much with them here. 

By far the most interesting response to the failures of twentieth century Marxism came in the form of an intellectual movement known as postmodernism. Postmodernism can, in large part, be traced to a group of French intellectuals who rose to prominence in the mid to late twentieth century. Though raised in the Marxist orthodoxy, these intellectuals became increasingly discouraged by the left’s seeming inability to secure any real, meaningful progress, with this frustration ultimately coming to a head in the aftermath of the failed May 1968 protests in France. Though these thinkers had been raised on Marx and they maintained a certain degree of solidarity with the values and goals of their comrades on the left, the failure of a proper revolution to materialize led these thinkers to question some of the more dogmatic aspects of orthodox leftist thought. Though postmodernism produced a rich and diverse body of thought, amongst the most frequently cited aspects of postmodern thought is a deep suspicion of grand narratives. Given that faith in Marx’s dogma is largely inspired by the narrative that communism must inevitably overcome and replace capitalism, it is easy to see how postmodernism represented a sort of threat to the Marxist orthodoxy that had prevailed up to that point. 

Of all of the thinkers to emerge out of the postmodern movement, the two who will most directly concern us are the philosopher Gilles Deleuze and the psychoanalyst Felix Guattari who would ultimately join forces on a number of projects, including  their landmark Capitalism and Schizophrenia comprised of the 1972 volume Anti-Oedipus, and A Thousand Plateaus, which appeared in 1980. Now, I must admit up front that I am no scholar of Deleuze and Guattari. I only began seriously studying their work over the last year and that study has been much heavier on the Deleuze side of things. I regret to admit that I have not yet had the opportunity to read any of Guattari’s independent work. Moreover, I am still trying to get a handle on their intricate terminology and the many nuances in their views. Therefore, let me, at the outset, apologize to any of my readers who might be better versed in the work of these philosophers than I. There is a very good chance I will fumble with some of the terminology and give some bad readings here and there. Also, as I don’t expect all of my readers to be familiar with Deleuze and Guattari, I will try, as much as possible, to translate their ideas into plain, intelligible language. Hopefully this will serve to clarify things rather than complicate them further. However, I gladly welcome any helpful corrections or constructive criticism. With that disclaimer out of the way, we must accept the risk of missteps and press on to say a few words about Deleuze and Guattari. Let us say at the outset that these are two outstanding thinkers who deserve to be studied carefully. Though Marx still wields a degree of influence over them, they are able to break free of the more dogmatic aspects of his thought enough to generate some incredibly penetrating insights. Indeed, I feel compelled to say that Capitalism and Schizophrenia represents, perhaps, the most accurate account of the spirit that drives the modern world that has ever been written. They recognize that the essence of modernity is the erosion of tradition, but, more than that, they recognize that capitalism, as the paradigmatic economic model of modernity, is a system that continually and inevitably erodes all traditions, rearranging the sediments into new traditions, for a time, only for these new traditions to be eroded again, and so on. But their insights are not limited to capitalism alone; they also shed much light on why so many Marxist experiments went so long. For instance, their concepts of micropolitics and microfascism help to explain how, even movements with nominally liberatory goals are liable to solidify around some core that itself becomes totalitarian and oppressive. Even more remarkable, Deleuze and Guattari draw a connection between the processes that constitute capitalism and the processes that occur in the mind of the schizophrenic, in that both consist of the constant dissolving and reconstituting of paradigms. Because of this affinity between the manner in which capitalism operates on the external world and the manner in which schizophrenia operates in the mind of the schizophrenic, capitalism works to stimulate and exacerbate schizophrenic processes, which leads Deleuze and Guattari to declare schizophrenia the paradigmatic affliction of the capitalist age (a little King Crimson, anyone?). Further, in their more cryptic moments, Deleuze and Guattari suggest that humanity has, in some sense, always had an intuitive grasp of the destabilizing force at the heart of capitalism, even if they could not fully comprehend all of the implications. They declare capitalism the “unnameable thing” against which all traditional societies were organized in order to keep at bay. (In this light, it becomes abundantly clear that, despite the left’s animosity toward capitalism, capitalism is, at its heart, a mode of production that is overflowing with leftist energies and the Marxist dogma that demands it’s follower tear down all traditions and institutions is really just an outpouring of the leftist energies that animate capitalism, crystallized and turned back on the that unnameable thing from which it came; Marxism is capitalism’s bastard child, an unholy abomination from which nothing, least of all that spirit which gave birth to it, is safe. Perhaps Deleuze and Guattari were wrong and capitalism was not the “unnameable thing.” Perhaps it was Marxism all along.)

There are many other elements of Deleuze and Guatarri’s thought worth commenting on and we will try to get to all of it at some time or another, but this is not the time. What we have said of their thought here is more than sufficient for our current purposes, for our more immediate concern is not the thought of Deleuze and Guattari itself, but the thought of those they have influenced. One strain of thought emerging from Deleuze and Guattari’s insights into the nature of capitalism came to be known as accelerationism. The general theme advanced by these thinkers is that the old, dogmatic Marxist approach of directly opposing capitalism at all points is ineffective and that a more viable means of overthrowing the capitalist order actually lies in working with the erosive forces of capitalism, amplifying them, in order to bring about a final cataclysm in which the capitalist system finally gives way to communism. As I indicated in a previous post, those accelerationists who interest us most are those associated with a group formed at Warwick University in England that was active around the turn of the millennium and that concerned itself, chiefly, with the accelerationist effects of emerging technology, known as the CCRU. This group flagrantly transgressed the standards of traditional academic philosophy, finding just as much (if not more) inspiration in the works of the great science fiction writers of the day as they did in the philosophical canon. The traditional philosophical essay was largely abandoned in favor of a narrative style of writing that straddled the border between truth and fiction which helped to facilitate one of CCRU’s most fascinating and characteristic conceptions, hyperstition, which might be understood as a sort of superstition whose power and influence is so intense that it, in effect, becomes real. But the CCRU, proper, is not our current concern and we will have to save any discussion of their future oriented theories for a later time. Our primary concern at the moment is one of the founding members of CCRU, a then-doctoral student by the name of Mark Fisher. 

Despite Fisher’s impressive work with the CCRU as well as an impressive solo career covering closely related ground, Fisher is probably best remembered today for his essay Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative?, written in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis. In this essay, Fisher eloquently lays out the major grievances that animate the contemporary left and, as a result, it has been raised to the status of one of the defining works of the post-2008 left. So, if we want to understand the contemporary left and how and why it has descended into complete and utter desolation, Capitalist Realism would seem as good a place as any to get started. 

According to Fisher, the overarching problem that the contemporary left currently faces is the hegemony of the viewpoint from which the essay takes its name, capitalist realism. But what is capitalist realism? Fisher explains, 

The malaise, the feeling that there is nothing new, is itself nothing new of course. We find ourselves at the notorious ‘end of history’ trumpeted by Francis Fukuyama after the fall of the Berlin Wall. Fukuyama’s thesis that history has climaxed with liberal capitalism may have been widely derided, but it is accepted, even assumed, at the level of the cultural unconscious.

So capitalist realism is just the perspective that there is no other alternative to liberal capitalism. As Fisher puts it, it is the attitude that it is easier to imagine the end of the world than it is to imagine the end of capitalism. More precisely, Fisher identifies, as the principal source of the left’s grievances, the capitalist supremacy, marked in Britain and England, respectively, by the Thatcher and Reagan governments, and cemented by the fall of the Society Union; the so-called “New World Order” ushered in by President George H.W. Bush. Now, at the very outset, we must admit that Fisher has chosen a worthy target. There is good reason to be dissatisfied with this New World Order, and we can, as we shall outline in a moment, even sympathize with a good number of the reasons he has for being dissatisfied with this order, even if his solutions leave much to be desired. Still, it is necessary to correct a few points in Fisher’s characterization of this order. In the first place, as far as I am concerned, there is very little liberal or capitalist about this order. Nor is it a right wing order as those like Fisher would have us believe. Rather it is a left wing order, with a clear lineage descending from Marx. This is not, to be sure, as pure a line from Marx as exists in Fisher, but a bastard lineage. It is a product of the ideas of the parliamentarian Marxists intermingling with those of corporate and other special interests through the medium of the state. Though diverging from the specific goals of Marx, this order maintained faith in the Marxist dogma that there was a better world just around the corner, clinging to the state as the means of bringing that world about. The result is a grotesque marriage of somewhat diverse corporatistic and socialistic interests. Moreover, though this order became the undisputed global power in the aftermath of the fall of the Soviet Union, it was in no sense new at the time, but already decaying. Today, we see the beginnings of its fall unfolding before our eyes. Ironically, if Bush’s declaration of a New World Order didn’t directly cause this fall, it certainly helped it along. We will have much more to say about the desolation of this particular lineage of leftism in the coming essays.

