Do checkout "Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative?", It's a concise book that talks about capitalism and its effects on culture and public thought. I haven't read lost futures yet but I found this really good video discussing Mark's idea by Cuck Philosophy called "Hauntology, Lost Futures and 80s Nostalgia" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gSvUqhZcbVg
Reading Capitalist Realism really helped pull me out of a depressive rut, tbh. Highly recommended, and it really is short, something like 80 pages. The part where he talks about how on the surface, the students in his classroom appear to be hedonically satisfied, but then he introduces the term “depressive hedonism”, really stuck with me.
edit: another part that really stuck with me was how there is a modern tendency to privatize the burden of stress; consider how mental illness is the individual's burden so it must be handled at the individual level, etc etc. Fisher wrote an article in the Guardian about this, "Why mental health is a political issue" in 2012 - https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2012/jul/16/mental...
Capitalist Realism is an incredible read. Since discovering him just a couple years ago, his ideas and his work have impacted me probably more than any other cultural/political theorist has. His death was a real loss, but his work is more vital than ever. Can’t recommend his work enough, and I’m excited to have seen his name pop up a couple times on HN over the last few days.
One thing that recently made me immediately recall the book was a story I read about "fake influencers", that is people who go on holidays, but pretend to be paid social media influencers to prop up their own instagram channels and whatnot to appear successful.
This seemed so absurd to me that I had to think of the Soviet joke about the workers "pretending to work while the bosses pretend to pay". And it struck me as sad but also funny that we are entering a stage of economic development, that for an increasing number of workers, looks more like a giant collective inside joke than actual meaningful or genuine labour.
Of course recommended reading on capitalism's effects on culture and thought are the works of Adorno and Horkheimer, and Marcuse - who seems to have fallen a little out of favor but his work is as important as it was in the 60s.
Do you have any recommendations on what books I should pick up? , I've only read about the authors you mentioned on https://plato.stanford.edu and also through some philosophy podcasts..
"One Dimensional Man" by Marcuse certainly, "Escape From Freedom" by Erich Fromm and for more contemporary review, Mark Fisher of course. You also can't miss Guy Debord (his Society of the Spectacle) and, although I haven't read him yet, Henri Lefebvre's "Critique of Everyday Life" is looking promising from what I've seen so far. I'd suggest browsing the Verso catalogue for old (republished) and new books, almost all of them center around cultural critique of capitalism[0].
It's a critique of the progressive liberal left from the traditional far left. Central to Fisher's thesis is that by emphasizing race and sex, class identity (which he feels is crucial) is ignored: "I’ve noticed a fascinating magical inversion projection-disavowal mechanism whereby the sheer mention of class is now automatically treated as if that means one is trying to downgrade the importance of race and gender. In fact, the exact opposite is the case, as the Vampires’ Castle uses an ultimately liberal understanding of race and gender to obfuscate class."
What I find particularly interesting is how similar this critique is to the alt-right's criticism of neo-liberalism. I think it's a fine example of the "horseshoe theory" of politics, where the far-left and far-right share certain commonalities: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horseshoe_theory.
The critiques are similar insofar as they are both critiques, but differ vastly in their content.
Mark Fisher, and the 'traditional left's' critique of neoliberal identity politics calls for a centering of class -- that is the power relations inherent in capital modes of production. This, many would argue is not an identity, but a _material position_: a specific stance or relationship to the productive forces in society.
The Alt-Right tends to believe societal conflicts arise from 'culture wars' between ethnicities, nationalities, religions, etcetera. In this way, they share an 'identitarian' analysis of political force with the liberals they aim to critique!
In total agreement, and I would add that Fisher's position is only acceptable in the left because it is founded in 'class reductionism' - which is sometimes used derogatorily - the idea that capital is the root struggle, because it is in part or in whole the cause of all other struggles.
It is also possible to try to position yourself on the traditional far left while also simply being racist or sexist, but that would be Third-Positionism, which is seeming more and more common in the alt-right. A Third-Positionist would find nothing that they could agree with in EtVC, because they would assert that "comradeship" across a 'cultural boundary' is a communist ideal.
If you look at the history of Stalinism, the Khmer Rouge, and Maoism, the horseshoe theory begins to look appealing again, unless you consider Stalin to be Fascist.
