Lecture with Mark Fisher:
Blog K-punk about culture, music, literature. Cybernetic Culture Research Unit. Author of Capitalist Realism.
Define capitalist realism? Difficult, it's diffuse. Book partly written to escape the premises we live with. Capitalist realism, "There is no alternative" (Thatcher) to capitalism. The claim has gone from a moral (political) claim to an ontological claim. We can't live in any other way. Capitalist realism is also an attitude to the world. We'd like things to be different from capitalism, but they aren't. Capitalist realism doesn't presuppose that people like capitalism, only that they don't thing capitalism is escapable. The can be, and probably is, a widespread ressentiment against capitalism. Capitalist realism is a psychic structure risen inside of capitalism. 

How did it rise? The ritualistic and linguistic parts of capitalism. Increasingly, we're required to talk about what we do (especially in public service) in terms of business. As we are forced to act businessy. Naturalizing business and business thinking. Fordism: Social security traded for being really bored all your working life. The shift to post-fordism:
Why? Created partly by the fordisms ability to organize workers into unions. Same confined space. Same label. Same interests. 
How? Jobs demanded "flexibility". Short contracts. Outsourcing. Neo-liberalisms expasion used the left freedom wave in the sixties. Promised freedom and claimed the unions was top-down, authoritarian and bureaucratic organisations. The left never recovered.

Instead of the visible and external stuggle in fordism, the neo-liberal politics internalized the conflict among the workers, between those who identified as workers and those who identified as capitalists. We expect less and less from politics. Less and less is taken for granted. Culture plays a part in this. There's a widespread populism noone likes. Noone expects good politics. When your rights as a worker is not taken for granted, you see them as a favor, "Yes, okay, I'll work for less money."

## NOTE: The fact that people laugh with Fisher when he portraits his dystopian view of capitalist realism could be a sign of it's existance.

'If you're not a entrepreneur, it's your fault you're poor. You could have worked harder. If you only worked harder, you could be better off.' This is a regularly expressed platitude in (British) TV, like "Fairy God Mother". The outsourcing and privatisation of employment services is a part of making people expect less.

Coach -> Unemployed depressed: "Pull your socks up, you can get out of this, only you can help yourself". Dangerous, makes the unemployed blame himself/herself. When all problems become individual problems, people don't depend on politics or the trade unions, they only depend on themselves. We trade political critique and political struggle for therapy. "Writing capitalist realism was a way of getting out of depression". **Political anger is not self-pathological**. "When I was off work for depression, noone in management cared. When I started being politicaly active and active in the union, people started thinking I was mad."

Without anti-depressants, the intensification of our society and the increased stress would not have been livable. Drugs help us handle the intensification. Drugs is a great tool for capitalism. You work for money, become stressed, work harder to afford the drugs. Marx' critique against religion is important when understanding drugs. **Instead of religion being the opium of the people, people is the opium for the people**. Drugs don't cure your depression, they only make you become happy about being depressed.

The crisis in 2008-2009 was not the destruction of capitalism but the reorganization of capitalism. No alternative agent to capitalism can take advantage of the losses in capitalism. Only different forms of capitalism. Capitalism has infiltrated and absorbed all institutional assumptions in politics. There's no political space for alternatives.

We all accepted Fukuyamas thesis, that nothing would change and everything would be boring. The end of history is not the dogma anymore. We don't think communism is possible, but we don't think capitalism is possible either. We don't know what's going to happen. We expect nothing, and we think nothing is probably in the future. Capitalism has never in our lives been so weak, but communism isn't strong either. This is a different capitalist realism. We can no longer claim that the age of revolutions is over. We can no longer claim that everyone is and will be satisfied with the system. The right wing has partly lost it's strong hold of modernism.

## NOTE. Modernization? What kind? The opposite of post-modernization or just contemporarization?

Neoliberalism works by claiming: Communism is boring, generic and old, capitalism is shiny and contemporary. Does that claim still work? Really? Capitalism is generic! Starbucks and McDonalds is generic. We criticize large consequences of capitalism with the same way people used to criticize communism. "You want generic and impersonal? We can do it better than capitalism!".