With that clarification out of the way, let us return to Fisher’s account and outline some points on which we can agree with him about the insufficiencies of this so-called liberal capitalist order. It seems appropriate to begin with an area with which Fisher and I both have personal experience, education. Fisher claims that many students are afflicted by a state he labels “depressive hedonia”. Reading Fisher’s account of this condition, I find much that parallels my own experience, though I suspect it is even more pronounced in a high school than the University environment that Fisher was familiar with. I will quote Fisher at length as he does an excellent job of painting what I find to be a representative image of the current state of education. He writes,

Walk into almost any class at the college where I taught and you will immediately appreciate that you are in a post-dsciplinary framework. Foucault painstakingly enumerated the way in which discipline was installed through the imposition of rigid body postures. During lessons at our college, however, students will be found slumped on desk, talking almost constantly, snacking incessantly (or even, on occasions, eating full meals). The old disciplinary segmentation of time is breaking down. The carceral regime of discipline is being eroded by the technologies of control, with their systems of perpetual consumption and continuous development. 

The system by which the college is funded means that it literally cannot afford to exclude students, even if it wanted to. Resources are allocated to colleges on the basis of how successfully they meet targets on achievement (exam results), attendance and retention of students. This combination of market imperatives with bureaucratically-defined ‘targets’ is typical of the ‘market Stalinist’ initiatives which now regulate public services. The lack of an effective disciplinary system has not, to say the least, been compensated for by an increase in student self-motivation. Students are aware that if they don’t attend for weeks on end, and/or if they don’t produce any work, they will not face any meaningful sanction. They typically respond to this freedom not by pursuing projects but by falling into hedonic (or anhedonic) lassitude: the soft narcosis, the comfort food oblivion of PlayStation, all-night TV and marijuana.

Ask students to read for more than a couple of sentences and many – and these are A-level students mind you – will protest that they can’t do it. The most frequent complaint teachers hear is that it’s boring. It is not so much the content of the written material that is at issue here; it is the act of reading itself that is deemed to be ‘boring’. What we are facing here is not just time-honored teenage torpor, but the mismatch between a post-literature ‘New Flesh’ that is ‘too wired to concentrate’ and the confining, concentrational logics of decaying disciplinary systems. To be bored simply means to be removed from the communicative sensation-stimulus matrix of texting, YouTube and fast food; to be denied, for a moment, the constant flow of sugary gratification on demand. Some students want Nietzsche in the same way they want a hamburger; they fail to grasp – and the logic of the consumer system encourages this misapprehension – that the indigestibility, the difficulty is Nietzsche.

An illustration: I challenged one student about why he always wore headphones in class. He replied that it didn’t matter because he wasn’t actually playing any music. In another lesson, he was playing music at very low volume through the headphones without wearing them. When I asked him to switch it off, he replied that even he couldn’t hear it. Why wear the headphones without playing music or play music without wearing the headphones? Because the presence of the phones on the ears and the knowledge that the music is playing (even if he couldn’t hear it) was a reassurance that the matrix was still there, within reach. Besides, in a classic example of intepassivity, if the music was still playing, even if he couldn’t hear it, then the player could still enjoy it on his behalf. The use of headphones is significant here – pop is experienced not as something which could have impacts upon public space, but as a retreat into private ‘OedIpod’ consumer bliss, a wailing up against the social.

The question of education deserves, at least, an essay devoted to it alone, so we will most assuredly return to it again at some later date. For now, it will suffice to simply agree with Fisher’s point here. The heart of the problem with education lies in the erosion of discipline. The fact that students are capable of achieving A’s even though they can’t do the reading, because it’s too boring, says it all. 

(I still haven’t figured out that footnote thing yet, so just a quick aside, skip it if you’d like, Fisher’s passing comments on pop got me thinking a bit about the state of music. Computers have become increasingly prevalent in music of all genres at all levels of production, to the point that many genres have sprung up that are typically entirely produced with computers. Many of these genres have become quite popular. Now, I’m not going to disparage any music just because computers might have been used in some way in its production. I recognize that producing such music still requires musical skills and sensibilities, and I’ll even admit to appreciating some such music. But I have to admit, I often find that there is a sort of feeling present in older styles of music that is missing in more computerized music. Maybe I’m just falling victim to the contemporary version of “rock and roll is the devil’s music”, but is it not possible that something is missing? Perhaps there is something about the role computers play in the process of producing music fundamentally alters the dynamics of that process. For instance, is it not reasonable to think that, by allowing the artist to be increasingly independent in both the process of arranging music and performing it, could something of the communal nature of music be lost? Could this explain, at least in part, Fisher’s observation that pop music is not to have an impact on the public space? Could computerized music ever replicate the freedom and spontaneity of say, the Dead? Even under an autocratic band leader such as Frank Zappa, there is a greater sense of freedom than in computerized music. Indeed, here we even have the opportunity to look at a piece that was originally digital before being performed by a full band. Is this version of “G-Spot Tornado” not more lively than this one? And I beg anyone to show me music produced with computers that could possibly   Perhaps, but these are just musings, pay them no mind.)

Well then, having gotten that out of my system, let us continue with the issue at hand. Fisher is correct to point to a system that incentivizes lowered standards, but a passage in Alex Niven’s introduction to the text lamenting the government’s decision to raise tuition prices is exemplary of a left intent on endorsing policies that run contrary to their goals. Lower tuition rates mean that those going to university have less to lose, increasing the chance of less serious students deciding to go to university. By raising tuition rates, and thus increasing the stakes for the prospective student, unserious students will be disincentivized from going to college and using valuable resources that might be better utilized by more serious students. 

Fisher’s seeming reflexive need to blame capitalism for the ills of the world, so characteristic of so many on the left, is on display when he continues a few pages later with a few otherwise insightful comments on the subject of discipline, writing, 

Teachers are now put under intolerable pressure to meditate between post-literature subjectivity of the late capitalist consumer and the demands of the disciplinary regime (to pass examinations etc). This is one way in which education, far from being in some ivory tower safely insulated from the ‘real world’, is the engine room of the reproduction of social reality, directly confronting the inconsistencies of the capitalist social field. Teachers are caught between being facilitator-entertainers and disciplinarian-authoitarians. Teachers want to help students to pass the exams; they want us to be authority figures who tell them what to do. Teachers being interpellated by students as authority figures exacerbates the ‘boredom’ problem, since isn’t anything that comes from a place of authority a priori boring? Ironically, the role of disciplinarian is demanded of educators more than ever at precisely the time when disciplinary structures are breaking down in institutions. With families buckling under the pressure of a capitalism which requires both parents to work, teachers are now increasingly required to act as surrogate parents, instilling the most basic behavioral protocols in students and providing pastoral and emotional support for teenagers who are in some cases only minimally socialized.

It is worth stressing that none of the students I taught had any legal obligations to be at college. They could leave if they wanted to. But the lack of any meaningful employment opportunities, together with cynical encouragement from government means that college seems to be the easier, safer option. Deleuze says that control societies are based on debt rather than enclosure; but there is a way in which the current education system both indebts and encloses students. Pay for your own exploitation, the logic insists – get into debt so you can get the same McJob you could have walked into if you’d left school at sixteen…

There can be little doubt that Fisher is right to point to the breakdown of established disciplinary frameworks as a serious societal I’ll, but, surely, to pin the blame for that problem exclusively on liberal capitalism is somewhat too simplistic. Indeed, in the process of exposing this problem, Fisher betrays the role of attitudes, like his own, with in academica, and the left more broadly, in contributing to the breakdown of disciplinary frameworks, for instance, in noting a sentiment amongst faculty that administration is pressuring them to act as authority figures despite simply wanting to teach. Surely teachers should be seen as, on some level, authority figures in the eyes of their students. The reluctance of teachers to accept their role as authority figures no doubt contributes, to some degree, to the breakdown of disciplinary frameworks. The reason for this reluctance is apparent when Fisher points out that students viewing teachers as authority figures contributes to the boredom problem. But why do students see authority figures as somehow inherently boring? Surely this is not a necessary disposition. Is there nothing at all interesting about authority figures, whether it be a result of vast knowledge of experience? Are there not cultures in which authority figures are afforded the utmost reverence and the youth are taught to honor their every word and seek out as many opportunities as possible to learn from them? And while we might admit that capitalism has played some role in the erosion of respect for authority figures, must we not also place some degree of blame on the influence of the left and its compulsive need to find oppression and injustice under every stone? Surely leftist academics bare some responsibility for students’ declining respect for teachers. 

That being said, it would also be too simplistic to lay all of the blame for this state of affairs at the feet of leftist ideologues and the causes Fisher cites are probably far more significant than those he neglects and they can most certainly be traced to the logic of so-called liberal capitalism, though, we must insist, such logic is not essential to capitalism in itself, and it is possible to conceive of a laissez-faire system, which promotes free trade and association, in which the features that lead to the problems Fisher cites are not present. Justifying this claim will necessarily become a major component of Revolutionary Restraint’s project. 