Really? I've never heard that before and I've spent a not insignificant portion of my life in hard left circles.
People will often say that Stalin's USSR was not communist, but was rather in a pre-communist phase. In the USSR this stage was known as the dictatorship of the proletariat, which according to Lenin, would eventually fade allowing a state-less, class-less society to flourish. Obviously they never got to that stage, but honestly even arguing this is semantics. Communism vs precommunism is a real time waster of a political debate, but I've never heard anyone describe any stage of the USSR as "capitalist".
Perhaps state capitalism, if you really want to stretch that definition, but that's still a very different thing.
Generally lefties will distance themselves from Stalinism and Maoism by describing those forms as "authoritarian socialism", as opposed to "libertarian socialist" ideologies like what they had in socialist Catalonia, or Anarcho Communism as it's described in The Conquest of Bread.
It wasn't until I read this that I realized how miserable being a liberal has felt over the past few years. Compared to the days of "Earth Day is every day" and "We are the world", being liberal today seems to be this never-ending race to see who can self-flagellate most intensely on social media.
I have to wonder how many people have been driven to the right simply because Trump and co. tell you that you are great and should feel great.
The left sure as hell use a little bit of that positivity.
The New Yorker article referenced in the first paragraphs of this piece provides a nice overview of k-punk and Fisher's writings, but other wise offers very little of substance.
> I would not claim that Islam is monolithically malign, of course, but someone less constrained by their unconscious sense of ideological appropriateness would ask why interpretations of the faith lead people towards evangelistic violence and puritanical tyranny so much more than interpretations of other faiths.
After WWII and decolonisation, a new breed of educated, progressive and secular leaders arose across former colonial states. In the Middle East, this was characterised by the influence of Egypt's Nasser. These leaders weren't afraid to stand up to religious fundamentalism. Here is a 1966 video of Nasser making fun of the Muslim Brotherhood trying to force women to wear the hijab[0]. There were secular governments across the Middle East, including Iran, Iraq, Syria, and Lebanon.
However, these secular and socialist leaders were seen as too close to the Soviets by the US, despite many of them explicitly participating in the Non-Aligned movement, and America and its allies quickly acted to counter their influence and depose them when possible.
The major political opponent to anti-imperialist socialism across the Islamic world were the religious fundamentalists, so they were the ones who were backed by the West.
Western support for Saudi's and their Wahhabist ideology is well known. Indonesia's Sukarno was deposed in an American supported purge backed by Islamic fundamentalists, described by the CIA itself as "one of the worst mass murders of the 20th century". Hamas was propped up in Palestine by the Israelis as a counter to Arafat's secular Fatah[1]. Western efforts to undermine Nasser and fund his political opponents(surprise... Islamic fundamentalists) are well documented. The crushing of Nasserism in the Arab world with the help of the Saudis and Israelis is regarded as one of the great triumphs of post WW2 American foreign policy. The groups that formed Al Qaeda and the Taliban were supported by Americans as counters to the Soviets in Afghanistan. There is also consistent American support for the Pakistani government, even in the face of genocide of millions[2], in an attempt to counter the spooky "socialist" and secular India.
And all that is discounting the reactionary sort of fundamentalism that might arise as a result of constant war and interventionism by the West in the Middle East.
It makes me sad when I see "westerners" criticizing Islamic extremism without recognizing their own culpability in the current state of affairs. It is short-sighted and illogical to divorce the political and social situation in the Islamic world from centuries of western foreign policy.
That phrase bothered me for a different reason - namely, the role of Christian evangelism in western imperialism. Christianity became a key justification for the racism and orientalism necessary to justify the imperialism, the idea that enlightened Christian Europeans were going to save the ignorant savages and degenerate oriental kingdoms from themselves. Without the racism and orientalism, imperialist ambitions become too morally difficult to maintain.
So I don't think the problem is Islam, or even Christianity. I think the problem is the political usefulness of evangelical religions.
Of course, the horror we talk about when talking about the violent nature of Islam is "terrorism"... which is, really, just a form of asymmetric warfare, all that's available when one side has tremendous military superiority. If the armies were more equal, the situation would be different.
