Capitalist Realism

What is capitalist realism

Time in capitalism

Paradoxes

Despite evincing an anti-statist rhetoric, neoliberalism is in practice not opposed to the state per se – as the bank bail-outs of 2008 demonstrated – but rather to particular uses of state funds

Responsibility

Blaming the government

Blaming the consumer

But the subject supposed to recycle, Jones argued, presupposed the structure not supposed to recycle: in making recycling the responsibility of ‘everyone’, structure contracts out its responsibility to consumers, by itself receding into invisibility.

power structure is responsible for how we behave

corporations are free of being held accountable like a person would

What agencies are capable of regulating and controlling impersonal structures? How is it possible to chastise a corporate structure?

Social media

Morality has been replaced by feeling. In the ‘empire of the self everyone ‘feels the same’ without ever escaping a condition of solipsism.

Nevertheless, the interpassive simulation of participation in postmodern media, the network narcissism of MySpace and Facebook, has, in the main, generated content that is repetitive, parasitic and conformist

It is another irony that capitalism’s ‘society of risk’ is much less likely to take this kind of risk than was the supposedly stodgy, centralized culture of the postwar social consensus.

❗Not by chance ⚠

As Adam Curtis’s remarks above make clear, the affects that predominate in late capitalism are fear and cynicism. These emotions do not inspire bold thinking or entrepreneurial leaps, they breed conformity and the cult of the minimal variation, the turning out of products which very closely resemble those that are already successful.

The informal censorship internalized and propagated by the cultural workers of late capitalism generates a banal conformity that the propaganda chiefs of Stalinism could only ever have dreamt of imposing.

References