In the first place, Fisher is right to point to the increasing absence of parents from childrens’ lives, in large part due to building pressures on parents to work, as a major cause of the breakdown of discipline. Moreover, he is absolutely justified in blaming the liberal capitalist world order for creating the conditions which cause so many parents to feel pressure to work more and spend less time with their families. Eliminating these pressures and allowing parents to spend more time with their families will have to become a central goal if capitalism is to remain a viable economic system going into the future. Now, some of these pressures might be eliminated simply by removing some of those aspects of the current liberal capitalist order that actually impede free trade and association, but some of these pressures will have to be dealt with on a far broader social and cultural level and with the cooperation of employers. We will have to return to this matter in more detail at a later date. 

There can be little doubt that the policies which Fisher noted earlier, incentivizing schools to accept and push through as many students as possible, with minimal concern for the actual passions, talents, or dispositions of those students, have played a significant role in creating an environment rife with boredom and unruly behavior. This surely contributes to the situation in which teachers find themselves, straddling the line between “facilitator-entertainer” and “disciplinarian-authoritarian” rather than a more appropriate status as, say, scholar-instructor. And what is the motivation for such policies? Their proponents would likely sight some belief in the uplifting power of education and claim to be motivated by some egalitarian humanistic desire to make that power equally accessible to everyone. There are probably many who actually believe this. But underlying this kind and cheery face is a cold hard financial incentive, one that goes far beyond the mere profits generated for universities by pushing through as many students as possible and Fisher identifies this incentive with expert precision at the end of the last section quoted. The ultimate motive for pushing as many students through the education system and artificially inflating the number of degrees, and thereby debasing their value, is not some humanitarian motive, nor is it to enrich universities, but to burden students with substantial debt, forcing them to commit to jobs, many of which these students could have learned to do without attending university, in order to continue making payments. The ultimate goal, then, as Fisher reveals, is control. 

To be sure, here Fisher is coming up against one of the most critical issues of our time. Whatever your political persuasion, the effects that encouraging every single child to attend college and threatening them that they would have no hope of succeeding if they do not are hard to ignore. Not only has the value of an undergraduate degree, and the impressiveness of those who hold them, diminished substantially, but for no other reason than being obedient and listening to the best advice of all the authority figures around them, the younger generations have been burdened by crippling debt that has placed many of the milestones their parents celebrated as rites of passage out of reach for far too many people. And Fisher is not entirely wrong in pointing to capitalism’s complicity in creating this situation. There is, to be sure, a certain strain of capitalist logic which comes close to raising greed to the level of a virtue by encouraging the unceasing accumulation of assets. But such logic and such rigid adherence to it to the point of such grotesque conclusions need not be an inherent feature of a system founded on free trade and association. If capitalism, or anything like it, is to be saved from itself and redeemed in the eyes of so many this debt based system of control has held back, then the student debt crisis must certainly be solved before it has a chance to spark more destructive crises. We, of course, must not limit ourselves to student debt. This is just the tip of the iceberg. A long list of debt schemes meant to further enrich the elite and keep the masses in submission perpetrated by the inflationary regime of the central banking cartel whose greatest victory, perhaps, might be traced to the establishment of the Federal Reserve Bank of the United States just over a century ago. We will have multitudes more to say on this subject as we progress. 

We must note a hint of irony in the student debt scheme. Though the motive for indebting students by sending them to universities was to keep them subservient and controlled in the mundane jobs they are forced to take to pay off their loans, in the process these students were inadvertently exposed to an academy largely controlled by left wing ideologues. Under the influence of these ideologues, those indebted have had the courage to question the so-called authorities who placed them in the predicament in which they find themselves and, having absorbed revolutionary rhetoric, they are perhaps more favorably disposed to rising up against those authorities than they would have been otherwise. The recent overwhelming show of support for Luigi Mangione’s cold blooded act of murder serves as a profound indication of this. Resolving this crisis in a timely and reasonable manner may very well prove to be a matter of existential significance for the elite. Of course, perhaps it is naive to think that the architects of this regime of debt did not anticipate what might result from exposing the youth, en masse, to hotbeds of leftist ideology, but then again, these delicate geniuses do not often inspire much confidence in their competence. 

Whether anticipated or not, it seems that whatever revolutionary spirit or hostility toward the rich this leftwing influence has inspired in the masses has either been effectively suppressed or even redirected to support the prevailing world order. Fisher indicates as much in the passage immediately following the last passage we cited, in which he laments the apparent stagnation and sterility of contemporary revolutionary moments. He writes, 

That the neoliberal Economist would deride French opposition to capitalism is hardly surprising, yet its mockery of French ‘immobilization’ had a point. ‘Certainly the students who kicked off the latest protests seemed to think they were re-enacting the events of May 1968 their parents sprang on Charles de Gaulle’, it wrote in its lead article of March 30,2006.

They have borrowed its slogans (‘Beneath the cobblestones, the beach!’) and hijacked its symbols (the Sorbonne university). In this sense, the revolt appears to be the natural sequel to [2005]’s suburban riots, which prompted the government to impose a state of emergency. Then it was the jobless, ethnic underclass that rebelled against a system that excluded them. Yet the striking feature of the latest protest movement is that this time the rebellious forces are on the side of conservatism. Unlike the rioting youths in the banlieues, the objective of the students and public-sector trade unions is to prevent change, and to keep France the way it is.

It’s striking how the practice of many of the immobilizers is a kind of inversion of that of another group who also count themselves heroes of 68: the s called’ liberal communists’ such as George Soros and Bill Gates who combine rapacious pursuit of profit with the rhetoric of ecological concern and social responsibility. Alongside their social concern, liberal communists believe that work practices should be (post) modernized, in line with the concept of ‘being smart’. As Zizek explains,

Being smart means being dynamic and nomadic, and against centralized bureaucracy; believing in dialogue and cooperation as against central authority; in flexibility as against routine; culture and knowledge as against industrial production; in spontaneous interaction and autopoiesis as against fixed hierarchy.

Taken together, the immobolizers, with their implicit concession that capitalism can only be resisted, never overcome, and the liberal communists, who maintain that the amoral excesses of capitalism must be offset by charity, give a sense of the way in which capitalist realism circumscribes current political possibilities. Whereas the immobilizers retain the form of 68-style protest but in the name of resistance to change, liberal communists energetically embrace newness. Zizek is right to argue that, far from constituting any kind of progressive corrective to official capitalist ideology, liberal communism constitutes the dominant ideology of capitalism now. ‘Flexibility’, ‘nomadism’ and ‘spontaneity’ are the very hallmarks of management in a post-Fordist, Control society. But the problem is that any opposition to flexibility and decentralization risks being self-defeating, since calls for inflexibility and centralization are, to say the least, not likely to be very galvanizing. 

Thus, as Fisher sees it, in the face of capitalist realism, the revolutionary spirit has two basic reactions. In the first case, the revolutionary looks backward to a time when revolution seemed more viable, becoming invested in the past and tradition, making themselves irrelevant to the current situation and even contributing to the perpetuation of the oppressive systems those they model themselves on struggled against. The other reaction is to look forward for novel ways to move the revolution forward, but these energies tend to be absorbed by what we might call liberals in communists’ clothing. (Or are they communists in liberals’ clothing? Perhaps there is little difference in the end.) These liberal communists are realists. They admit that struggling against liberal capitalism is futile, so they instead try to temper what they perceive as its most negative effects, largely through processes of decentralization which they see as promoting flexibility and spontaneity. Though these liberal communists have no doubt been successful at dissipating revolutionary energies, it is apparent that cracks are beginning to form in the facade with people increasingly realizing that the humanistic, liberatory vision these types preach openly ultimately serves to hide a hollow and ineffective, perhaps even tyrannical, to its core. As the clout of these figures diminishes, those who once followed them increasingly desire a return to pure, and thus more extreme ideologies, diverging from one another as they embrace more extreme forms of capitalism or communism. 

This drive toward decentralization embraced by the liberal communists seems to be one of Fisher’s bigger gripes with the liberal capitalist order. Aside from his comments about the effects of liberal capitalism in matters related to education, Fisher’s most relatable and justifiable complaints are those centered around the phenomenon of call centers where his distaste for decentralization is on full display. He writes, 

The closest that most of us come to a direct experience of the centerlessness of capitalism is an encounter with the call center. As a consumer in late capitalism, you increasingly exist in two, distinct realities: the one in which the services are provided without hitch, and another reality entirely, the crazed Kafkaesque labyrinth of call centers, a world without memory, where cause and effect connect together in mysterious, unfathomable ways, where it is a miracle that anything ever happens, and you lose hope of ever passing back over to the other side, where things seem to function smoothly. What exemplifies the failure of the neoliberal world to live up to its own PR better than the call center? Even so, the universality of bad experiences with call centers does nothing to unsettle the operating assumption that capitalism is inherently efficient, as if the problems with call centers weren’t the systemic consequences of a logic of Capital which means organizations are so fixated on making profits that they can’t actually sell you anything. 