This is actually related to another minor gripe I have about Mark Fisher. He talks a lot of the problems of left-wing online activism, and he's right, but the problem as it stands today isn't a new flaw of the left (this thinking has always been around, as he has noted). Rather, it's that the internet and social media make it so easy to be a mob. The right-wing Twittersphere is as bad as the left, and uses much the same tactics. The correct answer is for us to stay off of social media...
Every time I try to read these sort of discussions, typically from the left but also just as typically from the right, I'm left with the impression that the author believes that there are Good People and there are Bad People. The Good People are oppressed or misled by the Bad People, who are overtly or covertly, consciously or unconsciously, acting for their own benefit, whether that benefit is defined economically, socially, morally, or psychologically. The author argues, or just simply assumes, that if everyone, who are obviously Good People, would put on the author's revolution's uniforms or at least act according to the author's dictates or suggestions or hints, everything would be good and wonderful, full of rainbows and butterflies, with egalitarianism and respect for all the Good People and the Bad People taught the error of their ways so that they became Good People. (Or at least put up against a wall and shot.)
The problem is, and I'm an old man and can say this from experience, that the whole argument, right from its assumptions, is a load of horse shit. There are no Good People. They don't exist. Or maybe they do exist, but they're like those fairies also called "Good People"; you call them that to prevent them from souring your milk and killing your goats. In actual fact, there are only Bad People. They're everywhere. That person you think is a good person? They're a Bad Person. It's Bad People all the way down.
You know the neoliberal left, that everybody hates and is clearly in the wrong in all situations? They weren't always the powerful political war-horse they are now. (One could argue that they aren't a powerful political war-horse now, but that's neither here nor there.) The Baby Boomers? They learned identity politics because they had to. They were begat into a time when your race or manner of speech or the shape of your nose defined a significant fraction of your destiny. Without them, the whole but it's really about economic inequality and opportunities or whatever would be laughably, pointlessly, silly: simply none of it would apply if you were black, female, Hispanic, southern European, a new immigrant, eastern European (I had to laugh at one Neo-Nazi a while back; judging by his name and look, he was a Slav. If you can't find irony in a Slavic Neo-Nazi, you've missed the whole boat.)...
And yet, the Baby Boomers are indeed rat bastards.
Have you heard of the Liberal's Lament? "Last guys don't finish nice." Those most in need of help are the least likely to look like they deserve it. Those miners and factory workers that the old-timey traditional liberals fought so hard for? Racist and sexist as fuck. Sure, some of the leaders believed, or at least acted, in equality across the skin-tones, but most didn't and the rabble were all rabble. They aren't all going to rise, phoenix-like, Eminem-like, and become wonders and paragons.
And so, whenever I see something about some group, left, right, or center, just needing a little reform or revolution to really fix things right, I am going to ask, "What will go wrong?" Because it ain't going to go right. It will end up badly, even if it succeeds, at least according to the next generation.
As a fan of Fisher, it's interesting to read an open-minded review of his work from someone on the right. But the bit about Islam can't be left unchallenged. The reviewer says:
>>> I would not claim that Islam is monolithically malign, of course, but someone less constrained by their unconscious sense of ideological appropriateness would ask why interpretations of the faith lead people towards evangelistic violence and puritanical tyranny so much more than interpretations of other faiths.
But here in America we still have Christians practicing evangelistic violence and working to enforce puritanical tyranny. There's nothing unique about Islam in this regard, unfortunately. Like nearly any religion, it can be mustered to support incredible love or horrific cruelty.
You are right that any philosophy can be distorted and made horrific. It’s kind of like how even lots of water can be poisonous if drank in sufficient quantities.
It’s hard for me to bring up a topic like this without being lumped into straw man town of equating “some religions tend to have more violently dangerous people, as data like the pew opinions show” with “some religions are universally bad and racism is ok.”
I think an understanding of my first quote is important while my second quote is not worth, to me, discussing because racism is really harmful.
That being said, while the kkk is very real and caused massive historical violence and even today has a non-zero level of threat. The evalgelistic Christians are about as dangerous, in terms of violence, as followers of Eris working to further the Eschaton.
Other philosophies and religions are currently more dangerous and we need to engage with, learn about, and support constructive ways to change minds so apostasy stops being a capital offense in our world.
The idea that evangelical Christians are about as dangerous as the "followers of Eris" seems like quite a stretch. I don't see Discordians bombing abortion clinics.
