It continues to surprise me just how relevant and prescient the work of Mark Fisher remains within the context of the political climate in the UK. Not that you’d think that by the passing dismissals that continue to circulate occasionally across social media… But there are many essays that Mark wrote in the 2010s that have never been read widely. Perhaps that is because they are, in many ways, “parochial”.
But parochial from whose perspective? Fisher may continue to resonate most with those living in the UK, but the spread of his work across the Spanish-speaking world continues to fascinate me. More often than not, Fisher is chewed up and misunderstood by Americans, unfortunately… And in speaking to a few Americans recently, I’m conscious of how they continue to be barely plugged into what’s happening over here (or anywhere else, frankly).
My interest in Mark’s work endures unwaveringly, but I am returning to him more emphatically at the moment, as his writings from 2015-16 are spookily prescient for the UK in 2025-26. His writings on protest, in particular, have helped clarify my own thinking about what is happening with various protest movements at work today.
New Consciousness Raised?
Eight months ago, I felt my political consciousness raised anew in orbit of the UK’s prison-industrial complex. I have struggled to get back into theory since, instead yearning for community organising like I never have before. But in returning to others’ words to try and understand recent experiences, it has been Fisher — much to my surprise, honestly — who has once again encapsulated the last year for me.
“To have one’s consciousness raised is not merely to become aware of facts of which one was previously ignorant”, he wrote in 2015: “it is instead to have one’s whole relationship to the world shifted.” I have been relating to this profoundly. I’ve written about Israel-Palestine on this blog for years. I’ve never been ignorant to the existence of prisons. I have been to various protests, including protests against the UK government’s crackdown on protest rights. But after my partner was arrested for alleged involvement in direct action and remanded to prison for six months, my entire relationship to the world has shifted massively. In reading Mark, as I try to process the experience, it seems clear that something also happened to him in 2015. There was a shift — one ignored by many because it did not take place online.
Mark abandoned Twitter, moved into meatspace, and took to organising within the UK on a local and national level. His thought developed with new rapidity, but his old readership lagged behind, largely unaware of what was going on for him. If Mark became more parochial than before, this is likely why. Still, there are clear signposts from 2015, which remain available for all those willing to look past the distorting virality of ‘other’ essays…
Abandon Hope; Pick Up New Weapons
2015 was an interesting year for Fisher in many ways. He appeared newly radicalised by the electoral defeat of the Labour Party during that year’s general election. Earlier this year, on the ninth anniversary of Mark’s death, I returned to the blogpost written in response.
What had previously been a coalition government run by the Tories and the Liberal Democrats was transformed into a Conservative Party majority. I remember the election well – the most disheartening in living memory. But Fisher refused to give in to despair, because he recognised that despair and apathy is what the system wants most of all.
Reflecting on ‘capitalist realism’ – his most famous concept; a name given to neoliberalism’s cancellation of the future and its ‘naturalisation’ of capitalism as the only viable socio-economic system available to us (‘there is no alternative’) – Fisher wrote on his k-punk blog:
Capitalist realism is not about people positively identifying with neoliberalism; it is about the naturalisation and therefore the depoliticisation of the neoliberal worldview … To break out of this, you need a repoliticisation, and this requires a popular mobilisation…
There was some evidence of popular mobilisation at that time, in Fisher’s view. (He cites the SNP, but ten years on, this mobilisation clearly didn’t last.) Regardless, more clearly needed to be done to counteract the Tories’ victory, which “depended upon a popular de-activation.” But there was evidence of a new “popular enthusiasm – an enthusiasm that capitalist realism is set up to prevent emerging” — nonetheless. It may not have been strong enough to forestall the Tories’ ascendence, but it was still emerging. Something was rushing into view, Fisher argued; “something that, for a long time, there hasn’t seemed to be any glimmer of in England: the future.”
To encourage the emergence of a world struggling to be born, Fisher advocated for various strategies and tactics that are broadly uncontroversial: the development of “hub struggles” – like the Miners’ Strike – and the creation of new “social spaces” and “knowledge exchange labs”, where people can learn more about the nature of our system beyond the enclaves of higher education.
Most interesting to me, however, out of Fisher’s nine recommendations for encouraging popular mobilisation, is number seven: “Engage in forms of activism aimed at logistical disruption”. Expanding, Fisher writes:
Capital has to be seriously inconvenienced and to fear before it yields any territory or resources. It can just wait out most protests, but it will take notice when its logistical operations are threatened. We must be prepared for them cutting up very rough once we start doing this – using anti-terrorist legislation to justify practically any form of repression. They won’t play fair, but it’s not a game of cricket – they know it’s class war, and we should never forget it either.
