Summary

Capitalist Realism views capitalism as the only viable political and economic system, making alternatives seem unimaginable and creating a sense of inevitability. Anti-capitalist movements are dismissed, and suffering like poverty and war is accepted as inevitable. Capitalism’s unsustainable growth leads to mental health privatization and bureaucratic inefficiencies. Mental health problems are wrongly seen as individual, not systemic, reflecting a broader overemphasis on individual responsibility over systemic issues, undermining collective action needed to address these issues.

Key Takeaways

• Capitalist Realism: capitalism is seen as the only viable political and economic system, making it hard to imagine alternatives.
• Perceive as climax of history, creating a sense of inevitability
• Anti-capitalist movements dismissed within framework of capitalist realism
• Suffering (eg. poverty, war) is seen as inevitable
• Capitalism's need for constant growth is unsustainable, leading to issues like mental health privatization and bureaucratic inefficiencies
• Mental health issues are falsely seen as individual, not systemic
• Over-focus on individual responsibility > systemic issues → lack of collective action

Notes

1: Capitalist Realism

• “It’s easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism”
• Capitalist realism: the only viable political and economic system. Impossible to imagine otherwise
• History has climaxed with liberal capitalism
• “How long can a culture persist without the new?”
• 3 reasons for capitalist realism > postmodernism:
  1. Seemingly no alternatives to capitalism
  2. Postmodernism involved some relationship to modernism
  3. No culture to appropriate (too long after fall of Berlin Wall)

2: Protest

• Capitalism relies on us knowing worthlessness of money yet acting with understanding of its value
• Anti-capitalist movements can’t be taken seriously in capitalist realism
• Eg. treated as reform rather than demanding new system

3: Capitalism and Reality

• Poverty, famine, war accepted as inevitable suffering, regardless of capitalism
• Value → facts
• Reality, what is non-ideological
• Capitalism’s need for growth → inevitably unsustainable
• 1. privatization of mental health, accepting inevitability of worsening societal mental health
• 2. bureaucracy still existing in capitalism, breaking promise of truly free markets

4: Liberal Communism

• Mental health privatization → systemic causes are ruled out
• College is post-disciplinary
• “Some students want Niche the same way they want a hamburger”
• ADHD is a pathology of late capitalism
• Disciplinary structures in institutions are breaking down
• Liberal communism
• Flexibility, nomadism, spontaneity

5: Individualism

• Post-Fordism: deregulation of capital, labor
  • Flexibility, no long term, uncertainty
• ↑ 10/6/1979 interest rate hike
• Capitalism → bipolar, schizophrenia
• False belief that access to the top of open to anyone willing to work hard enough
• “The chemico-biololigization of mental illness is of course strictly commensurate with it’s depoliticization”
• ↑ reinforces capital’s drive towards atomistic individualization

6: Bureaucracy

• Increase in bureaucracy
• Flattening of pyramidal hierarchy
• Auto-surveillance
• Market Stalinism:
• Too much concern with representation / symbols of achievement vs actual output
• “The big other”: basically don’t ask don’t tell. Subconscious truths outside the Johari window
• ↑ suspended disbelief
• Bureaucracy uses interpretation of “the big other”’s laws to avoid responsibility
• Constant threat of surveillance

7: Confabulation

• Fungible reality of capitalist realism
• Retrospective confabulation
• Constantly reinventing reality, identity

8: Banks

• Focus on individuals > systemic
  • Eg. bank crises, costal flooding
• Responsibilization: ideology → ethical responsibility
  • Eg. “everyone should recycle”
• A collective subject does not exist
  • Bystander effect
• “Only individuals can be held ethically responsible for actions and yet the cause of these abuses is corporate and systemic”
• What agencies are capable of governing impersonal structures?

9: Marxist Supernanny

• Over-individualism: eg. personal health vs collective mandate of health
• ↑ “everyone is trapped within their own feelings and imaginations”
• People do not know what they want
• “The most powerful forms of desire are precisely cravings for the strange, the unexpected, the weird” ← need to take risks
• Capitalism → fear, cynicism
• Need to accept that capital is the systemic cause
• 2008 killed neoliberalism but solidified capitalist realism
• Anti-capitalism must not treat itself as marginalized
• Rationing is inevitable