Mark Fisher
Realismo capitalista

What is the difference between post-Fordism and Fordism? Well, it's like comparing the criminals in Heat to those in The Godfather. A gang without roots or ties, instead of the old-fashioned family with its traditions and values.

I stumbled upon this book by chance while browsing the bookstore in Milan Central Station, waiting for my train to Naples. I was drawn to it right from the cover, a beautiful work by Jon Rafman featuring waste, cigarette butts, and PC keyboards thrown into a twilight and primordial nature.

A fundamental essay on late capitalism, which in Italy was published by a small publishing house only in 2018, a year after the author's suicide and nine years after the first publication of the volume. It explains the perpetual sunset of the capitalist system, starting from the premise that “it's easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism.” And it does so without using a single technical term, rather employing musical metaphors and drawing heavily from the cinematic imagination.

It's not a book about economics, far from it. It talks about us, in all the degenerations we live as normal, but are not normal, rather the result of the ossification of a system narrated as inevitable when it is not. Surgical is the definition of some socio-cultural phenomena that we have seen and see every day, but perhaps underestimate.

Particularly striking is his vision of the neuroses of today's man: mental illness, depression, psychosis that are soaring but are narrated as individual cases, while Fisher identifies them as diseases of a system that drives stress to a frenzy. But the system is not questioned, and if you can't handle the stress, it's your fault. You're the weak one.

And so the bureaucracy of control and self-control (in school, for example, Fisher taught) becomes an empty practice, and the tension of the controlled ends up focusing more on being suitable for control than on truly doing their job well. Here too, the perfect example is teachers, but there are many others.

Brilliant is the reading of countercultures: capitalism is invincible because it engulfs everything and transforms everything into an object to barter. Even the work of a protester (he cites Kurt Cobain) becomes fashion, a catchphrase, and is immediately defused of its corrosive potential.

Heartbreaking is the analysis of parental figures, now incapable of giving children a perspective that is different from lazy permissive hedonism. And then they might ask teachers to give them the values they themselves have not been able to instill in their children.

Fisher wants to challenge the idea that capitalism is no longer debatable (he cites Thatcher's words in front of striking miners in the eighties) but perhaps this essay - although brilliant - manages only to describe the paradox without having a real solution. It sounds more like a requiem for the socio-economic and cultural evolution of Western man. Proof of this is the part dedicated to the 2008 financial crisis: “After the bank bailout, neoliberalism found itself discredited. This does not mean that neoliberalism has disappeared overnight: on the contrary, its assumptions continue to dominate economic policy, but they no longer do so as an ingredient of an ideological project driven by confidence in its future prospects, but rather as a kind of inertial fallback, a walking dead” (p. 148).

Heavy and very true words. Words that in 2009 had not yet fully reckoned with other degenerations, such as those linked to social media and the web, which are wisely alluded to in advance, speaking, for example, of the narcissism of Facebook and the consequent collapse of the cultural television offering. Besides this, the book explains very well the emptying of any ideological and value content of the economic system. Making money to make money, without roots, because we don't know how to do anything else. Because we have been told that's how it is. That everything has a price, a market value.

Today, ten years later, these truths are glaring in the deep crisis of the European left and, in general, in the impossibility of providing a new reading, different from the purely capitalist and liberal one. Which is associated with a conservatism that Fisher did not consider a necessary condition for Capital, but which has had free rein thanks to the failure (this is my opinion) of social democracies to provide an interpretation - and thus an alternative - to the late, decaying capitalism we are experiencing.