https://libcom.org/files/Capitalist%20R ... Fisher.pdf
1: It's easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism 1
2: What if you held a protest and everyone came? 12
3: Capitalism and the Real 16
4: Reflexive impotence, immobilization and liberal communism 21
5: October 6, 1979: 'Don't let yourself get attached to anything' 31
6: All that is solid melts into PR: market Stalinism and bureaucratic anti-production 39
7: '...if you can watch the overlap of one reality with another': capitalist realism as dreamwork and memory disorder 54
8: 'There's no central exchange' 62
9: Marxist Supernanny 71
It's easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism
In one of the key scenes in Alfonso Cuaron's 2006 film Children of Men, Clive Owen's character, Theo, visits a friend at Battersea Power Station, which is now some combination of government building and private collection. Cultural treasures - Michelangelo's David, Picasso's Guernica, Pink Floyd's inflatable pig - are preserved in a building that is itself a refurbished heritage artifact. This is our only glimpse into the lives of the elite, holed up against the effects of a catastrophe which has caused mass sterility: no children have been born for a generation. Theo asks the question, 'how all this can matter if there will be no-one to see it?' The alibi can no longer be future generations, since there will be none. The response is nihilistic hedonism: 'I try not to think about it'. What is unique about the dystopia in Children of Men is that it is specific to late capitalism. This isn't the familiar totalitarian scenario routinely trotted out in cinematic dystopias (see, for example, James McTeigue's 2005 Vfor Vendetta). In the P.D. James novel on which the film is based, democracy is suspended and the country is ruled over by a self-appointed Warden, but, wisely, the film downplays all this. For all that we know, the authoritarian measures that are everywhere in place could have been implemented within a political structure that remains, notionally, democratic. The War on Terror has prepared us for such a development: the normalization of crisis produces a situation in which the repealing of measures brought in to deal with an emergency becomes unimaginable (when will the war be over?) Watching Children of Men, we are inevitably reminded of the phrase attributed to Fredric Jameson and Slavoj Žižek, that it is easier to imagine the end of the world than it is to imagine the end of capitalism. That slogan captures precisely what I mean by 'capitalist realism': the widespread sense that not only is capitalism the only viable political and economic system, but also that it is now impossible even to imagine a coherent alternative to it.