Reading this in 2026, it is striking how prescient it feels. Exactly ten years after Fisher wrote these words, the British government has begun to use its counter-terrorism legislation to brutalise and disempower pro-Palestinian protest movements explicitly. What Fisher called for was direct action, and the authoritarian response to popular direct action movements has illuminated the class war engulfing Britain more glaringly than I can remember in my lifetime.
Direct action – a form of protest that does not seek recourse to influencing government policy through the pressure of civil disobedience, but rather acts directly upon capital’s logistical infrastructure – has a long and celebrated history in the British isles. The Suffragettes are the go-to example, jarringly celebrated in parliament at the same time as politicians today enact legislation that would have surely broken the Suffragette movement in the early 20th century. Indeed, today’s direct actionists are defamed as ‘terrorists’ and imprisoned under repressive counter-terror regimes that seek to isolate, disenfranchise and break apart ‘ideological’ movements on the grounds of their apparent ‘extremism’ and threat to ‘national security’.
The playbook will be familiar to anyone with a passing knowledge of McCarthyism internationally, but the crackdowns within the UK in particular are unprecedented. The other day, for example, I attended the campaign launch for the Brize Norton 5 at Palestine House in London. Dr Asim Qureshi, research director at CAGE International, spoke at length on the UK government’s new National Security Act 2023. The Brize Norton 5, accused of spray-painting RAF planes used to refuel Israeli jets mid-strike, have been remanded to prison since July 2025 and are the first to be charged under the new act.
A few nights earlier, Juno and I had been watching documentaries about the partition of Korea, and I was struck by discussions of South Korea’s own National Security Act, implemented in 1948 “to secure the security of the State and the subsistence and freedom of nationals, by regulating any anticipated activities compromising the safety of the State.” Over the decades since, the Act has been adapted to stop its arbitrary usage, curtailing freedom of expression and enabling human rights abuses. In the UK, many suspect it will be a long time before we see similar powers put in place to curtail the abuses being enacted right now.
Korea is not the only historical example resonating with our present. The UK government in 2026 is willing to exert the sort of totalitarian crackdown on leftists as Italy did to break the left in the 1970s, for example — albeit for actions that pale in comparison to anything the Red Brigades ever did. Most damningly, these measures have been applied to pro-Palestinian activists almost explicitly, who object to British facilitation of a contemporary genocide as well as Britain’s long-standing support for Israeli apartheid. Far-right agitators, responsible for rioting and terrorising communities on racially aggravated grounds in 2024, face no such comparable repression.
The world Fisher expected to see, once the British left got its act together, is here. These crackdowns are not evidence of a coming defeat, however. The left has never felt more empowered in this country, and it is making gains not seen since a decade ago. This time, however, the left is also refusing to make concessions. Smearing anti-Zionists as ‘antisemites’, for example, doesn’t work anymore. Smearing them as terrorists won’t either.
Indirect Action
Fisher’s predictions regarding direct action and the repressions that would result from its tactical use are not the only prescient aspect of his 2015 blogpost. He insists that new narratives are also essential to support these logistical disruptions.
Capitalist realism isn’t simply a bricks-and-mortar system, after all; it is also a ideological regime that installs capitalism as the basis of all ‘common sense’. The rise of social media as a newly putrid battleground was something Fisher was tentatively excited about, before he abstained from the impotence of Twitter debates. In fact, the intensification of Twitter circle-jerks was a problem he identified much earlier than most. His essay “Touchscreen Capture” is one example of him critiquing the further entrenchment of neoliberalised communications technology in the 21st century.
In his blogpost following the 2015 general election, Mark raises the same argument. The contradictory delibidinising tendencies of addictive social-media platforms is an intensification of old PR exercises from the 1970s and ’80s. It’s all very intentional. “This is why the intensification and proliferation of the capitalist technologies of reality management and libidinal engineering in the 1980s was not merely some happy coincidence for neoliberalism; neoliberalism’s success was inconceivable without [new communicative] technologies”, Fisher writes. But he knew the solution wasn’t abandoning social media either. To do so entirely would only be to cede its possession to the right. He argues instead that communicative technologies must be used proactively, not reactively.
This is because logistical disruption must be coupled with narrative disruption. Logistics and narrativisation are two sides of the same coin for capitalism itself, after all. It is for this “reason that direct action, while of course crucial, will never be sufficient: we also need to act indirectly, by generating new narratives, figures and conceptual frames.”
