Mark Fisher Author

[Lourdes Horace]

In Britain, the sense of entropy had been encouraged by the political misdeeds of the presiding New Labour government. After coming to power in 1997, this centrist administration had spent its first term in government (1997-2001) triangulating between neoconservatism (tough talk on immigration and benefits claimants, continued privatisation of public amenities, fawning support for big business) and some genuinely radical reforms, most notably in foreign policy (such as the referendums for Scottish and Welsh devolution in 1997 and the Good Friday Agreement for Northern Ireland in 1998). However, by 2003, with the onset of the Iraq War, New Labour had become a typical neoliberal proposition in the classic Reaganite-Thatcherite mould.

As privatisation reforms in the NHS continued, and as the Blair government raised the university tuition fees it had introduced in 1998, there was a strong sense of decline in British culture, especially among younger people. But it was one obscured by a housing-market bubble and a seemingly robust economy that guaranteed a decent standard of living for many older professionals (though not those in the increasingly besieged public sector). The mass-media expression of this zeitgeist was a glut of ultra-derivative guitar bands such as Kaiser Chiefs, Razorlight and the Zutons, and a venal celebrity culture epitomised by exploitative TV shows like Big Brother. It felt as though we were trapped inside an endlessly reloading cycle of late-capitalist tawdriness, with no counterculture to offer even a modicum of friction, let alone relief.

This analysis got to the heart of why 21st-century youth culture had ground to a halt. In a historical period where the suppression of personal freedom and fulfilment was seen as the ultimate evil, why did young people feel so unfulfilled and so lacking in vitality?

With the British protests leading into the far more momentous global eruptions of 2011 (the Arab Spring, Occupy Wall Street, the Spanish Indignados movement, the anti-austerity protests in Athens), it became increasingly apparent that Capitalist Realism was one of the manifestos of choice for those involved in the radical outbursts of the early 2010s. As Fisher had written in his stirring peroration to the book:

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.

While leftist ideas and attitudes are far more influential and more frequently articulated now than they were in the late Noughties, the call for a revival of protest and activism by the Capitalist Realism generation has not yet generated any lasting radical outcomes. Fascism and the far right are resurgent, raising the possibility of a capitalist collapse that will lead to the triumph of militarism and authoritarianism rather than any humane egalitarian overhaul.

Throughout his career, Fisher rallied against alarming political events while patrolling the current state of popular culture. Whether essaying about the significance of English football, glam rock, or The Hunger Games film trilogy, he wrestled with principles deeper than aesthetics. Fisher never stooped to suckle the masses; nor did he fluff the pillows of academics. Like the gleaming guillotines of the French Revolution, he spared nothing which is bolstered by the tyrannies of tradition or authority.

Fisher embodied the pants-leg-pulling wonder of a child: the pursuit of the endless why; the joy of negating what is in order to make room for what could be. Rather than complicating his legacy, these complexities spark hidden depth inside his character. Arguing for sanity in a world tossed to the sharks of stockbrokers and career politicians, k-punk insinuates itself into our lives with its contagious dissent. And there Fisher waits: ready to infect another subject with his peculiar hope. Before we know it, we, too, have been activated.

For the sake of concision, the two-hour Skype session with Reynolds was transcribed and edited down to three questions. Conversely, after being presented with ten questions via email, Ambrose answered two questions before becoming predisposed. I thank them both for their participation. My warm condolences to those who knew Mark Fisher both on- and off-line. The world has lost a strikingly original mind.

I finally got to meet and become friends with Mark around 2005 through my partner (now wife) who was one of a group of bloggers working and in dialogue with him during the early days of the k-punk blog. Her blog (now defunct) was called Glueboot. My first impression of Mark was that as well as being all of the things you might imagine he would be from reading his blog, he was also quite shy, nervous, and pessimistic.

