If capitalist realism is so seamless, and if current forms of
resistance are so hopeless and impotent, where can an effective
challenge come from? A moral critique of capitalism, empha-
sizing the ways in which it leads to suffering, only reinforces
capitalist realism. Poverty, famine and war can be presented as an
inevitable part of reality, while the hope that these forms of
suffering could be eliminated easily painted as naive utopianism.
Capitalist realism can only be threatened if it is shown to be in
some way inconsistent or untenable; if, that is to say, capitalism's
ostensible 'realism' turns out to be nothing of the sort.
Needless to say, what counts as 'realistic', what seems possible
at any point in the social field, is defined by a series of political
determinations. An ideological position can never be really
successful until it is naturalized, and it cannot be naturalized
while it is still thought of as a value rather than a fact.
Accordingly, neoliberalism has sought to eliminate the very
category of value in the ethical sense. Over the past thirty years,
capitalist realism has successfully installed a 'business ontology'
in which it is simply obvious that everything in society, including
healthcare and education, should be run as a business. As any
number of radical theorists from Brecht through to Foucault and
Badiou have maintained, emanc***tory politics must always
destroy the appearance of a 'natural order', must reveal what is
presented as necessary and inevitable to be a mere contingency,
just as it must make what was previously deemed to be impos-
sible seem attainable. It is worth recalling that what is currently
called realistic was itself once 'impossible': the slew of privatiza-
tions that took place since the 1980s would have been
unthinkable only a decade earlier, and the current political-
economic landscape (with unions in abeyance, utilities and
railways denationalized) could scarcely have been imagined in
1975. Conversely, what was once eminently possible is now
deemed unrealistic. 'Modernization', Badiou bitterly observes,
'is the name for a strict and servile definition of the possible.
These 'reforms' invariably aim at making impossible what used
to be practicable (for the largest number), and making profitable
(for the dominant oligarchy) what did not used to be so'.
At this point, it is perhaps worth introducing an elementary
theoretical distinction from Lacanian psychoanalysis which
Zizek has done so much to give contemporary currency: the
difference between the Real and reality. As Alenka Zupancic
explains, psychoanalysis's positing of a reality principle invites us
to be suspicious of any reality that presents itself as natural. 'The
reality principle', Zupancic writes,
is not some kind of natural way associated with how things
are … The reality principle itself is ideologically mediated;
one could even claim that it constitutes the highest form of
ideology, the ideology that presents itself as empirical fact (or
biological, economic … ) necessity (and that we tend to perceive as non-ideological). It is precisely here that we
should be most alert to the functioning of ideology.
For Lacan, the Real is what any 'reality' must suppress; indeed,
reality constitutes itself through just this repression. The Real is
an unrepresentable X, a traumatic void that can only be glimpsed
in the fractures and inconsistencies in the field of apparent
reality. So one strategy against capitalist realism could involve
invoking the Real(s) underlying the reality that capitalism
presents to us.
Environmental catastrophe is one such Real. At one level, to
be sure, it might look as if Green issues are very far from being
'unrepresentable voids' for capitalist culture. Climate change
and the threat of resource-depletion are not being repressed so
much as incorporated into advertising and marketing. What this
treatment of environmental catastrophe illustrates is the fantasy
structure on which capitalist realism depends: a presupposition
that resources are infinite, that the earth itself is merely a husk
which capital can at a certain point slough off like a used skin,
and that any problem can be solved by the market (In the end,
Wall-E presents a version of this fantasy – the idea that the
infinite expansion of capital is possible, that capital can prolif-
erate without labor – on the off world ship, Axiom, all labor is
performed by robots; that the burning up of Earth's resources is
only a temporary glitch, and that, after a suitable period of
recovery, capital can terra form the planet and recolonize it). Yet
environmental catastrophe features in late capitalist culture only
as a kind of simulacra, its real implications for capitalism too
traumatic to be assimilated into the system. The significance of
Green critiques is that they suggest that, far from being the only
viable political-economic system, capitalism is in fact primed to
destroy the entire human environment. The relationship between
capitalism and eco-disaster is neither coincidental nor accidental:
capital's 'need of a constantly expanding market', its 'growth fetish', mean that capitalism is by its very nature opposed to any
notion of sustainability.
But Green issues are already a contested zone, already a site
where politicization is being fought for. In what follows, I want
to stress two other aporias in capitalist realism, which are not yet
politicized to anything like the same degree. The first is mental
health. Mental health, in fact, is a paradigm case of how capitalist
realism operates. Capitalist realism insists on treating mental
health as if it were a natural fact, like weather (but, then again,
weather is no longer a natural fact so much as a political-
economic effect). In the 1960s and 1970s, radical theory and
politics (Laing, Foucault, Deleuze and Guattari, etc.) coalesced
around extreme mental conditions such as schizophrenia,
arguing, for instance, that madness was not a natural, but a
political, category. But what is needed now is a politicization of
much more common disorders. Indeed, it is their very
commonness which is the issue: in Britain, depression is now the
condition that is most treated by the NHS. In his book The Selfish
Capitalist, Oliver James has convincingly posited a correlation
between rising rates of mental distress and the neoliberal mode
of capitalism practiced in countries like Britain, the USA and
Australia. In line with James's claims, I want to argue that it is
necessary to reframe the growing problem of stress (and distress)
in capitalist societies. Instead of treating it as incumbent on
individuals to resolve their own psychological distress, instead,
that is, of accepting the vast privatization of stress that has taken
place over the last thirty years, we need to ask: how has it
become acceptable that so many people, and especially so many
young people, are ill? The 'mental health plague' in capitalist
societies would suggest that, instead of being the only social
system that works, capitalism is inherently dysfunctional, and
that the cost of it appearing to work is very high.
The other phenomenon I want to highlight is bureaucracy. In
making their case against socialism, neoliberal ideologues often excoriated the top-down bureaucracy which supposedly led to
institutional sclerosis and inefficiency in command economies.
With the triumph of neoliberalism, bureaucracy was supposed to
have been made obsolete; a relic of an unlamented Stalinist past.
Yet this is at odds with the experiences of most people working
and living in late capitalism, for whom bureaucracy remains very
much a part of everyday life. Instead of disappearing, bureau-
cracy has changed its form; and this new, decentralized, form has
allowed it to proliferate. The persistence of bureaucracy in late
capitalism does not in itself indicate that capitalism does not
work – rather, what it suggests is that the way in which
capitalism does actually work is very different from the picture
presented by capitalist realism.
In part, I have chosen to focus on mental health problems and
bureaucracy because they both feature heavily in an area of
culture which has becoming increasingly dominated by the
imperatives of capitalist realism: education. Through most of the
current decade, I worked as a lecturer in a Further Education
college, and in what follows, I will draw extensively on my
experiences there. In Britain, Further Education colleges used to
be places which students, often from working class backgrounds,
were drawn to if they wanted an alternative to more formal state
educational institutions. Ever since Further Education colleges
were removed from local authority control in the early 1990s,
they have become subject both to 'market' pressures and to
government-imposed targets. They have been at the vanguard of
changes that would be rolled out through the rest of the
education system and public services – a kind of lab in which
neoliberal 'reforms' of education have been trialed, and as such,
they are the perfect place to begin an analysis of the effects of
capitalist realism