Accelerationist Narratives
This tension between direct and indirect action was a focal point of Fisher’s work during the 2010s. I’ve previously written about how he despised the resurgent purity politics of an American left that took far too seriously the admonishments of the right.
These admonishments were common in orbit of the Occupy movement:
In the London Evening Standard, one columnist crowed that it “was capitalism and globalisation that produced the clothes the protesters wear, the tents they sleep in, the food they eat, the phones in their pockets and the social networks they use to organise.”
In an essay titled “Postcapitalist Desire” (and in the first session of his postgraduate seminar of the same name), Fisher highlights how the right’s claims of leftist hypocrisy don’t actually warrant being taken seriously. What Mark heard in these dismissals was little more than the sort of miserablism espoused by his former lecturer Nick Land, whose “theory-fictional provocations were guided by the assumption that desire and communism were fundamentally incompatible.”
If Land was nonetheless useful in the 2010s, Mark argued its for the way he identifies points of contention that the left needs better arguments to rebuke. He identifies three of these, arguing that Land’s writings
- “luridly expose the scale and the nature of the problems the left now faces”, that is, “the extent to which [capitalism’s] victory was dependent upon the libidinal mechanisms of the advertising and PR companies whose semiotic excrescences despoil former public spaces”;
- “expose an uncomfortable contradiction between the radical left’s official commitment to revolution, and its actual tendency towards political and formal-aesthetic conservatism”;
- “assume a terrain that politics now operates on, or must operate on to be effective — a terrain in which technology is embedded in everyday life and the body; design and PR are ubiquitous; financial abstraction enjoys dominion over government; life and culture are subsumed into cyberspace”.
But Mark, like the rest of the blogosphere, went to great lengths to distance himself from his former lecturer. In fact, much of Mark’s 2010s writing demonstrates how inapposite and blinkered Land’s arguments are in the present, despite the fact Land has successfully seduced Silicon Valley losers into believing their wealth-generating shortsightedness is radical.
In this regard, whilst Land may have ultimately won out in narratively hijacking “accelerationism” for his own ends, Mark’s definition is far more interesting and aligned with his perspective on direct and indirect action when he writes:
I want to situate accelerationism not as some heretical form of Marxism, but as an attempt to converge with, intensify, and politicize the most challenging and exploratory dimensions of popular culture. [Ellen] Willis’s desire for “a social and psychic revolution of almost inconceivable magnitude” and her “quarrel with the left” over desire and freedom can provide a different way into thinking what is at stake in this much misunderstood concept. A certain, perhaps now dominant, take on accelerationism has it that the position amounts to a cheerleading for the intensification of any capitalist process whatsoever, particularly the “worst,” in the hope that this will bring the system to a point of terminal crisis. (One example of this would be the idea that voting for Reagan and Thatcher in the ‘80s was the most effective revolutionary strategy, since their policies would supposedly lead to insurrection). This formulation, however, is question-begging in that it assumes what accelerationism rejects—the idea that everything produced “under” capitalism fully belongs to capitalism. By contrast, accelerationism maintains that there are desires and processes which capitalism gives rise to and feeds upon, but which it cannot contain; and it is the acceleration of these processes that will push capitalism beyond its limits. Accelerationism is also the conviction that the world desired by the Left is post-capitalist—that there is no possibility of a return to a pre-capitalist world and that there is no serious desire to return to such a world, even if we could.
The impotence of Occupy
Mark’s ‘accelerationist’ position is important in the present context because he also uses it to intervene within the horizonalist contradictions that made the Occupy movement so impotent. In an essay titled “Indirect Action: Some Misgivings About Horizontalism”, Mark is critical of any leftist tendency that sees basic strategic planning and political organization as copying the modus operandi of the State. (This may sounds silly now, but 15 years ago, it was all too commonly heard.) Mark instead wants “to argue … that this rejection of the very concept of authority has been disastrous for the left.”
It has led to a kind of self-defeating and self-loathing marginalization and to an unwarranted faith in spontaneity and face-to-face interaction (an emphasis strangely at odds with the technological aspects of network culture, which have downgraded the importance of face-to-face communication). It has contributed to the left’s continuing failure to make any hegemonic headway, despite the spectacular discrediting of neoliberalism caused by the financial crisis. Never has, the word ‘curate’ been so widely used in cultural circles, but never has there been less confidence in the validity of the concepts inherent in curatorship: the linking of management with care and authority. In summary, the left’s disdaining of authority — and the concomitant embrace of ‘horizontalism’ — has done little to displace what I have called capitalist realism: the belief that capitalism is the only political-economic system that ‘works’, and that it is impossible even to imagine any alternative to it. In fact, rather than challenging capitalist realism, horizontalism has — at least in some respects — further embedded it.
