This quote from the late Mark Fisher appeared on my Facebook page a few days ago, posted by the FB blogger Philosophical Thoughts, a left-wing web-site. Fisher died in 2017, but his presence on Facebook continues on. Philosophical Thoughts quotes from Fisher's book Post-Capitalist Desire: The Final Lectures.
Fisher writes skilfully: "The suppression of class consciousness operates via a fantasy recruitment." He says that Capitalism dupes the working-class into "identification with a career", rather than with class consciousness. The workers resent uppety doctors, lawyers, and professors, but they "identify with the rich". Capitalism encourages them to think "they already are rich. . . . they just haven't got the money, yet."
I can see the logic that Fisher proposes, but it is just the usual left-wing rhetoric of collective-action versus "rugged-individualism". In the animal kingdom, male lions live solitary lives; ruminants like deer and buffalo live in groups. Human societies should allow both. Most people prefer to live and think as a group, while others go it alone, living by their own drummer. In a freedom-loving society, the government takes on the role of maintaining the choices. Not so Fisher, it seems. Basically, he prefers group-action. He considers individual initiative self-deception.
Fisher died by his own hand in 2017. Friends reported that he suffered from recurring "depression". No one has said much about his ailment, but "depression" can act like a closed curtain, rather than a genuine piece of personal information about a person. Fisher's depression suggests that he could not operate within class-consciousness, either. Vague selfhood, personal apathy, or emptiness overrode his ability to care. I really would like to know more about why he died. It is simplistic to think that the collapse of the Soviet Union and the Eastern Bloc led Fisher to believe that he had backed the losing side in the global struggle for domination, or whatever.
Nevertheless, Fisher published Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? in 2009. He was born in 1968. The Soviet Union dissolved itself in 1990, unable to continue the dictatorial administration it had maintained since World War II. Only 22 years old at the time, and presumably wet behind the ears, Fisher could hardly have understood in a coherent way the thrust of World affairs, judging by my own experience.
If Fisher harbored negative feelings about the direction of his life, he could have picked them up from the French writer Jacques Derrida, whom Fisher studied in depth. Derrida published his book Spectres of Marx in 1993, in which he wrote about the "lost futures of modernity", caused by the resurgence of "neoliberalism" and "post-Fordist economies".
Fisher wrote that the shift "gradually and systematically deprived artists of the resources necessary to produce the new". He commented that he had explored the impasses and refused "to give up on the desire for the future". He felt a "pining for a future that never arrived".
This leaves me hanging onto Fisher's, and more broadly the Left's, lack of a conclusive sense of direction and independent stance that can step away from the prevailing capitalist economic system and consumer culture, and define itself enough to stand on its own and create a satisfactory life for its left-leaning citizens.
Finally, Fisher admitted that he experienced sexual abuse earlier in his life, but did not say much more about it than that. Increasingly, sex-abuse takes on the role of a drawn-curtain, to protect the privacy of a victim and to deflect, much like the depression-curtain, the attention of others from the victim's personal point-of-view, rather than to draw attention to it and define it.