The call center experience distils the political phenomenology of late capitalism: the bored and frustration punctuated by cheerily piped PR, the repeating of the same dreary details many times to different poorly trained and badly informed operative, the building rage that must remain impotent because it can have no legitimate object, since – as is very quickly clear to the caller – there is no-one who knows, and no-one who could do anything even if they did. Anger can only be a matter of venting; it is aggression in a vacuum, directed at someone who is a fellow victim of the system but with whom there is no possibility of communality. Just as the anger has no proper object, it will have no effect. In this experience of a system that is unresponsive , impersonal, centerless, abstract and fragmentary, you are as close as you can be to confronting the artificial stupidity of Capital in itself. 

Now, I suspect that most people who have ever had to deal with a call center can identify with Fisher’s frustrations. I certainly can. Trying to resolve a problem through a call center can be a time-wasting, infuriating nightmare which often leaves one with the feeling that you are just being strung along until you get so fed up that you drop the matter entirely. But it seems that Fisher’s experiences were even worse. I can’t say that I recall ever experiencing such a problem when trying to buy a product, only when trying to have some issue with a product I’ve already purchased or to get my money back. Businesses, in my experience, are ever eager to take one’s money, but not too motivated to do anything else. And, to be sure, nothing I have ever experienced in the private world can begin to compare to the frustrations associated with the government call center. And even if such experiences for some reason prove to be necessary features of capitalism, they are comparatively minor inconveniences in the grand scheme of things and being rid of them is hardly sufficient reason for overthrowing every other benefit the capitalist mode of production has brought us. Of course, there is no reason to think that such experiences are necessary features of capitalism and I must admit that I sympathize with anyone who might adopt the goal of achieving a capitalism without such experiences.

However, as much as we might find the call center experience disheartening, it is possible that the solution to the negative feelings it inspires might lie within ourselves far more than any change we might be able to affect in the world. Fisher repeatedly suggests that the frustrations of the call center are the result of having a direct experience of the decentralizing effects of capitalism which deprives us of any true object to direct our feelings toward. But perhaps this need for an external object itself is part of the very problem we are trying to solve. Perhaps rather than seeking a center outside ourselves we should be trying to find a center with ourselves. Indeed, perhaps, the erosive effects modernity has had on the old external centers toward which people once turned for stability is a blessing in disguise as it has not only opened up the possibility of turning inward for centeredness, but necessitating it. There is obviously much more to this line of thinking than we can say here, but this suggestion will suffice for now. (This song seems fitting. Harrison’s sitar is probably the strongest justification for The Beatles reputation.)

Given Fisher’s aversion to the decentralizing effects of the prevailing capitalist world order, it should come as no surprise that his answer is centralization. The final chapter of Capitalist Realism is titled “Marxist Supernanny” and in it he fantasizes about a hypothetical figure of the same name. He explains,

The Marxist Supernanny would not only be the one who laid down limitations, who acted in our own interests when we are incapable of recognizing them ourselves, but also the one prepared to take this kind of risk, to wager on the strange and our appetite for it. 

This description clearly betrays Fisher’s yearning for a central authority figure to direct and control society. 

In the process of fantasizing, Fisher has occasion to reflect a bit more on the questions of parenting and discipline, and offers a few observation that are at least worth considering. He writes, 

The problem is that late capitalism insists and relies upon the very equation of desire with interests that parenting used to be based on rejecting. In a culture in which the ‘paternal’ concept of duty has been subsumed into the ‘maternal’ imperative to enjoy, it can seem that the parent is failing in their duty if they in any way impede their children’s absolute right to enjoyment. Partly this is an effect of the increasing requirement that both parents work; in these conditions, when the parent sees the child very little, the tendency will often be to refuse to occupy the ‘oppressive’ function of telling the child what to do. The parental disavowal of this role is doubled at the level of cultural production by the refusal of ‘gatekeepers’ to do anything but give audiences what they already (appear to) want. The concrete question is: if a return to the paternal superego – the stern father in the home, Reithian superciliousness in broadcasting – is neither possible nor desirable, then how are we to move beyond the culture of monotonous moribund conformity that results from a refusal to challenge or educate? A question as massive as this cannot of course be finally answered in a short book such as this, and what follows here will amount to a few starting points and suggestions. In brief, though, I believe that it is Spinoza who offers the best resources for thinking through what a ‘paternalism without the father’ might look like. 

In Tarrying with the Negative, Zizek famously argues that a certain Spinozism is the ideology of late capitalism. Zizek believes that Spinoza’s rejection of deontology for an ethics based around the concept of health is allegedly flat with capitalism’s amoral affective engineering. The famous example here is Spinoza’s reading of the myth of the Fall and the foundation of Law. On Spinoza’s account, God does not condemn Adam for eating the apple because the action is wrong; he tells him that he should not consume the apple because it will poison him. For Zizek, this dramatizes the termination of the Father function. An act is wrong not because Daddy says so; Daddy only says it is ‘wrong’ because performing the act will be harmful to us. In Zizek’s view, Spinoza’s move both deprives the ground of Law in a sadistic act of scission (the cruel cut of castration), at the same time as it denies the ungrounded positing of agency in an act of pure volition, in which the subject assumes responsibility for everything. In fact, Spinoza has immense resources for analyzing the affective regime of late capitalism, the videodrome-control apparatus described by Burroughs, Philip K. Dick, and David Cronenberg in which agency is dissolved in a phantasmagoric haze of psychic and physical intoxicants. Like Burroughs, Spinoza shows that, far from being an aberrant condition, addiction is the standard state for human beings, who are habitually enslaved into reactive and repetitive behaviors by frozen images (of themselves and the world). Freedom, Spinoza shows, is something that can be achieved only when we can apprehend the real causes of our actions, when we can set aside the ‘sad passions’ that intoxicate and entrance us. 

There’s no doubt that late capitalism certainly articulates many of its injunctions via an appeal to (a certain version of) health. The banning of smoking in public places, the relentless monstering of working class diet on programs like You Are What You Eat, do appear to indicate that we are already in the presence of paternalism without the Father. It is not that smoking is ‘wrong’, it is that it will lead to our failing to lead long and enjoyable lives. But there are limits to this emphasis on good health: mental health and intellectual development barely feature at all, for instance. What we see instead is a reductive, hedonic model of health which is all about ‘feeling and looking good’. To tell people how to lose weight, or how to decorate their house, is acceptable; but to call for any kind of cultural improvement is to be oppressive and elitist. The alleged elitism, and oppression cannot consist in the notion that a third party might know someone’s interest better than they know it themselves, since, presumably smokers are deemed either to be unaware of their interests or incapable of acting in accordance with them. No: the problem is that only certain types of interest are deemed relevant, since they reflect values that are held to be consensual. Losing weight, decorating your house and improving your appearance belong to the ‘consentimental’ regime. 

But as much as increased pressures on parents to work likely contribute to the breakdown in discipline we are currently witnessing, it is too convenient to lay all of the blame on work, as Fisher himself goes on to indicate. As Fisher reveals when he says that a return to the “stern father… is neither possible nor desirable,” the breakdown of discipline has much deeper cultural and intellectual causes. But here again, Fisher reveals the role of leftism in bringing about the very conditions he laments. Whether or not we agree with the claim that a return to the stern father is neither possible nor desirable, it is indisputable that it is the leftward lurch of modernity, in particular the influence of those ideologies that have dared to push the furthest left, that has unseated the stern father from his traditional authoritative position and if it is impossible or undesirable to return the father to his traditional role, then that is only because of the continuing influence of those ideologies which unseated him in the first place. The left cannot lay blame for the breakdown of discipline at the feet of capitalism, after all, the capitalist spirit was originally born from the highly paternalistic Protestant ethic. Capitalism and paternalism are by no means incompatible. If leftists lament the seeming undisciplined absurdity of modern capitalism, they only have themselves to blame to the extent they have been successful in stripping capitalism of its paternalistic aspects while leaving capitalism itself largely intact. To be clear, this is not necessarily an endorsement of a return to the strict paternalism of past eras; overly paternalistic societies have their own problems; but some measure of paternalism within a society is likely desirable and suggestions to this effect must not be condemned on their face as endorsements of oppressive regimes. 