One of our first conversations concerned the absolute vacuity of current popular music, not music per se, but the lack of genuine novelty, strangeness and alternative expression in current popular culture. Both of us had shared touchstones of such things in our youth (we were exactly the same age), where singularly strange alternatives became part of the mainstream in the 1970s and 1980s. We talked about how the conditions of possibility for such occurrences had been eroded and evacuated by capitalist realism.

In the years until his death, we became very good friends and spent a lot of time with him, his wife Zoe, and his young son George when they moved to Suffolk. I would have to say that our relationship was not that of serious political or philosophical interlocutors, although we were definitely on the same page when it came to many of those things. Rather, we spent most of our time together talking about our mutual love of certain films, music, literature, and television.

I remember the first time I got to visit him in Suffolk we spent a lot of the time listening and talking about his collection of Japan, a band I had been a massive fan of during my school days and no one else I knew at the time cared for, watching vintage episodes of Doctor Who (Troughton and Pertwee era), and a couple of horror films (The Omen and Night of the Demon). Such mutual enthusiasms marked much of how I would characterise our subsequent relationship.

Mark was a dynamic person, continually changing alongside changing times. How do you feel that he progressed, either as a person or as a writer, throughout the time that you knew him? Can you recall any moments of transformation, any critical junctures during the development of his thought?

(i) One of the most important early catalysts was his involvement and collaboration with the CCRU at the University of Warwick in the 1990s. I think this provided him with a first liberation in terms of theory and practice, and a formative example of working in highly productive forms of collaboration.

(vii) Protracted periods of unemployment, with Mark supporting his family with freelance writing for publications such as The Wire. The severe discipline of having to write for such a variety of different outlets on an eclectic range of issues refined his writing even further.

In addition to these nodes, I also remember several key discoveries that Mark made during the time that I knew him, some of which he wrote about and clearly exhibited the way in which they had influenced him, others not. These include the work of Christopher Priest, David Peace, Burial, Seaford Mods, David Smail, Andy Beckett, Columbo (the TV series), The Hunger Games (film series) and Russell Brand. These discoveries appeared to serve the same catalysing function as many of his early influences such as Joy Division, the Fall, Burroughs, Ballard, and Scritti Politti.

But some years later, nearer the end of his life, Mark and I had an email exchange about Gerard Manley Hopkins, one of the great 19th century poets of the English countryside, who wrote ecstatic poems about kingfishers and The Windhover. A devout Christian, but a worshipper of nature, and in that sense a true Romantic pantheist. So, Mark and I had a lovely exchange about how much we both loved Gerard Manley Hopkins.

It leaves me wondering, is the collective not a collection of individuals? In a way, we see evidence of this reevaluation now in a culture buzzing around the reemergence of the individual within society. We see this reflected generally in the rise of popularity of self-help books. And specifically, in the rise of people with celebrity status like Jordan Peterson, who promote self-improvement practices to address an alleged crisis of meaning.

When Mark was doing k-punk, he was very into the idea of networks. He loved the idea of the blog circuit as a network and k-punk being a node in the circuit of music and popular culture blogs, but also a node in a separate circuit of theory and philosophy blogs. He would go through these rhythms of depression and unproductiveness and then being hyper-productive, churning out writing that pulsated with manic optimism.

Fisher's book on Capitalist Realism remains a popular reference point for many would be anti-capitalists in the UK. As such, we have decided to translate this new review from our comrades in Italy, where the book has only recently been published. See also our reviews of Inventing the Future: Postcapitalism and a World Without Work and Postcapitalism: A Guide to Our Future by authors from a similar milieu.

Getting to the point, from a revolutionary point of view, the text makes some interesting observations but also contains some remarkable weaknesses. We will try to show both by retracing the author's narrative of "capitalist realism" following him chapter by chapter.

The film The Children of Men serves to launch a reflection about totalitarianism which is still on the increase today despite, and even through, the persistence of the democratic form: the authoritarian measures that are everywhere in place could have been implemented within a political structure that remains, notionally, democratic.

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