Mini-Review: Capitalist Realism

I have very mixed feelings here. This book is an engaging entry point to contemporary left theory (which, caveat emptor, I am not well-versed in, so take this review with that in mind) and makes valuable arguments with respect to mental health as well as the titular relationship between ideology and imagination, but I felt like much of the remainder of the work is imprecise or impressionistic in ways that I found lacking.

To be specific, many of the arguments in the latter half of the book seem to me to conflate several different diagnostic factors as roots of the “audit culture”/bureaucratic expansionism that are core to the felt experience of “centerless” corporations and purely symbolic work culture. Despite the book's title, my sense is that Fisher is arguing more specifically that these arise from the particular expression of capitalism circa 2008, not about capital-C Capitalism as an economic system. I say this because many of his diagnoses of audit culture and bureaucracy have a host of interrelated causes. One could point to, for example, financialization and the requirements of public companies to “perform work” as part of their duty to shareholders; the rise of managerialism as a practice in the latter half of the twentieth century, which went well beyond shareholder-driven corporations to happen in schools, hospitals, and so on; or even just look at natural ossification and bureaucratic development of most large organizations as complex technologies require similarly complex organizations to develop them.

What I mean to say is that while Fisher's diagnosis of these problems is accurate, his arguments for the mechanism is unclear and often touted simply as “contemporary capitalism” when it is likely more accurately a whole variety of causes that should be teased apart. One shouldn't come to such a short volume and expect it to hash out the whole scope, but we should also be clear in what this work is: an entryway to future developments.