The left’s assault on paternalism has no doubt hurt actual fathers, but the most profound casualty of this assault has no doubt been the highest paternalistic authority of all, none other than God Himself. God, being the highest of all traditional authorities, is naturally the ultimate target of all leftist energies and those energies have succeeded in dealing significant blows to God’s authority in the modern era. But if we want to enjoy the benefits of paternalistic discipline while avoiding the drawbacks associated with more worldly paternal authorities, then perhaps our greatest hope lies in the Father of all Creation Himself. As Johnny Paycheck puts it, “God Can Do It”!

To be sure, though the suggestion that society must reinvigorate its relationship with God might be noxious to many on the furthest fringes of the left, Fisher at least pays lip service to God immediately after this in his comments on Zizek’s analysis of Spinoza. Of course, it should not be lost on us that Spinoza’s God is often regarded as the most defanged notion of God in all of Western philosophy, to the point that a common accusation from his opponents was that Spinoza was in fact an atheist. While the charges of atheism levelled against Spinoza might tend to overstate their case, it is much harder to deny that there is a certain connection between Spinoza’s philosophy and the secularism of the modern age. Fisher, through Zizek, does well to recognize a major point of connection in Spinoza’s interpretation of the Fall. As they indicate, by claiming that Adam was not wrong for eating the apple merely because God commanded it, but that God commanded Adam not to eat the apple because Adam would be harmed if he did so signals a transition away from a deontological ethics and a turn toward a health obsessed ethics. There is obviously quite a lot at play in this little passage. It digs at some of the most difficult problems in all of philosophy from the debate between deontology and consequentialism to the Euthyphro problem. Clearly, if the latter still has not been solved in the nearly two and a half millennia since Plato first posed it, there is no hope of us resolving it here, but please permit me to offer a few thoughts with the understanding that these are by no means meant to be anything approaching knockdown arguments. 

In the first place, Spinoza’s concern for the reason for God’s command over and above the command itself is eminently rational in a manner quite consistent with modern attitudes. Indeed, Spinoza might even be said to foreshadow the revolutionary spirit that would sweep Europe a century later, insofar as he is willing to question authority and demand that authority, even that of God’s, be exercised with the best interests of those it governs in mind. Now these demands are perfectly reasonable in the case of earthly rulers. It is perfectly reasonable to demand that the people we entrust with power have good reasons for the laws they impose on us and that those reasons have our best interests in mind. The problem seems to come from conflating what is reasonable to demand of earthly rulers with what it is reasonable to demand of God. While God might share with earthly rulers the characteristic of being a ruler, there are obvious and relevant differences between God and earthly rulers. For instance, while earthly rulers only attain their status by means of historical accident, God’s position is inherent to God’s very nature. More than that, while earthly rulers’ very existence is entirely contingent, God exists by matter of necessity. Even more relevant to our current concerns is that God, as traditionally conceived, is understood to be perfectly Good. To demand God justify Himself is to miss the point. If God commands something, it must be Good because God is Good. To question whether God’s order is Good is to misunderstand what God is (note God’s revelation to Moses, “I Am That I Am!). But even if we know that God is Good, it can, at times, be difficult, if not impossible, to see how what God commands us to do is Good. This is only to be expected as God is, by definition, omniscient, whereas our knowledge is necessarily limited, therefore it is quite likely that what God knows to be Good from His infinite vantage point might appear to be anything but Good from our limited vantage point (this is the reason for Plato’s injunction that we pray for the Good alone.) Though it may be tempting to cry out for God to justify Himself when we cannot see his reasons, it may simply be impossible for God to show why his command is Good for us in the moment. It is here that the vital importance of faith becomes apparent. We must maintain our faith in God’s absolute Goodness so that we are prepared to follow His command even when we cannot possibly understand His reasons. We must maintain our faith that whatever God commands is Good for no other reason than that God has commanded it. But this is not to say that we should abandon the hope that God has our best interests in mind in issuing His commands. Indeed, if we are to maintain our faith that God is Good and that God loves us (Spinoza would surely dispute this, but if God is Good and to love is Good, then surely Good must love us), it is imperative that we also maintain faith that our own good is included in that ultimate Good toward which God guides us. And if our own good is included in God’s ultimate Good, is it not reasonable to think that in that ultimate Good God might show some concern for our desire to know that His commands were in our best interest? Perhaps we can only fully understand the Good in all of God’s commands as we approach and, ultimately, reach that ultimate Good. Until that time, we must follow God’s commands even when we can’t possibly understand His reasons, reassured by our faith that by unwaveringly following His command we will eventually be carried along to the realization of that Divine Providence in which the Good in all of God’s commands becomes apparent. (We should also consider the possibility that it is precisely the point that we cannot see how God’s commands could possibly be Good for us so that we might have the opportunity to practice selflessness and show our appreciation for the Good itself with no expectation of reward. Indeed, perhaps one of the principal advantages of deontology is that it forces us to maintain faith in the Good itself and to search for it in the act itself, especially when it is not immediately apparent, whereas consequentialist thinking encourages us to expect some sort of personal good to come from the act. I am not so naive to think that this means deontology has the upperhand in the debate. It seems much more likely to me that the resolution lies in some sort of synthesis of the two positions. If synthesis is possible, it would seem likely that deontology should be the framework preferred when considering Divine commands, while consequentialism should be the framework preferred when considering commands from earthly rulers, with certain Divine commands taking absolute preference over any possible consequentialist consideration.) In this light, we may understand God’s commands as beacon’s that guide us through the foggy haze of intoxicating passions and obscured motives, until we can succeed in unraveling the reasons behind our actions and lifting ourselves to a state of true freedom in which we can identify the Good for ourselves and act accordingly. Thus let us pray to God, let your light shine down on me

Now, all of this, of course, raises the thorny question of how we can know what God commands and how we can sort out competing claims. (Maybe Victor Wooten can shed some light on this problem) We are even less prepared to tackle these questions than the last questions. But it is precisely the difficulty of answering these questions that leads us to the problems surrounding earthly rulers and regimes of discipline. Though God knows perfectly well what is best for us and how best to mold us to fit that reality, for humans this is all largely guesswork. Though we might be able to gain some general ideas about what works best through trial and error, countless variables and constantly changing conditions mean that we can hardly ever come by any hard and fast rules. Still, working by analogy to what we just said above, we might give a very rough sketch of an appropriate disciplinary regime and the various stages one might pass through throughout the course of their life. Because we all start life more or less ignorant of what is good for us, in the first stage of life, individuals should be subjected to paternalistic authority and a comparatively strict regime of discipline. Parents should both be entrusted with the administration of this regime and be granted a considerable degree of discretion in determining precisely how to administer it, both because natural circumstances lend themselves to this arrangement and because this period is of such vital importance, we must avoid at all cost any impulse to centralize this stage, lest a miscalculation on the part of some bureaucrat leads to the ruin of an entire generation. As children mature, parents should begin to explain the reasoning behind their commands, with the hope that their children will understand and accept those reasons and choose to continue to follow those commands for their own good of their own volition. Though children should begin to acquire more freedom at this stage, the authority of the parent must remain as a constant reminder that the child will be pulled back into line should they prove unable to keep themselves in line. Once children reach the age of majority, however, they should be granted considerable freedom. Indeed, they must be free to do whatever they want so long as they do not harm others in the process. Still, though people may be free to do what they want within these limits, it does not mean that they will necessarily be free from any social or economic consequences of their actions. They must learn to regulate themselves so that they are able to survive within the society they find themselves in the niche they have carved out for themselves, and if they are unable to do so, they must be prepared to live with the consequences. 

Having said all this, we can turn to our attention to the contemporary health obsessed regime, which, since Fisher wrote, has only become more extreme, especially in the wake of the COVID fiasco. I will not here deal with the particular details of this health obsessed regime, other than to state my strong disapproval of it and to suggest the work of psychiatrist Thomas Szasz’ work as one of the most compelling critiques of it (truly, all of Szasz’ corpus is worth reading, but his Pharmacracy is probably the most relevant to our current concerns). Instead, I want to focus on Fisher’s comments. Fisher seems to despair over the fact that it is acceptable to tell people how to improve their health, while it is unacceptable to suggest any sort of cultural improvement. On this point we cannot fault him. If it is acceptable to critique the personal health habits of others, it would seem perfectly reasonable to critique people on other habits, especially if those habits might have wider societal repercussions. But I must push back here on Fisher’s assessment of what separates matters of health from matters of culture. It is not, as Fisher claims, that matters of health are consensual while matters of culture are not. The answer is much deeper. What separates health advice from cultural advice is the fact that health advice can be cloaked in medico-scientific justification, whereas cultural advice tends to remain nakedly moralistic. It is perfectly acceptable to give advice when it can be justified by empirical evidence, what is unacceptable is to give advice when justification must ultimately appeal to intangible or transcendental principles. What Fisher really laments is the inadmissibility of moral judgement in popular discourse and he is right to lament it. To be sure, there is a certain sensibility to the demand that all advice be justified by empirical evidence. Is it not the height of presumption to think we should be able to demand others conform to our expectations without being able to point to concrete, verifiable reasons why we should? Perhaps, but just because we cannot materially substantiate certain principles does not mean that those principles do not exist or that they do not matter. Now, to be sure, given the difficulty of discerning such principles, we should be very careful to whom we attribute the ability to accurately discern them and we should never assign anyone the authority to dictate to the rest of us what those principles are and how we must adhere to them.  But that does not mean that we should not allow lively debate on these matters. On the contrary, the difficulty of accurately discerning these principles means that we must encourage lively debate on these matters and actively consider other points of view in order to maximize the chance that we get as close to the true answers as possible. To achieve this, however, it will not only be necessary for us to learn to accept and graciously respond to criticism of our own ideas, but also to learn to be tolerant of a wide range of behaviours that do not, in and of themselves, harm others, and to only hold others’ personal habits against them when they become a detriment to our personal relationships when they matter most and also to make ample room for forgiveness. 

