It’s easier to fantasize a new world than imagine the end of capitalism

In his widely influential essay Capitalist Realism, Mark Fisher writes about the phenomenon that “it’s easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism.” Specifically, he categorizes the phenomenon as such,

‘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 (2).

Now, sure, capitalism might have dominated the minds of subjects and, through its ideological edifices, have shortened the distance the subject may have access to in their imagination, but is it not true that what we often learn is that the point at which one is strongest, one may also find their weakest point?

Nowhere is this more clear than in the myth of Achilles. Achilles’ mother Thetis, upon his birth, dipped him in the river Styx so as to make him immortal. Though, the one part Thetis had not dipped Achilles’ body into the river was his heel. As Achilles grew, he went on to become a legendary Greek warrior, slaying all that came before him. However, during the Trojan War, tragedy struck: he was struck in the heel with an arrow, leading to his death.

Is this not the structure of capitalist limits on imagination? Although capitalism may deem the limits of what may seem possible, does not fantasy function as a sort of bypass, allowing political reinvention in spite of what may be deemed as impossible?

The ideological mechanisms through which capitalism demarcates and continuously reproduces itself influence and control the fantasies through which the subject enjoys. The most classic example is that of the purchasing of Starbucks coffee; as Slavoj Zizek explains,

What is really difficult for us to accept is that we are sometimes reduced to the purely passive role of an impotent observer who can only sit back and observe what his fate will be. To avoid such a situation, we are prone to engage in frantic obsessive activities: recycling paper, buying organic food, and so on, just so that we can be sure that we are doing something… You know what you encounter when you go to a Starbucks coffee shop: basically, the message is, though our coffee is a little bit more expensive, one cent from every coffee goes for Guatemalan children, five cents goes for water, and so on. In other words, the logic is the following one: in the old days, we were consumerists, and then we felt bad, and if you wanted to pretend to be an ethical being, you had to do something to counteract it. But the offer here is: we make it simpler for you. You can remain just a consumerist because your altruistic nature — solidarity with the poor — is included into the price.

Or, as Fisher puts it,

The fantasy being that western consumerism, far from being intrinsically implicated in systemic global inequalities, could itself solve them. All we have to do is buy the right products (21).

Now, at the outset, the consequence of this all looks pretty nihilistic and saddening. Specifically, the notion that capitalism controls fantasy, and, as a result, we are stuck in obsessive cycles which lead to our own demise. But, instead, the logic one ought to adhere to here is the opposite one: that what this instead proves is that there is a, so to speak, way out. What we instead find in the phenomena of capitalist realism is an inner problem with its functioning. Capitalism can only delineate the upper and outer limits of imagination, and it may also, to an extent, control fantasy, but it cannot delineate the limits of fantasy as such.

Fantasy, through its covering of the lack experienced within the subject, is capable of “stag[ing] scenarios that are not even thinkable in the everyday world” (Enjoying What We Don’t Have 211). In this particular sense, fantasy is the way out of capitalist realism. The method of resistance we must engage in is not the traditional Marxist one, that is, the one that fights against fantasy, trying to get at the “real” of it all. Instead, it is the opposite; we must discern, cut through, and use fantasy to picture a new political formation. “If we can’t think about the possibility of capitalism’s end, we can fantasize about it” (212).

A fantastic example of how this would function is in Le Guin’s The Left Hand of Darkness.

Through the imagining of a world that exists without male and female gender categories, Le Guin imagines what patriarchal ideology renders unthinkable and thereby defies its unthinkable status… Le Guin’s novel can’t accomplish a physiological miracle and allow [biological] men to bear children, but it can change the way that we think about the activity, prompting us to stop viewing the burden as uniquely feminine. This is one of the ways in which Le Guin’s fantasmatic scenario allows subjects to think new possibilities. In doing so, it reveals a political power that exists implicitly within all fantasizing (213).