The Occupy movement was an instance of raised-consciousness for a generation, but it was, unfortunately, toothless. The movement didn’t so much make demands as vague suggestions. It asked for alternate forms of democracy, corporate accountability, and reform. In fairness, Occupy was also a reckoning with a newly digital world. The lack of interest in authority may have also come from a feeling that people didn’t know what was to be done. Who did? Even Fisher writes with the benefit of at least 5 years’ hindsight.
Nevertheless, in reflecting on the Occupy movement for himself, Fisher was more forthright a few years later, when many on the left had yet to fully reckon with their late-00s failures. His (accelerationist) view was that no political project of resistance will achieve much of anything if it abstains from involvement with new communicative-capitalist infrastructures.
Trying to make sense of the logic of Occupy in hindsight, Fisher suggests that the “idea must be a kind of contagious withdrawal from the structures of the State, capital and the media, which will spread through lateral networks rather than via the ‘arborescent’ structures of mass media and parliamentary politics.” In that regard, it constitutes a contradiction: how can a movement spread through networks it is abstaining from? That’s not to say that posting alone will change the world — we know it won’t — but Occupy also demonstrated that not having a clear message or narrative made its forms of direct action ultimately inconsequential. Indeed, direct actions needs indirect action as its underside.
Mark continues:
If the aim is not to take over or even influence the State, then there must be a faith in the practical sufficiency of the movement itself. The point is not to direct demands towards, or protest against, an Other, but for the movement to constitute itself as an immediately effective collectivity. Yet, this faith in immediate – which is to say, unmediated – action betrays a lack of faith in the efficacy of indirect action.
Mark writes even more forthrightly on this topic in an essay entitled “Politics Beyond the Street: KP Brehmer and the Making-Visible of Capitalist Realism”:
‘How do you occupy an abstraction?’ McKenzie Wark posed this question in 2011, in the wake of the Occupy protests. It remains an urgent problem, especially now that the Occupy movement’s momentum has dissipated, and capital continues on its remorseless march. We’re now very aware that, far from threatening neoliberalism, the financial crisis of 2008-9 has led to the intensified form of neoliberalism known as austerity. We should also be aware of the limitations of the idea of taking direct action against capital. If capital is essentially abstract, then what would such direct action entail? Capitalism is a system of virtualities. It cannot be directly experienced, even if it conditions most of what we can now experience. (It may be difficult to conceive of what really occupying capital might involve, but we can be certain that capital occupies us.) Successful action against capital must therefore be of an indirect sort — it must involve challenging and replacing the machineries of mediation which impose capitalist reality upon us.
Lessons Learned
The pro-Palestine movement of the 2020s has achieved both of these things very successfully. It is the “hub struggle” uniting and expanding the left as a whole. It has brought the virtuality of the arms trade — anonymous UK factories idealogically and physically distanced from the atrocities they facilitate abroad — firmly into touching distance.
We have — in part, and even regrettably — Israel’s own insanity to thank for this. Israel’s genocide has revealed the horror of their exaggerated political system — that is, as the sharp edge of Western-imperial geopolitics overall — to a world that has been largely ignorant of its injustices for decades. Palestinian solidarity has never been more popular as a result, even if there is a lingering grief regarding how overdue that solidarity is. Grief aside, however, it is clear that various improvements have been made — improvements demonstrable given the fact that the pushback against them has been more authoritarian than anything seen so far this century.
The strength of the Palestinian solidarity movement is found in its infrastructural diversity. Activists, actionists, journalists, investigators, academics, social-media influencers, artists, writers, organisers, et al. – not only are all present in the movement, in active face-to-face communication with one another, but many individuals also occupy multiple roles at once. A vibrant communality offers the most vibrant glimmer of a communism to come. Movements that Fisher saw as lacking ten years ago, today seem to have learned lessons from past impotencies.
I still have my critiques. If I’m totally honest, I think the cultural arm of the pro-Palestinian movement continues to be lacking. Perhaps I’m just a bit worn out by hearing the same Lowkey, Bob Vylan and Macklemore songs on social media posts. I unfortunately don’t rate the music that highly — perhaps because the protest-music formula feels a little tired. (Their “official commitment to revolution” does tend toward “formal-aesthetic conservatism.”) But these artists have other strengths. They have used their cultural platforms proactively to become vital and visible spokespeople for the movement. Truthfully, many of them are better activists than they are musicians. (Kneecap may be the one exception that does it all with consistent aplomb.)