Whether it is because he is unable or unwilling to do so, at the root of Fisher’s frustration is his inability to articulate his desire for moral discourse to be deemed socially acceptable. As a result of this desire, Fisher seems to reluctantly yearn for the path of the more traditional Marxist for whom the idea of a central authority tasked with making such decisions about intangible principles for us was perfectly acceptable, ultimately culminating in his fantasies of a Marxist Supernanny. But Fisher knows better. He knows that such a central authority is not a realistic solution. He thus abandons his fantasies, leaving us with a limp, wavering and vague conclusion.

It is crucial that a genuinely revitalized left confidently occupy the new political terrain I have (very provisionally) sketched here. Nothing is inherently political; politicization requires a political agent which can transform the taken-for-granted into the up-for-grabs. 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. For example, the left should argue that it can deliver what neoliberalism signally failed to do: a massive reduction of bureaucracy. What is needed is a new struggle over work and who controls it; an assertion of worker autonomy (as opposed to control by management) together with a rejection of certain kinds of labor (such as the excessive auditing which has become so central feature of work in post-Fordism). This is a struggle that can be won – but only if a new political subject coalesces; it is an open question as to whether the old structures (such as the trade unions) will be capable of nurturing that subjectivity, or whether it will entail the formation of wholly new political organizations. New forms of industrial action need to be instituted against managerialism. For instance, in the case of teachers and lecturers, the tactic of strikes (or even of marking bans) should be abandoned; because they only hurt students and members (at the college where I used to work, one-day strikes were pretty much welcomed by management because they saved on the wage bill whilst causing negligible disruption to the college). What is needed is the strategic withdrawal of forms of labor which will only be noticed by management: all of the machineries of self-surveillance that have no effect whatsoever on the delivery of education, but which managerialism could not exist without. Instead of the gestures, spectacular politics around (noble) causes like Palestine, it’s time that teaching unions got far more immanent, and take the opportunity opened up by the crisis to begin to rid public services of business ontology. When even businesses can’t be run as businesses, why should public services? 

We must convert widespread mental health problems from medicalized conditions into effective antagonisms. Affective disorders are forms of captured discontent; this disaffection can and must be channeled outwards, directed towards its real cause, Capital. Furthermore, the proliferation of certain kinds of mental illness in late capitalism makes the case for a new austerity, a case that is also made by the increasing urgency of dealing with environmental disaster. Nothing contradicts capitalism’s constitutive imperative towards growth more than the concept of rationing goods and resources. Yet it is becoming uncomfortably clear that consumer self-regulation and the market will not by themselves avert environmental catastrophe. There is a libidinal as well as a practical case, to be made for this new ascesis. If, as Oliver James, Zizek, and Supernanny have shown, unlimited license leads to misery and disaffection, then limitations placed on desires are likely to quicken, rather than deaden, it. In any case, rationing of some sort is inevitable. The issue is whether it will be collectively managed, or whether it will be imposed by authoritarian means when it is already too late. Quite what forms this collective management should take is, again, an open question, one that can only be resolved practically and experimentally. 

The long, dark night of the end of history has to be grasped as an enormous opportunity. The very oppressive pervasiveness of capitalist realism means that even glimmers of alternative political and economic possibilities can have a disproportionately great effect. The tiniest event can tear a hole in the grey curtain of reaction which has marked the horizons of possibility under capitalist realism. From a situation in which nothing can happen, suddenly anything is possible again. 

In the end, Fisher is able to do little more than to regurgitate old Marxist cliches without saying much about how to make them realities. Perhaps the only solid piece of concrete advice that he has to offer is the suggestion that workers rebel against tedious procedures that only management will notice. And though Fisher’s suggestion that we might be able to redirect disaffection toward more worthy ends is certainly interesting and worth pursuing, it is not clear that, even if this is possible, that we ought to redirect disaffection toward the ends that Fisher has in mind. There is the additional worry that such an approach might lead to a situation wherein, however politically incorrect the turn of phrase might be, the lunatics end up running the asylum, which recent events increasingly suggest is not all that far fetched a proposition Fisher seems able to tell us all day long what is needed, but he can scarcely provide us with details as to what should happen once what is needed is achieved. In this, he betrays the basic condition of the contemporary left. They are like dogs chasing their own tails. They run in circles hopelessly trying to seize the means of production, however, in the off chance they should ever succeed in seizing them, they would find themselves paralyzed, not knowing what to do with it once they had it. 

Unfortunately, the left cannot even live up to Fisher’s modest and uninspiring vision for it. Anyone who has been paying attention to recent event cannot help but find a certain perverse humour in Fisher’s call to abandon “…spectacular politics around (noble) causes like Palestine.” But the situation is far worse than that. Since Fisher wrote Capitalist Realism the condition of the contemporary left has deteriorated significantly. In particular, the left has become addicted to a highly divisive form of identity politics in which diverse groups compete with one another for the status of most oppressed so they might enjoy all of the political capital that comes along with that status. Increasingly leftists are expected to conform to ever more extreme purity tests, risking ostracisation should they fail these tests. Fisher himself recognized the development of these tendencies and addressed them in his essay Exiting the Vampire Castle, which can be found here. He begins, 

This summer, I seriously considered withdrawing from any involvement in politics. Exhausted through overwork, incapable of productive activity, I found myself drifting through social networks, feeling my depression and exhaustion increasing. 

‘Left-wing’ Twitter can often be a miserable, dispiriting one. Earlier this year, there were some high-profile twitterstorms, in which particular left-identifying figures were ‘called out’ and condemned. What these figures had said was sometimes objectionable; but nevertheless, the way in which they were personally vilified and hounded left a horrible residue: the stench of bad conscience and witch-hunting moralism. The reason I didn’t speak out on any of these incidents, I’m ashamed to say, was fear. The bullies were in another part of the playground. I didn’t want to attract their attention to me. 

The open savagery of these exchanges was accompanied by something more  pervasive, and for that reason perhaps more debilitating: an atmosphere of snarky resentment. The most frequent object of this resentment is Owen Jones, and the attacks on Jones – the person most responsible for raising class consciousness in the UK in the last few years – were one of the reasons I was so dejected. If this is what happens to a left-winger who is actually succeeding in taking the struggle to the centre ground of British life, why would anyone want to follow him into the mainstream? Is the only way to avoid this drip-feed of abuse to remain in a position of impotent marginality?

Fisher goes on to say that one of the influences that caused him to shake his disillusionment and engage with politics once again was a stand up show and interview given by the comedian Russell Brand. Now, I really don’t follow this sort of thing and I can’t say I know much about Russell Brand, but I understand that he is, perhaps not the most opportune figure in light of recent events, but hindsight is always 20/20 so, out of fairness, it seems best to leave recent headlines out of this discussion. At any rate, Fisher welcomes Brand saying, “Brand makes people feel good about themselves; whereas the moralising left specialises in making people feel bad, and is not happy until their heads are bent in guilt and self-loathing.” But the optimism Brand inspired in Fisher was quickly spoiled by the complaints of the moralizing left with accusations of sexism which Fisher quickly dispels. However, what Fisher finds even more dismaying is the attacks leveled against Brand’s working class background. 

Brand’s intervention was not a bid for leadership; it was an inspiration, a call to arms. And I for one was inspired. Where a few months before, I would have stayed silent as the PoshLeft moralisers subjected Brand to their kangaroo courts and character assassinations – with ‘evidence’ usually gleaned from the right-wing press, always available to lend a hand – this time I was prepared to take them on. The response to Brand quickly became as significant as the Paxman exchange itself. As Laura Oldfield Ford pointed out, this was a clarifying moment. And one of the things that was clarified for me was the way in which, in recent years, so much of the self-styled ‘left’ has suppressed the question of class. 

