Name: It seems there's something I should know // Well I ought to leave but the rain it never stops // And I've no particular place to go
Item: Capitalist Realism
Author: spudm0de

Capitalist Realism →

by Mark Fisher, MARK FISHER

It seems there's something I should know // Well I ought to leave but the rain it never stops // And I've no particular place to go

spudm0de

Nov 03, 2024

This and Infinite Jest are the two most foundational texts I read in my early 20s (and I don't really care how much of a meme that makes me). It's depressing but also kind of awesome how both of these books' critiques and diagnoses of our cultural maladies are evergreen despite how much has 'changed' (in terms of attack vectors on our time, attention spans, ability to lead meaningful lives). This book named and outlined so many things I didn't have the intelligence to name and outline myself, but had always sort of thought, like:

The current ruling ontology denies any possibility of a social causation of mental illness. The chemico-biologization of mental illness is of course strictly commensurate with its depoliticization. Considering mental illness an individual chemico-biological problem has enormous benefits for capitalism. First, it reinforces Capital’s drive towards atomistic individualization (you are sick because of your brain chemistry). Second, it provides an enormously lucrative market in which multinational pharmaceutical companies can peddle their pharmaceuticals (we can cure you with our SSRIs). It goes without saying that all mental illnesses are neurologically instantiated, but this says nothing about their causation. If it is true, for instance, that depression is constituted by low serotonin levels, what still needs to be explained is why particular individuals have low levels of serotonin. This requires a social and political explanation; and the task of repoliticizing mental illness is an urgent one if the left wants to challenge capitalist realism.

I've softened from the 'militant' lefty I was around the time I read CR (cue that chain-email-from-your-mom quote about moving rightward on the political spectrum as you get older that's for some reason misattributed to Churchill [interesting deep-dive on the etiology here]), but hold just as high of an opinion of it now as I did upon first reading.

CR helped me understand the 'rules of the game' so to speak and while, at the time, this was horribly demoralizing (see: obits for the authors of both texts mentioned at the beginning of this review), it's been key in leading a life with more agency, more confidence, more resolve.