Glancing Down The Abyss Of Capitalism’s Inevitability

“While French students can still be found on the streets protesting against neoliberalism, British students, whose situation is incomparably worse, seem resigned to their fate. [... ]  But this, I want to argue, is a matter of not apathy, nor cynicism, but of reflexive impotence.” Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism (2009). 

Mark Fisher provides a philosophical and cultural exploration of contemporary capitalism, its inevitability, and our willingness to conform and yield to the political void by thrusting our innately defiant souls head-first into the abyss of capital accumulation. Fisher creates an analytical paradigm called “Capitalist Realism”, which explains how any viable socio-political alternative to capitalism has entered the realm of the impossible. Awareness of capitalism’s violence, paired with false hope, cannot absolve us of our political inertia. This is what Fisher meant by asserting that today’s students, especially in late-stage capitalist Britain, are reflective but impotent. 

We do reflect. We read, we recognise systematic inequality and oppression, we deplore the narrow minds of past generations. However, blinded by the haze of our undeserved political complacency, we tend to forget how we are a melancholic generation caught in capitalism’s superstructural spiderweb. While our pricey seminars become places of roaring anti-capitalist sentiments, we go back to our over-priced London houses/flats/student accommodations and spasmodically embrace our phones - a device harbouring capitalist vices. Micro-trends, endless advertisements, and dystopian feeds that broadcast genocide and celebrity or influencer opulence simultaneously. 

Our inquisitive minds cunningly perceive how capitalism not only exacerbates and accelerates war, famine, climate change, and poverty, but also manufactures it. But in a world where the seemingly invincible concept of “Capitalist Realism” festers beneath our comprehensive critiques and hopeful convictions, our efforts to change the world through dialogue and intellectual discourse remain fruitless. How can we precipitate societal change through words when even the tireless street activists go home while an agonising deliberation afflicts them: the inevitability of capitalism. Each action we take seems to become a bleak recreational activity, alleviating the guilt inextricably linked to knowing why. Why humanity and mother earth suffers, why we conform, and how it is sustained.

In an increasingly post-literate society, where the overreliance on what Fisher called “communicative sensation-stimulus matrix” of texting, TikTok, and Instagram-Reels dominates, our delicate desperation is reduced to a medical pathology. Social Media has become the emblem of decaying intellectualism, a reincarnated medieval rat fostering the plague of short-attention spans and chronic boredom. A rational and scientific explanation to an ostensibly natural generational phenomenon, divorced from any junction with socio-economic structures. But precisely this instrumental rationality has been colonised by capitalist logic. Like an omnipotent sponge, this manufactured rationality absorbs our ability to think critically, rendering any opposition to capitalism’s logic and reason obsolete and irrational. Our blaring cries echo inaudibly within the arena of capitalist logic. Capitalism has conceived its very own mutation of the scientific, natural, and rational. 

Ultimately, this is how we find ourselves quiveringly standing at the edge of the abyss of capitalism’s inevitability - reflective but impotent. René Descartes’s seminal words reside in every student's mind and soul. Cogito, ergo sum. We think, therefore we are. Rationalism ought to be a divine well of knowledge. But how do we not fracture our sacred bond with reason, when reason has fallen prey to the system?

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Edited by Roxy-Moon Dahal Hodson (EIC) and Hania Ahmed (Creative Editor)