Even as recently as the 80s, when The Last Tempation of Jesus Christ was released, it was banned in several countries (and is still banned in several) for its "blasphemous" content. The producers were worried that people would bomb theaters. The idea that Islam is uniquely censorious or intolerant of "blasphemy" is ahistorical, in my opinion.
Aside from those sources aren’t really reputable, that’s why I said that the right threat is non-zero. It does exist, it’s just less than other threats.
OKC was 1995. It makes me feel old but that’s 25 years ago. I would worry more if Montana had turned into an ISIS-like dystopian recruiting all these dumbasses to gather from around the world to make a super Pope or something.
That's the first time I've heard SPL isn't reputable. Anyway, it's not an opinion piece, it's just a list of violent events. If you find one that's not true, please say so.
The article is a record of right-wing violence, which are due to strains of white supremacy (often Christian supremacy as well), going up to 2019. So Islam is far from exceptional when it comes to ideologies prone to violence.
You're not one of those people who dismiss everything that disagrees with them as "fake news", are you?
So if Islam is not the only ideology that can turn violent, then why do people like to focus on it so much and act like it's the number one threat to the world that's flying under our radar? And people ignore the fact that US activity in Muslim countries has been so barbaric, which is obviously going to make people angry.
This is why people talk about Islamophobia, because the fixation goes beyond logic.
I think a big difference between Christianity and Islam is that in the west Christianity has been around (or at least more dominant) much longer. I think this has two effects:
1. People are more used to it, and likely less aware of the flaws it has (or might have, as this is in the eye of the beholder). This may lead to people to make claim X, Y, Z about Islam, forgetting that this may have applied in the past (or still does) to Christianity as well
2. It had more time to develop according to the "western ways" so to speak.
Of course this will vary per country, and the US is big enough that it probably even varies per state. The Netherlands for example doesn't really have anything close to for example the Westboro Baptist Church, at least not that I know of and is anywhere near as widely known.
2. Is a complete inversion of history. “Western ways” were derived from Christian values, not the other way around. The value of charity, the importance of justice, care for the poor, days of rest and of work, the value of children—all of these are not things the West valued or understood in the same way prior to Christianity. The concept of “the West” is inextricable from Christian values and the evolutions of the reading and interpretation of its texts.
It's not so much that Christianity is the source of justice, hard work, and loving children as that Christianity claims to be the source of these things.
And, since Christianity is inextricable from European imperialism, those "values" were used to claim moral superiority to other cultures, in order to justify the pillage. Because other cultures clearly don't care about justice or work or children, right? Right.
Your inversion can itself be inverted. The success of Christianity is arguably derived from European political power - first the Romans, and then the colonialist explosion across the globe that started with Spain in the New World (closely followed by England, Holland, and France), which was a result of technological advantages, not moral ones. Without colonialism, Christianity would be merely an also-ran religion confined to a European backwater.
those are inherent human values. maybe christianity rescued them for some people, maybe they just appropriated them. but christianity is not the source of compassion, nor love for children..
we still have Christians practicing
evangelistic violence
Did you not notice the terms "so much more"?
That sounds like a quantitative argument, not a qualitative one. Can I invite you to reflect on how to refute/confirm quantitative arguments, and then to consult the quantitative distribution of violence, in, say, the last 100 years, of Christians, Bahais, Shiks, Bhuddists, or Zoroastrians and Islam.
Since this account appears to be using HN exclusively for ideological battle, we've banned it. That's not what this site is for, as the guidelines explain:
If you don't want to be banned, you're welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com and give us reason to believe that you'll follow the rules in the future. Primarily that means doing what serves intellectual curiosity, rather than what destroys it.
This piece exhibits the usual problem of using words and expression so abstract or vague that anyone reading it can pour in the undetstanding ones wants. People discussing will often disagree because they have different take on simple words. Just i the opening two paragraphs I can mention: "cultural and political theorist", "censorious moralism", "Poshleft moralisers", "kangaroo courts", "structural critique", "inspire and energise", "speculative realism", "knowing postmodern pretension". Add in the usual tendencies for hyperboles and denigrement of anything they disagree with, it adds up to something only people already adhering to whatever cause it's about will read.