Class consciousness is fragile and fleeting. The petit bourgeoisie which dominates the academy and the culture industry has all kinds of subtle deflections and pre-emptions which prevent the topic even coming up, and then, if it does come up, they make one think it is a terrible impertinence, a breach of etiquette, to raise it. I’ve been speaking now at left-wing, anti-capitalist events for years, but I’ve rarely talked – or been asked to talk – about class in public. 

But, once class had re-appeared, it was impossible not to see it everywhere in the response to the Brand affair. Brand was quickly judged and-or questioned by at least three ex-private school people on the left. Others told us that Brand couldn’t really be working class, because he was a millionaire. It’s alarming how many ‘leftists’ seemed to fundamentally agree with the drift behind Paxman’s question: ‘What gives this working class person the authority to speak?’ It’s also alarming, actually distressing, that they seem to think that working class people should remain in poverty, obscurity and impotence lest they lose their ‘authenticity, 

Someone passed me a post written about Brand on Facebook. I don’t know the individual who wrote it, and I wouldn’t wish to name them. What’s important is that the post was symptomatic of a set of snobbish and condescending attitudes that is apparently alright to exhibit while still classifying oneself as left wing. The whole tone was horrifyingly high-handed, as if they were a schoolteacher marking a child’s work, or a psychiatrist assessing a patient. Brand, apparently, is ‘clearly extremely unstable… one bad relationship or career knockback away from collapsing back into drug addiction or worst.’ Although the person never occurs to them that one of the reasons that brand might be ‘unstable’ is just this sort of patronising faux-transcendent ‘assessment’ from the ‘left’ bourgeoisie. There’s also a shocking but revealing aside where the individual casually refers to Brand’s ‘patchy education [abd] the often wince-inducing vocab slips characteristic of the auto-didact’ – which, this individual generously says, ‘I have no problem with at all’ – how very good of them! This isn’t some colonial bureaucrat writing about his attempts to teach some ‘natives’ the English language in the nineteenth century, or a Victorian schoolmaster at some private institution describing a scholarship boy, it’s a ‘leftist’ writing a few weeks ago. 

Where to go from here? It i first of all necessary to identify the features of the discourses and the desires which have led us to this grim and demoralising pass, where class has disappeared, but moralism is everywhere, where solidarity is impossible, but guilt and fear are omnipresent – and not because we are terrorised by the right, but because we have allowed bourgeois modes of subjectivity to contaminate our movement. I think there are two libidinal-discursive configurations which have brought this situation about. They call themselves left wing, but – as the Brand episode has made clear – they are in many ways a sign that the left – defined as an agent in a class struggle – has all but disappeared. 

Fisher’s distress that leftists, who, at least nominally, are consumed with concern for class, are willing to attack someone of working class background for lacking the polished language and grammar of the highly educated elite is not only completely justified and understandable, but, it must be said, is a concern that we should all share whether we would consider ourselves leftists or not. Sophisticated language and impeccable grammar is all well and good and those who have mastered such skills and their artful application certainly should be commended for their accomplishments, but, at the end of the day, such skills amount to little more than surface level ornamentations which tell us little to nothing about the quality of the underlying arguments they dress up. The most vapid and baseless arguments can be concealed behind a veil of beautiful language, while the strongest and truest arguments can be stated in the language of a pauper. Though beautiful language might be necessary for artistic writing, and dexterity with technical terminology might be useful for academic writing, the lack of such ability must not be barriers to entry into discussions about subjects as vitally important to all people as politics, ethics, or theology. There is nothing more condescendingly obstructive and infuriatingly unproductive than derailing a discussion by calling attention to another’s use of the improper form of “there” or for using “which” where proper grammar demands “that”. We must adopt an attitude of extreme charity when approaching discussions about serious topics with others. Rather than vigilantly searching for the slightest slip up in another’s grammar or terminology for a chance to jump down the throats of our interlocutors and embarrass them, we should prefer to be as patient as possible and even help others’ arguments along when possible. We must try to be as understanding as possible when approaching other points of view and try as hard as much as we can to see things from others’ perspectives and when we come upon disagreements that we cannot overlook, we should try to be as gentle as possible in offering corrections.  We must remember, especially in matters of politics, our goal must not be to tear each other down, even if we cannot stand one another, but to come to mutually agreeable arrangements whereby we can avoid the more vile circumstances into which politics can deteriorate. 

That being said, that Fisher attributes his despair over the current state of the left to so-called moralizing leftists might seem to come into conflict with our earlier argument that in Capitalist Realism his despair stems from the impermissibility of moral judgment, but the ascendency of the moralizing left does not fulfill the desire for the sort of moral judgement Fisher has in mind. The moralizing left does not represent a rational, critical approach to morality, but a dogmatic approach. It allows discourse with in an increasingly narrow set of parameters and one risks being forever shunned as an impossibly backward reactionary should they unwittingly slip over the line. Indeed, as the parameters become narrower, even the most dogmatic of the moralizing left are at risk of being found guilty of past statements that now qualify as heresy. We will have much more to say about the dogmas that reign over the moralizing left in our next essay. 

More than this, Fisher keenly recognizes that the moralizing left is not really the left at all, or at least not revolutionary in the sense that Fisher seems to make an ideology properly leftist, but an element of the prevailing liberal capitalist regime that has been dispatched to infiltrate, capture, and incapacitate the true left. He refers to this regime as the Vampires’ Castle. 

The first configuration is what I came to call the Vampires’ Castle. The Vampires’ Castle specialises in propagating guilt. It is driven by a priest’s desire to excommunicate and condemn, an academic-pedant’s desire to be the first to be seen to spot a mistake, and a hipster’s desire to be one of the in-crowd. The danger in attacking the Vampires’ Castle is that it can look as if – and it will do everything it can to reinforce this thought – that one is also attacking the struggles against racism, sexism, heterosexism. But far from being the only legitimate expression of such struggles, the Vampires’ Castle is best understood as a bourgeois-liberal perversion and appropriation of the energy of these movements. The Vampires’ Castle was born the moment when the struggle not to be defined by identitarian categories became the quest to have ‘identities’ recognised by a bourgeois big Other. 

The privilege I certainly enjoy as a white male consists in part in my not being aware of my ethnicity and my gender, and it is a sobering and revelatory experience to occasionally be made aware of these blind-spots. But, rather than seeking a world in which everyone achieves freedom from identitarian classification, the Vampires’ Castle seeks to corral people back into identi-camps, where they are forever defined in the terms set by dominant power, crippled by self-consciousness and isolated by a logic of solipsism which insists that we cannot understand one another unless we belong to the same identity group. 

I’ve noticed a fascinating magical inversion projection-disavowal mechanism whereby the sheer mention of class is now automatically treated as if that means one is trying to downgrade the importance of race and gender. In fact, the exact opposite is the case, as the Vampires’ Castle uses an ultimately liberal understanding of race and gender to obfuscate class. In all of the absurd and traumatic twitterstorms about privilege earlier this year it was noticeable that the discussion of class privilege was entirely absent. The task, as ever, remains the articulation of class, gender and race – but the founding move of the Vampires’ Castle is the dis-articulation of class from other categories. 

The problem that the Vampires’ Castle was set up to solve is this: how do you hold immense wealth and power while also appearing as a victim, marginal and oppositional? The solution was already there – in the Christian Church. So the VC as recourse to all the infernal strategies, dark pathologies and psychological torture instruments Christianity invented, and which Nietzsche described in The Genealogy of Morals. This priesthood of bad conscience, this nest of pious guilt-mongers, is exactly what Nietzsche predicted when he said that something worse than Christianity was already on the way. Now, here it is… 

The Vampires’ Castle feeds on the energy and anxieties and vulnerabilities of young students, but most of all it lives by converting the suffering of particular groups – the more ‘marginal’ the better – into academic capital. The most lauded figures in the Vampires’ Castle are those who have spotted a new market in suffering – those who can find a group more oppressed and subjugated than any previously exploited will find themselves promoted through the ranks very quickly. 

So, the Vampires’ Castle is a sort of tool that the liberal capitalist ascendency uses to subjugate the left and render it impotent in order to prevent any meaningful resistance. It does this by capitalizing on the guilt that leftists feel over the past injustices perpetrated against marginalized groups. This creates an atmosphere wherein it becomes an act of apostasy to criticize those belonging to more marginalized groups than oneself. This means that the more marginalized the group, the less susceptible to criticism they are, resulting in a sort of competition amongst groups for “most marginalized” status so that they might enjoy the political capital it bestows. Likewise, individuals who belong to the greatest number of highly marginalized groups also enjoy increased political capital, incentivizing individuals to check off as many marginalized boxes as they possibly can. But identity based hierarchy is just as ridiculous when it is founded on perceived oppression as it is when it is founded on perceived superiority. The result is a farcically tribal left that is fueled by what can only be described by a mockery of morality. 

