Capitalist Realism with Carlee

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Aug 29, 2023

Explore capitalist realism and its pervasive impact on our lives. Discuss the commodification of everything, including healthcare and cultural experiences. Examine the co-option of rebellion and anti-establishment movements by capitalism. Delve into the concept of inter-passivity and its influence on our desires and decision-making. Reflect on the portrayal of the real versus reality in various mediums. Explore the relationship between capitalism and mental illness, advocating for a collective understanding. Analyze distorted time perception and the hyper-mediated existence of the youth generation. Discern the centralistness of capitalism and its failure in the neoliberal world. Examine the impersonal and individualizing nature of capitalism and the importance of collective responses.

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INSIGHT

Capitalist Realism Defined

Capitalist realism is the pervasive, often unconscious belief that capitalism is the only viable system.
It's like an atmosphere, conditioning our culture, work, and education, limiting our thoughts and actions.

ANECDOTE

Children of Men and Capitalist Realism

The film Children of Men illustrates capitalist realism by depicting a dystopian future that's not a radical break from our present.
It portrays a slow societal decline under capitalism, rather than an explosive end.

INSIGHT

Commodification Under Neoliberalism

Neoliberalism's core promise is that everything can be a market, leading to the commodification of all aspects of existence.
This commodification is driven by futurelessness and a need for transactional exchanges.

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“It's easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism.” Those words have been attributed to both the philosophers Fredric Jameson and Slavoj Žižek decades ago, but they couldn’t feel more true today. As we continue to stare down the double barrels of climate change and COVID without any meaningful response from those who rule over us, without organized and collective action that has been able to make a transformative material impact, and for many out there without even really fully absorbing the reality staring us in the face…yeah. , it certainly seems like it’s easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of this horrifying social order.

This phenomenon, which was so aptly distilled into a bite-sized quote by Jameson and Žižek, has come to be known as capitalist realism — a concept popularized by the late Mark Fisher in a book of the same name written in 2008. In Capitalist Realism, Fisher, an author and educator, explains in eighty pages, just how deeply capitalism has permeated our worlds, how totalizing its hegemony has become in the 21st century, how broadly it has flattened not just our institutions but our interactions, our experiences, our emotions, our traumas — how the commodification of everything has enveloped us all in this era we know as neoliberal capitalism.

To discuss Capitalist Realism, the book and the concept, we’ve brought on Carlee, co-host of Hit Factory, a podcast about the films and politics of the 1990s. Carlee’s immersion in film and media, and her deep understanding of how capitalist realism exists in the realm of culture, gives this conversation a wide-ranging scope spanning from music to film to labor struggles to mental health — and much more. Carlee is also a friend of the show, both Robert and I have been guests on Hit Factory in the past, so we couldn’t be more excited to be continuing our collaboration with such a good comrade on such an exciting and rich topic.

Thank you to Carolyn Raider for this episode’s cover art and to Chain and The Gang for the intermission music. Upstream theme music was composed by Robert Raymond/Lanterns.

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