Beyond the Mirror of Capitalist Realism

Fisher’s most famous work remains Capitalist Realism. It’s a book that describes the flat, futureless system we’re locked up in; a period of cultural stagnation and austerity coupled with the ever-present suspicion that the world will soon come to an end.

Fisher describes capitalist realism as an artificially constructed worldview that traps us in a depressive cycle. The cycle sustains itself through a paradox: a pervasive sense of doom and foreboding actually reinforces the status quo. According to Fisher, this pessimistic way of seeing is a strategic development of neoliberal capitalism. It’s a system that ensures that we cannot think outside its confines, no matter how hard we try. Even if we take off the They Live ideology glasses, there’s another set of They Live ideology glasses still on our face, which we can’t even detect. Even when we think we are escaping the Matrix with the red pill, we’re simply transitioning into another room of the Matrix labeled “the real world.” This eerie, Escher-like doubling is all part of the haunting, and by necessity, we have to use fiction to even talk about it.

Whereas previous generations believed in some sort of ideological project of the present — aimed at building a better future — capitalist realism is fully defined by capitalism, which brings the short term to the fore, erasing any future where capitalism is absent. It’s either more capitalism, or the end of the world. There is no alternative.

This condition developed gradually over decades, creating widespread paralysis through atomization. But in Acid Communism, Fisher sought to invert the power of this system, flipping Goliath on his head: “Instead of seeking to overcome capital, we should focus on what capital must always obstruct: the collective capacity to produce, care, and enjoy . . . far from being about ‘wealth creation,’ capital necessarily and always blocks the production of common wealth.”

For both Fisher and his intellectual heroes like Fredric Jameson, the distance between the world that could be free and what we have now is a measurable terrain if we use metaphors and language created in fiction — especially science fiction. In Acid Communism, however, Fisher also pointed to concrete, historical ways of seeing: the effervescent proliferation of experiments in democratic socialism and libertarian communism that flourished in the 1960s.

The 1960s counterculture was created by material conditions — Fisher uses an example from the memoir of Danny Baker, a radio DJ recalling a family vacation in 1966. Baker’s parents drive the family to the beach in an affordable consumer automobile, using free time away from work thanks to the previous generation’s hard-won labor rights. Out on the sand with a view of the surf, the technology of an appliance-sized transistor radio makes it possible to listen to the Kinks, and the Beatles, who are singing about dreaming, perception, and the way the rules of the world present themselves as unbreakable, but aren’t. Reality is psychedelic, malleable, in a constant state of flux, and if everyone decided something should stop, or something else should start, then our collective desire — our willing of a future — is a species-wide unstoppable force.

For Fisher, this daydreaming is not a waste; it’s the logical acknowledgment of a stone-cold fact: this collective capacity was physically demonstrated, to horrifying effect, in the world wars.

Haunted by the Scarcity Canard

Fisher points to Baker’s career in public broadcasting as a part of this postwar evolution in the public sphere. In radio and television, working-class perspectives proliferated, especially when mobilized government programs paid for Western culture that could be loaded up and shot at enemies like ammunition, rattling the bodies of both European fascism and Soviet communism.

Programs like the New Deal, the GI Bill, or the UK’s vast program of counsel housing showcased Western governments not just as pillars of capitalist values but also as architects of  quasi-communistic structures. Initiatives like the Works Progress Administration or the military itself demonstrated state capacity for collective organization on a mass scale.

The postwar boom lifted millions of regular (predominantly white) people into new middle-class lives typified by safety, social dignity, consumerism, creative opportunity, and rest. Advances in automation, building materials, and agriculture supported this transformation, which proved that governments could create powerful systems of public good overnight. By the 1960s, the children of those who had demonstrated this collective power dreamed of applying that capacity on a global scale, regardless of race, gender, and nationality.

Instead, we got nothing but scarcity.

In Acid Communism — a title that winks at our need to re-aestheticize everyday life, elevate our consciousness, and see through the paper tiger of capitalist realism — Fisher points to scarcity and artificial restriction as the primary generator of wealth for those in charge of the postwar order.

Inflation was the buzzword of the 2024 election, which was due in part to real scarcity — as were the various supply chain crisis during the pandemic, which made the richest Americans 40 percent richer. But corporations have also been price-gouging without consequence, creating a form of artificial scarcity that erodes the value of pay increases through inflation. Fisher identifies this pattern as a defining feature of neoliberal capitalism: “A system that generates artificial scarcity in order to produce real scarcity; a system that produces real scarcity in order to generate artificial scarcity.”

Take Blackstone, which owns a third of US housing stock: they can create scarcity and set prices. Or consider the degradation of topsoil by pesticides, which benefits companies like Monsanto — they profit from selling the pesticides and can then roll out genetically modified foods as a solution to the damage. This cyclical logic perpetuates a system ostensibly designed for wealth creation but, in reality, obstructs the production of common wealth. Resources are withheld and labor’s value is siphoned away. A system capable of satisfying everyone’s needs, shelter, food, medical care, a life free of meaningless work — the provisions of Red Plenty — is deliberately thwarted.

For Fisher, this is the materialist core of the counterculture. The leftover hippie detritus — peace signs, leather vests, the era’s music — are haunted remnants of a deeper, unrealized potential. Fisher despised hippies and their lionizing of drug use, criticizing their “hedonic infantilism” as a reinforcement of capitalist realism, rather than a rebellion against it. But still, Fisher held to the “psychedelic” dream of emancipation, a vision of collective capacity and possibility.

