A year ago the critic and cultural theorist Mark Fisher passed away. Here is one of his pertinent observations:
R: How has capitalism persuaded us that it’s the only ‘realistic’ political-economic system?
M: "One way of getting to this is by forcing ritualistic compliance, where there’s no other available language or conceptual model for how we understand life, work, or society, except that of business. And that’s one of the key things that happened in that period, particularly with public services – and that’s something I dwell on at some length in the book ‘Capitalist Realism’. It’s the extent to which teachers are now required to go through these self-surveillance procedures, these self-assessment procedures, which have been imported in from business, and the strange subjective disavowal comes with these procedures often - managers who are uncomfortable imposing kind of business rhetoric, business methods, nevertheless will say to workers, say to teachers, ‘You don’t have to believe in this, but this is what we have to do now. We have to go along with this kind of thing.’ And that sense that one has to go along with practices and languages coming in from business – I think that that is a key part of this sense that there is no alternative - that this is how things are done now - and there’s no other way around it."
R: How has capitalism persuaded us that it’s the only ‘realistic’ political-economic system?
M: "One way of getting to this is by forcing ritualistic compliance, where there’s no other available language or conceptual model for how we understand life, work, or society, except that of business. And that’s one of the key things that happened in that period, particularly with public services – and that’s something I dwell on at some length in the book ‘Capitalist Realism’. It’s the extent to which teachers are now required to go through these self-surveillance procedures, these self-assessment procedures, which have been imported in from business, and the strange subjective disavowal comes with these procedures often - managers who are uncomfortable imposing kind of business rhetoric, business methods, nevertheless will say to workers, say to teachers, ‘You don’t have to believe in this, but this is what we have to do now. We have to go along with this kind of thing.’ And that sense that one has to go along with practices and languages coming in from business – I think that that is a key part of this sense that there is no alternative - that this is how things are done now - and there’s no other way around it."
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