To be sure, racism and homophobia are distasteful and unfortunate attitudes and violence on these bases is deplorable and should be punished to the fullest extent of the law. Moreover, it is not at all unreasonable to ask that people, in the interest of civility, listen to the concerns and feelings of those around them and be as accommodating as is possible and reasonable. It is precisely because these demands are reasonable that the strategies of what Fisher calls the Vampires’ Castle are so effective. They draw on very real, difficult facts in order to pull on people’s heart strings, they capitalize on the indwelling guilt that every thinking person must feel from time to time, and they convince people to go to extreme lengths to account for those difficult facts, to the point of abandoning reason entirely. History is overpopulated with injustices, but that a person is a member of a group that has historically been victim to injustices, that mere fact is not sufficient reason to trust that person with authority. Every tradition, ethnic, cultural, religious, or otherwise, has its points of true beauty and its points of shame. When we interact with those of different backgrounds, we should try as much as possible to appreciate those points of beauty that their traditions offer. But we must never use one’s background as grounds for judging the individual until we have become familiar with that individual as the groups that one belongs to can never be an absolute determinant of an individual’s character. While we’re on the subject, how about a celebration of diversity from a figure the moralizing left could hardly be expected to accept as an ally.  

Fisher goes on to describe in greater detail how he understands the Vampires’ Castle to operate, however, as he is still very much under the sway of leftist dogma, as evidenced by his admissions about the guilt of his own background, Fisher himself cannot entirely break free of the Castle and his analysis ultimately falls flat, even going so far as to blame the only viable solution, individualism. We will analyze this phenomena in more detail from a more right wing perspective in the following essay. 

Fisher then goes on to identify a neo-anarchist current as the other primary source of his woes with the contemporary left. We will set this section aside for now, but it seems as good a chance as any for this classic.

In the conclusion, Fisher outlines his basic strategy for combatting the Vampire’s Castle, writing, 

So what can we do now? First of all, it is imperative to reject identitarianism, and to recognise that there are no identities, only desires, interests, and identifications. Part of the importance of the British Cultural Studies project – as revealed so powerfully and so movingly in John Akomfrah’s installation The Unfinished Conversation (currently in Tate Britain) and his film The Stuart Hall Project – was to have resisted identitarian essentialism. Instead of freezing people into chains of already-existing equivalences, the point was to treat any articulation as provisional and plastic. New articulations can always be created. No-one is essentially anything. Sadly, the right act on this insight more effectively than the left does. The bourgeois-identitarian left knows how to propagate guilt and conduct a witch hunt, but it doesn’t know how to make converts. But that, after all, is not the point. The aim is not to popularise a leftist position, or to win people over to it, but to remain in a position of elite superiority, but now with class superiority redoubled by moral superiority too. ‘How dare you talk – it’s we who speak for those who suffer!’ 

But the rejection of identitarianism can only be achieved by the reassertion of class. A left that does not have class at its core can only be 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. 

If this seems like a forbidding and daunting task, it is. But we can start to engage in many prefigurative activities right now. Actually, such activities would go beyond pre-figuration – they could start a virtuous cycle, a self-fulfilling prophecy in which bourgeois modes of subjectivity are dismantled and a new universality starts to build itself. 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. This doesn’t mean, of course, that we must always agree – on the contrary, we must create conditions where disagreement can take place without fear of exclusion and excommunication. 

We need to think very strategically about how to use social media – always remembering that, despite the egalitarianism claimed for social media by capital’s libidinal engineers, that this is currently an enemy territory, dedicated to the reproduction of capital. But this doesn’t mean that we can’t occupy the terrain and start to use it for the purposes of producing class consciousness. We must break out of the ‘debate’ set up by communicative capitalism, in  which capital is endlessly cajoling us to participate, and remember that we are involved in a class struggle. The goal is not to ‘be’ an activist, but to aid the working class to activate – and transform – itself. Outside the Vampires’ Castle, anything is possible. 

So, in the end, Fisher’s solution to the scourge of identitarianism is to retreat into the more familiar and orthodox Marxist territory of class struggle. But is this not just another form of identitarianism? Another form of collectivism which, instead of awarding political capital to those who have suffered oppression on the basis of racial, sexual, and other marginalized identities, awards political capital to those who can claim membership in that most encompassing of all marginalized groups, the working class? Though Fisher’s strategy of reinvigorating working class consciousness over and above other sorts of identitarian consciousness is, to be sure, a promising means of overcoming the divisive effects these other sorts of consciousness have had on the left, in the long run, class consciousness is subject to similar limitations as these other forms of collectivism and has the potential to be even more divisive and corrosive to society. In the first place, it is even more difficult to define class than it is to define race, gender, sexuality, or similar identity categories. Who exactly is a member of the working class? Fisher’s own source of hope, Russell Brand, brings this question immediately to light. Can a celebrity millionaire comedian really claim to be a member of the working class? If so, does that mean, once a member of the working class always a member of the working class? But then, wouldn’t that mean that a person born to a working class family who worked their way up to be, say, the CEO of some major corporation, or a successful banker, or some other such position still be able to claim working class status? If a millionaire comedian is still working class, why not a millionaire who has made their fortune in these other sorts of fields? And if millionaires can still be regarded as working class, why not billionaires? But if millionaires and billionaires can be regarded as working class, then surely the notion that the working class is inherently marginalized and oppressed must be thrown out the window entirely, rendering it entirely useless for Fisher’s purposes. But the problems do not end here. Even if we could come up with some definition of working class that limits it to people of a more intuitive socio-economic status, that does not mean that we will necessarily find any common interests or reasons for solidarity amongst the people who fit that definition. For instance, a working class Christian might find themselves having many more interests in common with a wealthy Christian than they do with a working class atheist and vice versa. Though a Marxist might accuse such people of suffering from false consciousness, there is no more reason to think that Christian or atheist consciousness is false than there is to think that it is, in fact, class consciousness that is false. But there is an even bigger problem for class consciousness in that even if we could do away with every sort of racial, sexual, and other such identitarian consciousnesses, we would still not be left with a perfectly unified working class, but one divided into a number of other classes. I come from a solidly working class background. My father was a truck driver and my mother works in food service. My father pointed out that there was a distinction between those who did manual labor for a living, so-called blue collar workers, and those who worked in less physically demanding jobs, so-called white collar workers, even if both sorts of workers ultimately made similar amounts of money (Does anyone doubt Merle had anything besides manual labor when he wrote this one.). He insisted that white collar culture is much different than blue collar culture and that he sensed a subtle heir of superiority on the part of white collar workers toward blue collar workers. Having grown up and found myself employed in what would typically be considered white collar work, I have found that my father’s suspicions were not all that far off. Moreover, it is certainly the case that blue collar and white collar workers have substantially different interests. For instance, hard manual labor takes a substantial toll on the body not experienced by those engaged in less physically demanding jobs. The interests of construction workers are not necessarily the interests of office workers, nor are the interests of either necessarily the interests of nurses or retail workers. To think that the mere fact that people earn incomes in roughly the same ballpark as one another is enough to unite them to overthrow the system, much less that they will be able to create a new and better system afterwards, is simply naive. Fisher would have done well to heed his own wisdom; “no-one is essentially anything,” least of all are they essentially working class. 

What is needed is not to judge and divide people into groups based on characteristics like race, gender, religion, or class, but to treat people as individuals. That a person falls into one of these categories or another might tell us something or another about the individual in question, but we must understand that these categories only offer us narrow windows through which to see others, and to truly know another individual, we must take that individual as a whole, taking account of all of the peculiarities and particularities that make that person a truly unique individual. We must not fall into the fatal trap of assuming that the rich are inherently evil or that the poor are inherently virtuous. Nor should we presume that simply because one person is poor and another rich that their interests must be hopelessly irreconcilable. Rich and poor alike have good reasons for supporting principles such as property rights, free trade, and free association. What is needed is to overcome the contentious and unproductive divisions between various religious, racial, gender, and class identities, and to, instead, champion a genuine, all encompassing human identity by rallying around the ideals of human freedom and which strives to realize the perfection of the human race as a whole. 

At any rate, Fisher’s fellow leftists do not yet seem to have taken his pleas to heart. He received considerable bitter backlash from the very Vampires’ Castle his essay was meant to attack. And in recent years, the identitarian frenzy of the left has only been amplified. 

Thus concludes our preliminary examination of the desolation that permeates the contemporary left. It should be clear at this point that the left, crippled by the destructive force of its own ideology, is without momentum and is not currently in a position to offer viable solutions to the current circumstances in which we find ourselves without risking considerable damage. When we return, we will begin our examination of the right, where we shall discover a resurgent intellectual tradition that deserves serious consideration. Though we will find that the right’s solutions to our current problems still leave much to be desired, we shall also see that the insights of right wing thinkers shed considerable useful light on our current situation. To begin, we will pick up where we left off and consider how the right understands the phenomena that Fisher attributes to the Vampires’ Castle.