As we confront the haunting presence of capitalist realism — clocking into work with Donald Trump at the helm again, enduring rising temperatures as the world careens toward the 1.5-degree Celsius mark, facing increasingly catastrophic weather, or listening to the latest story of dithering cruelty committed by the ruling class — it’s important to recognize that the end of the world is wielded as a constant threat to maintain the status quo. The endless reptation of terms like “record-breaking temperatures” and “once-in-a-lifetime rainfall” and “Hillary Clinton offers her advice” inspires dread, but it clearly does not have to be this way.

What would “psychedelic reason” sound like? How could psychedelic consciousness and class consciousness converge to imagine a world beyond capitalist realism?

Punching Out in the Desert of the Real

As David Graeber documented in Bullshit Jobs, every day, our system of work inflicts a moral and spiritual “scar” across “our collective soul.” In 1930, Graeber writes, the economist John Maynard Keynes predicted that the United States and UK would have a fifteen-hour workweek by the year 2000. “Instead, technology has been marshaled, if anything, to figure out ways to make us all work more. In order to achieve this, jobs have had to be created that are, effectively, pointless.”

Graeber points to the bloat of the administrative sector, the astronomical growth of financial services, marketing, corporate law, human resources, and public relations consulting as examples of professions whose practitioners confess that they, themselves, don’t believe they are contributing to society. We all know it’s bullshit. Many of us go to work for the paycheck, count down the hours, then use our limited free time for the self-soothing repair necessary to repeat the cycle tomorrow.

This was my experience of most jobs, and it creates a day-after-day cycle of “lash and balm,” spreading an epidemic of depression, substance abuse, and a core feeling of individual meaninglessness despite adequate or good financial compensation. It is a result of the vision of abundance deferred — we are haunted by dreams of Red Plenty; of collective possibilities that are seemingly out of reach. But hints as to how to rise above it emerge in thinkers like Fisher. In Acid Communism, he captures this malaise in a perspective that steps outside the grind of modern life:

The anxiety-dream toil of everyday life from a perspective that floated alongside, above or beyond it: whether it was the busy street glimpsed from the high window of a late sleeper, whose bed becomes a gently idling rowing boat; the fog and frost of a Monday morning abjured from a sunny Sunday Afternoon that does not need to end; or the urgencies of business airily disdained from the eyrie of a meandering aristocratic pile, now occupied by working-class dreamers who will never clock on again.

Fisher’s work, including his k-punk blog, was a staple of the early-aughts blogosphere, before that space was subsumed by the corporate enclosures of online media. The internet, which could have remained a vast and powerful public information space, has been hijacked by the stupidest and saddest people alive who see its potential only as a tool for endless profit. Artificial intelligence is enshittifying our language, art, and our general understanding of the world while technological advancement is increasingly synonymous with mass unemployment, surveillance, and harvesting labor through endless scrolling and hearting posts. In the background, Florida sinks and new epidemics and contaminations proliferate.

In a post-1.5-degree-Celsius world, shouldn’t the ruins of abandoned industries house something better? A public media sphere? Art galleries, concert venues, theatres, stadiums, and sports fields? What if more people spent their day learning lines in a play, designing cloths, or attending the play itself. What if people could do nothing for long enough to rediscover what kind of work we’d actually find satisfying if we were completely, 100 percent, bored.

Utopian thinking often signals unseriousness, especially on the Left, where fears of naivety abound. But Fisher’s Acid Communism reminds us that imagining “the way things could be” is a vital tonic against despair: “Images of gratification . . . would destroy the society that suppresses it.”

Fisher draws on Herbert Marcuse’s ideas about why art does not have the power to depict utopia or “true gratification.” Fisher says art can only “measure our distance” between today and the possibility of Red Plenty — in the desert of capitalist realism, depicting the utopian would flood the barren landscape in which the image was suppressed. This process would not be a result of violence, but gratification: safety, prosperity, plenty, real growth; a torrent of public goods.

In Capitalist Realism, Fisher famously analyzed the 2006 film Children of Men — a science fiction story about the world facing a sterility epidemic. The inability to conceive children nearly destroys humanity, elementary schools are hauntingly empty, and void of children’s voices. The film follows the mother and guardian of the first child born in decades — it’s a powerful messiah narrative, offering a vision of spiritual renewal in a dystopia that looks more and more like our world.

Fisher was ahead of his time, and felt more than his fair share of the world’s pain. He sought renewal himself in Acid Communism, and there are hints in his final lectures collected in Postcapitalist Desire, edited by Matt Colquhoun. Many of us wish the project had not been left unfinished. But, that’s our job — Fisher’s thought has influenced many, and the torch has been carried on in books like Inventing the Future: Postcapitalism and a World Without Work and After Work: A History of the Home and the Fight for Free Time.

One of the key themes in Acid Communism concerns the “aestheticization of everyday life” — a way of squinting at the mundane, trying to see it as radically other. This isn’t magical thinking, like The Secret, but a tool to combat defeatism. By reenchanting the everyday, we can spot glimpses of utopia — of Red Plenty — and resist the suffocating inevitability of the present. Fisher challenged us to view global human dignity as a force that must be restrained, tied down, and sedated in order to keep the current system intact. How do we push further into the realm of psychedelic reason? Fisher started us off, asking, “What if the success of neoliberalism was not an indication of the inevitability of capitalism, but a testament to the scale of the threat posed by the specter of a society which could be free.”