A short book by an English academic that explores “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” (2). In order to build movements that can once again threaten to transform capitalism, we must “destroy the appearance of a ‘natural order'” and “reveal what is presented as necessary and inevitable to be a mere contingency” (17) and in so doing show that “capitalism’s ostensible ‘realism’ turns out to be nothing of the sort” (16). The book suggests three areas where the disjuncture between the ‘realistic’ stories propagated within and about capitalism fit increasingly poorly with our experiences of the world, offering possibilities for rupture: the capitalist fantasy of perpetual growth and its increasingly urgent collision with the limits of our ecosystem; the role of the neoliberal transformation of capitalism in steadily increasing certain kinds of environmentally-induced mental illness; and the disjuncture between the neoliberal promise of ending bureaucracy and the increasing power that (a new form of) bureaucracy has in our lives today. The book ends by offering a few suggestions about what it might look like to “begin by building on the desires which neoliberalism has generated but which it has been unable to satisfy” (79), though they are quite tentative.
I have mixed feelings about the book. I think it has some interesting ideas. Certainly when it cited material evidence from the author’s own experience within the intensely neoliberal post-secondary sector in the UK and from related research, it felt convincing. Some of its discussion of cultural artefacts felt useful too. And I think overall that there is value to exploring the ways in which capitalism in its current state deadens our capacity to imagine alternatives, and how we need to push back against that. But there were also significant stretches that drew on sources that I, myself, find less useful – a few post-structuralist psychoanalytic/literary theorists, Slavoj Zizek, others – and on other kinds of analysis of culture that felt less grounded to me. Which I normally don’t mind, but for some reason I felt less willing than I often have been in the past to suspend such judgements and just get on with putting in the effort to get what I can out of a book. I think I am perhaps more impatient overall than I used to be with writing that is meant to intervene in real people’s political decision-making but that has not done as much work as I think it should have to translate ideas that, yes, may indeed have something to offer but that have been formulated at a considerable remove from the kinds of analyses actually generated in the course of struggle. It probably also didn’t help that this is a very short book, so ideas were often not explored in the depth that they deserved.
So…yeah. Some interesting stuff, but not as useful to me as I had hoped.
Originally posted on Scott’s Goodreads.