Beyond these musicians, the pro-Palestine movement has utilised social media very effectively, and we are also seeing a movement finally carving out a broader media ecosystem. Ten years ago, Novara Media was leading the charge in this regard, but they have since positioned themselves as an alternative media outlet in competition with the mainstream. As such, they have inserted themselves into a mainstream media ecology that has subsequently led to them making many of the same mistakes or orbiting the same talking points. Other outlets defer to their own authority and expertise instead, which they know outpaces that of the mainstream without giving a shit if they attract mainstream attention. (Matt Kennard was very good on this during the Brize Norton 5 panel discussion embedded above.)
Far from being self-maligned, a true alternative is offered that highlights just how moribund the legacy media — embroiled with the political establishment — has become. They supply an answer to one of the central questions that preoccupied Fisher in the mid-2010s:
How can the politics of street protest make any contact with the abstract structures of capital that appear to be immune to direct action?
A networked politics has since formed whereby footage of direct action goes viral on social media, leading to concerned citizens doing their own research. But the flow of information is not one-directional. Investigative journalists informed actionists who transform abstract structures into real-world locations.
New Blogtivisms
By way of an example, after the action my partner is alleged to have been involved with in Wolverhampton, I saw a video on social media highlighting the industrial history of the neighbourhood.
Gordon Dimmack is a blogger and resident of Wolverhampton. On August 27th, he travelled to the site where the action took place. Standing outside the gated factory, he began to share his thoughts:
I’m outside Moog Aircraft Systems in Pendeford in Wolverhampton, and the reason I’m here is because yesterday morning, in the early hours, four activists from the group Palestinian Martyrs for Justice broke in and allegedly caused a load of criminal damage. Because they say that Moog Aircraft Systems supplies training systems to Elbit Systems, a company in Israel; that trains the pilots to fly around in the F-35s above Gaza doing all these war crimes. And they say that this is a company that is complicit in that… in that system…
He stumbles.
I’m really, really unhappy about this. I’m gonna break… I had this whole speech that I was gonna do… And I’m gonna break from it and just talk from the heart.
This is a mile down the road from where I live. Pendeford, Wolverhampton – we have a deep pride in our history. All the companies around here, on this site and around here, like Doughty Bolton Paul’s and the Lucas Aerospace up the road – they were all companies and manufacturers that helped defeat fascism in World War II. We built the planes… Doughty Bolton Paul’s actually built a plane that fought in the Battle of Britain. And my grandad… My grandad actually built the rivets that put the Spitfires and the Hurricanes together; [the planes] that fought fascism in World War II.
And here we are now, with companies on the same sites profiting from [fascism]. I’m fuming! I am absolutely fuming. We have a deep pride in this area for our history of fighting fascism, of fighting the worst kinds of evil you can possibly imagine. We… I am deeply proud of it. My family is rooted in this history. All around this area there are mosaics and signs and even brickwork with pictures of Spitfires and Hurricanes, and the Doughty Boulton Paul’s plane. We’re deeply proud of it in this area, and now…
These companies that are sitting on the land that these great organizations once operated under are now supplying the very sort of evil that we fought against in World War II.
It was deeply affecting for me to see him at the site, overcome with emotion. Because, of course, he’s right. What’s worrying, though, is that Wolverhampton’s industries are not alone in subsisting on this kind of underhand complicity and active facilitation. (I’ve long been aware of a similar ideological obfuscation around similar industries where I grew up in Hull.) They are so many sites across the UK that warrant this level of scrutiny — and then some! Furthermore, what’s dangerous is that the romanticisation of these industrial sites has helped to enable that underhandedness for decades.
But a networked politics dismantles all of this. Both materially and ideologically, there is no peaceful space for business-as-usual. What has been hiding in plain sight is made newly visible. Direct and indirect action, far from being opposed, are now immersed in collaboration. The successes of this collaboration speak for themselves. For all the government’s draconian clampdowns on those mobilising for life, I cannot see them defeating them. All they have done is make new martyrs and elevate new spokespeople within the movement, inspiring others to take action until something changes.
Far from being parochially irrelevant in death, I’m left wondering once again what Mark would think about all of this leftist organising and activism in the present. If he was here, I think he’d be hugely impressed and pleased by what he saw.