We need to convert depression into anger. This has been succesfull especially among young people; student union uprisings and London riots. Depression is created by capitalism. We need to convert it into anger against capitalism. We need to claim that we can have a succesfull anti-authoritarian radical left. The sixties might have lead to neo-liberalism, but that's not what anyone wanted.

Discussion between Samira Ariadad and Mark Fisher:
When post-modernism is naturalized, that is when capitalist realism becomes a fact. For a culture that pushes values like innovation, newness, progress, we are an extremely homogenous and generic culture. How? We devote so much energy to working, we have no time for culture. Social pressure and real pressure to not "waste time". We must always be productive. We must always be our own bosses. This logic is a result of neo-liberalism. As a precarious, you never have free time, you only have time you need to invest in productivity.

## NOTE: We need a larger aesthetical analysis of the "social" internet and how we spend time on it. Also read: "Transportåldern" in "Trafikmaktordningen". Write: "Kommunikationsåldern". Also: Decapitalize internet. Deworkify internet. Fight arbetslinjen in the internet. => Save internet.

We need to realize that we live in a capitalist dystopia. It's already here. We always check our inbox. We always update our statuses to improve our personal trademark. Communism is achieved by technology and progress. But we NEED to have a critical perspective on new technology. Else, we surrender it to the capital. Boredom is a luxury we lost with smartphones. Now, we are always productive. Internet produces a kind of seemless, insomniac fascination of information. Entertaining technology fills the existential problem boredom forced. Now, we don't have to think about the existential problems.

Capitalism tells us to join the debate, and we agree. Why do we agree? Why does capitalism ask us to join the debate? Because it makes us spend time on debate. The opposite of debate isn't authoritarian control, it's participating in projects. Participating in projects isn't much about opinions. When you're on the internet, you're always chasing time. When you go to Twitter, you're always catching up on the timeline. You're always behind the time.

Still, you have to be dialectic about things like Twitter. Yes, they take you away from boredom and force you into a capital lifestyle. But Twitter also enables us to constitute a kind of counter-media. This is proved in things like the London riots and the Murdoch scandal.

We can afford to dream about the political future in any way, even quite science fiction-ways. Because they're as probably to exist as any systems nowadays.

Questions from audience:
Post-fordism creates a emptyness in our work time. We don't need eight hours to do our job. Boredom arises at work. We fill the boredom with facebooking.

Wal-Mart/Tesco is capitalist utopia. What do people want from supermarkets? Everyone hates Wal-Mart and Tesco. Still, everyone goes to Wal-Mart and Tesco. Depersonalization is a good quality when buying things. But depersonalization is a attribute we hate. Depersonalized and generic non-places is good for the buyer and seller, but harmful for the person. It limits the creativity and imagination.
People say they hate the management and control they think communism is about, but then they pay money to experience the same attributes at Disneyland and shopping malls.

We need to take back authority, management and bureaucracy. Neo-liberalism works by claiming that these attributes are history, belonging to stalinism. These things are not bad in themselves, except in a neo-liberal logic. How can we have something like a national health service without bureaucracy? The precariat makes it impossible to take some time off from work to be bored or do projects. Management and structure give us the stability to take some time of and be unproductive.

**Revolutionism and reformism isn't a useful dicotomy anymore. You need a revolution to accomplish a small reform.**

Commodification of familiarity and intimacy is a result of the post-fordist logic, where the production of services has become more important than the production of goods. The top of the commodification of intimacy is reality-TV. Emotion has become the currency of culture. Tabloids are high-priced in this currency. *Tabloids are sensationalizing of commodified intimacy*. We've gotten "emotional fast food".

Capitalism will self-destruct. The problem is that the radical left wing need to pick up the ball. If not, the radical right wing will. (Also read: Fuck facket forever, Osynliga partiet och CUF). How do we prevent this? Right wing makes it a racist question. "Increase the social system" becomes "The immigrants take over our social system, we need to decrease immigration to protect the social system".

Few people are actually ontologically racist, they take on racist politics because of the right wing rhethorics. We need to provide a different political frame. We need to say "no, the problem is neo-liberalism, not immigration".