#mark fischer

JACOBIN MAGAZINE

Mark Fisher was prolific, piercing, witty, humane, and omnivorous. On any given day you could log onto his blog k-punk and read about Sigmund Freud and J. G. Ballard, Jurassic Park and Voguephoto-shoots, Batman and Lenin, financial collapse and dance music.

But what made him such a valuable cultural critic wasn’t his dazzling breadth of commentary. It was his vision of the world, intricate but discrete, which bundled all his observations together into a coherent whole. That vision was of a global society dominated by capital, bludgeoned by neoliberalism, but straining nonetheless, weakly but perceptibly, for revolution.

Fisher didn’t live to see anything like a revolution. But his work contains blueprints for a new generation of socialists, tens of thousands of whom have been energized — in the US, in his native UK, and around the world — since his suicide in January 2017.

A new collection of Fisher’s k-punk essays from Repeater Books clocks in at over eight hundred pages, including his book reviews, film reviews, political writings, music reviews, interviews, and other assorted essays. I read it the way I imagine it’s meant to be read: incompletely, out of order, in fits and starts. Three major themes emerge in his political writing, each a refutation of some common lie or a refusal of some sham consensus: society exists, capitalism is not forever, and the Left must fight to win. Together they constitute a vital perspective for anyone who seeks to contribute their energy to the struggle against capitalism and for socialism.

Society Beyond Individuals

“There are individual men and women and there are families,” said Margaret Thatcher. “There is no such thing as society.” Fisher knew otherwise.

There is a society beyond individuals — and, as a corollary point, the setbacks and catastrophes sustained by individuals usually have collective political and economic causes. They therefore must have collective political and economic solutions. The utility of individualizing problems, as neoliberalism does, is to prevent us from identifying and pursuing those solutions — chiefly because the solutions will inevitably involve undermining the profits and redistributing the wealth of the capitalist elites who run society and want to keep it that way.

One theme that runs through Fisher’s writing is the individualization and depoliticization of mental health. In an essay titled “October 6, 1979: Capitalism and Bipolar Disorder,” Fisher argues that the disintegration of security and solidarity under neoliberal capitalism has left people “psychologically trashed,” feeling abandoned and disoriented. Fisher, who himself struggled with depression, didn’t deny that mental illness has observable neurological manifestations. But he was aghast at the observable injunction against discussing the political and social conditions that permitted those neurological disorders to spiral out of control and destroy people’s lives.

“The current ruling ontology rules out any possibility of a social causation of mental illness,” he wrote. “The chemico-biologisation of mental illness is of course strictly commensurate with its de-politicisation.” If every individual’s mental illness is solely the result of anomalous brain chemistry, not induced or augmented by factors such as financial precarity or social isolation or neoliberal perfectionism, then we need not inquire whether our society itself is disordered.

In another essay, “Why Mental Health Is A Political Issue,” Fisher wrote:

It would be facile to argue that every single case of depression can be attributed to economic and political causes; but it is equally facile to maintain — as the dominant approaches to depression do — that the roots of all depression must always lie either in individual brain chemistry or in early childhood experiences.

He ventured a different explanation. First, he wrote in “The Privatisation of Stress,” the erosion of job security coupled with punitive and hyper-extractive management techniques put working people on edge: “It is hardly surprising that people who live in such conditions — where their hours and pay can always be increased or decreased, and their terms of employment are extremely tenuous — should experience anxiety, depression, and hopelessness.” A society that guaranteed economic stability would, on the other hand, allow people to relax, free their minds from financial worry, and plan for the future. It wouldn’t eradicate all negative feelings, but neither would it aggravate or compound them the way neoliberal capitalism does.

Chefchaouen, Morocco