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| Alex Niven |
“Dear Mark,” began an email I wrote to a man I had never met in the first days of 2010:
I read your book Capitalist Realism last week and it felt like coming up for air after a long time spent underwater. I would like to thank you from the bottom of my heart for giving such eloquent expression to pretty much everything that needed to be said, and for providing a reason to hope, when I for one was just about ready to despair.
To those unacquainted with the work of theorist, music writer, journalist, film critic, philosopher, editor, and lecturer Mark Fisher, who sadly took his own life four years ago today, the above might seem hyperbolic or sycophantic. It is neither. Like so many other members of my generation, encountering Capitalist Realism at the age of twenty-five transformed my life.
... Capitalist Realism made a series of simple points that bypassed years of postmodern hedging to offer a foundation for action.
Continue reading @ Tribune.
"... the rejection of identitarianism can only be achieved by the re-assertion of class. A left that does not have class at its core can only be a liberal pressure group. Class consciousness is always double: it involves a simultaneous knowledge of the way in which class frames and shapes all experience, and a knowledge of the particular position that we occupy in the class structure. It must be remembered that the aim of our struggle is not recognition by the bourgeoisie, nor even the destruction of the bourgeoisie itself. It is the class structure – a structure that wounds everyone, even those who materially profit from it – that must be destroyed. The interests of the working class are the interests of all; the interests of the bourgeoisie are the interests of capital, which are the interests of no-one. Our struggle must be towards the construction of a new and surprising world, not the preservation of identities shaped and distorted by capital."
ReplyDeleteMark Fisher. Lest we forget.