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Famous Mark Fisher Quotes

“The idealized market was supposed to deliver ‘friction free’ exchanges, in which the desires of consumers would be met directly, without the need for intervention or mediation by regulatory agencies. Yet the drive to assess the performance of workers and to measure forms of labor which, by their nature, are resistant to quantification, has inevitably required additional layers of management and bureaucracy. What we have is not a direct comparison of workers’ performance or output, but a comparison between the audited representation of that performance and output. Inevitably, a short-circuiting occurs, and work becomes geared towards the generation and massaging of representations rather than to the official goals of the work itself. Indeed, an anthropological study of local government in Britain argues that ‘More effort goes into ensuring that a local authority’s services are represented correctly than goes into actually improving those services’. This reversal of priorities is one of the hallmarks of a system which can be characterized without hyperbole as ‘market Stalinism’. What late capitalism repeats from Stalinism is just this valuing of symbols of achievement over actual achievement. […] It would be a mistake to regard this market Stalinism as some deviation from the ‘true spirit’ of capitalism. On the contrary, it would be better to say that an essential dimension of Stalinism was inhibited by its association with a social project like socialism and can only emerge in a late capitalist culture in which images acquire an autonomous force. The way value is generated on the stock exchange depends of course less on what a company ‘really does’, and more on perceptions of, and beliefs about, its (future) performance. In capitalism, that is to say, all that is solid melts into PR, and late capitalism is defined at least as much by this ubiquitous tendency towards PR-production as it is by the imposition of market mechanisms.”

CapitalismBureaucracyFree MarketNeoliberalismStalinismLate CapitalismCapitalist Realism
Book:Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative?
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“Tendo incorporado tudo que lhe era exterior tão completamente, como pode funcionar sem um exterior para colonizar ou do qual se apropriar? Para a maior parte das pessoas que com menos de 20 anos, na Europa e na América do Norte, a falta de alternativas ao capitalismo não é se nem sequer uma questão. Jameson costumava se referir, horrorizado, aos caminhos pelos quais o capitalismo se infiltrava no próprio inconsciente; agora, o fato de que o capitalismo terá colonizado até os sonhos da população é tão amplamente aceito que nem vale a pena comentar.”

Late CapitalismYouth Pessimism
Book:Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative?
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“Em vez de atribuir aos indivíduos a responsabilidade de lidar com seus problemas psicológicos, aceitando a ampla privatização do estresse que aconteceu nos últimos trinta anos, precisamos perguntar: quando se tornou aceitável que uma quantidade tão grande de pessoas, e uma quantidade especialmente grande de jovens, estejam doentes? A epidemia de doença mental nas sociedades capitalistas deveria sugerir que, ao invés de ser o único sistema que funciona, o capitalismo é inerentemente disfuncional, e o custo para que ele pareça funcionar é demasiado alto.”

Mental IllnessLate Capitalism
Book:Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative?
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“We are all familiar with bureaucratic libido, with the enjoyment that certain officials derive from this position of disavowed responsibility (‘it’s not me, I’m afraid, it’s the regulations’). The frustration of dealing with bureaucrats often arises because they themselves can make no decisions; rather, they are permitted only to refer to decisions that have always-already been made (by the big Other). Kafka was the greatest writer on bureaucracy because he saw that this structure of disavowal was inherent to bureaucracy.”

CapitalismLate CapitalismNeoliberal Bureaucracy
Book:Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative?
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