Juno and I went down to Woolwich Crown Court for the sentencing of the Filton 4 today, after getting back from Birmingham last night. My thanks to D’am for inviting both of us to speak about the Moog 4’s case and the Filton case.
This is a short talk given at the ICA on 29th May, as part of an event coinciding with the exhibition ‘Genuine Fake Premium Economy’. It’s a summation of a few ideas that have been kicking around this blog so far this year. If you happen to be an avid reader, it will be familiar. Consider it a TL;DR for everyone else.
How would Mark Fisher have approached our broken economy?
Fisher is hailed today as a diagnostician, following the publication of his first book, Capitalist Realism, in 2009. Specifically, he introduces, analyses and makes accessible Fredric Jameson’s claim that “it is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism”, which speaks to the fact that capitalism has become so ‘naturalised’ as an ideological position that we cannot ‘think’ beyond it. It is a work of ideology critique, in that regard, which wrestles with the same problem that Karl Marx sought to overcome when he turned a Hegelian idealism on its head. Fisher’s great achievement, nonetheless, was revitalising that position for a new generation in a new era – one left baffled by the seemingly inconsequential nature of the financial crash of 2008.
Having offered up this diagnosis, what was the treatment? Admittedly, Fisher didn’t really get around to it in any of his subsequent books, but he was actively working on his argument for almost a decade.
The one thing few people appreciate about Fisher’s published works is that they should probably be read a reverse order. His second book, 2014’s Ghosts of My Life, is really the precursor to Capitalist Realism, detailing the emergence of a sharpening cultural contradiction in the mid-2000s, whereby our sense of neoliberal stasis and the apparent closure of any alternative to capitalism is made self-evident by a culture that also acts like we’ve achieved everything we’re able to and are now living at the end of history. It’s central concept of ‘hauntology’, borrowed from Derrida, is intriguing in this context, because the spectres of so many alternatives nonetheless break through capitalist realism’s libidinal skin constantly, and perhaps more convincingly in Fisher’s cultural application than in Derrida’s more politically philosophical one. Indeed, various spectres of cultural and political alternatives continue to haunt us, and it was Fisher’s ultimate goal to do the work of materialising them. His final book, 2017’s The Weird and the Eerie, is based on some of his very early blogposts from 2003–2004, but is also a culmination of that hauntological project, naming the aesthetic categories where alternatives visibly break through our malaise most monstrously. Suffice it say, when reading Fisher’s work, time is constantly out of joint.
But that was Fisher in the 2000s. As his books travelled backwards, his blog kept moving forwards. 2015, in particular, was an interesting year for him. He appeared newly radicalised by the electoral defeat of the Labour Party during that year’s general election, and so set about writing a plan of action. But as is often the case with Fisher’s work, his tone far from preachy. He is writing as much to convince himself of what he has to say, dragging himself out of the depressions that inevitably follow another electoral defeat. Returning to the concept that made his name, for example, he writes about how:
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. Contrary to the pessimism that is often seen as foundational to his work, Fisher identified a new “popular enthusiasm – an enthusiasm that capitalist realism is set up to prevent emerging”. It may not have been strong enough yet to forestall the Tories’ ascendence in 2015, 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 – “talking to opponents”, the creation of new “social spaces” and “knowledge exchange labs”, where people can learn more about the nature of our socio-economic system beyond the enclaves of higher education.
Most interesting to me, however, out of Fisher’s various recommendations for encouraging popular mobilisation at this time, is No. 7 on his list: “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 11 years later in 2026, it is striking how prescient it feels. Fisher is of course talking about 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. It has a long and celebrated history in this country, with the Suffragettes always being the go-to example. But 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’. It is a 21st century revamp of commonplace anti-leftist suppression, hardly that different from American McCarthyism, South Korea’s 1948 National Security Act, or the widespread imprisonment of Italian leftists in the 1970s.
As we know, these regimes readily employed propaganda campaigns to further delegitimise these movements. For this reason, alongside Fisher’s predictions regarding direct action, he also reiterates a further point, key to his work overall: new counter-narratives are essential to support these logistical disruptions and embolden activists themselves.
Capitalist realism isn’t a bricks-and-mortar system, after all. As Marx also pointed out, capitalism is also an ideological regime that installs the ideas of the ruling class as the foundation of all ‘common sense’ as well. The rise of social media as a new battleground for ideas in this regard was something that tentatively excited Fisher in the 2000s, as significant in the establishment of new repressions and freedoms as the invention of the printing press was. But by the 2010s, he understood its central function more as a kind of “Touchscreen Capture” – that is, the further entrenchment of depoliticization via neoliberalised communications technologies in the 21st century.
In his blogpost following the 2015 general election, Mark raises the same argument. It’s all very intentional, he says.
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.
This is because logistics and narrativisation are two sides of the same coin: one allows capital to circulate; the other allows its ideology to circulate. It is for this reason, Fisher continues, “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.”
This tension between a direct and indirect action was a focal point of Fisher’s work during the 2010s. In another essay, titled “Indirect Action: Some Misgivings About Horizontalism”, he is especially critical of any leftist tendency that disavows any engagement in narrativization – or more specifically, the left’s authoritative advancement of its own ideas and the time it takes to formulate them – instead deferring to an unwarranted faith in spontaneity and face-to-face interaction – something that social media itself has encouraged within us, albeit through a kind of reverse psychology, where touching grass and doing it for the ‘gram both encourage the same kind of passive participation. Art and culture have a particularly important role to play here. Given the additional context of Fisher’s role as a lecturer in the Visual Cultures department at Goldsmiths – which I know from experience is not lacking in students who want to be curators – he tellingly adds:
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.
It was on this basis that Fisher saw the Occupy movement, emerging in response to the financial crash, as especially disappointing and toothless. Occupy asked for alternate forms of democracy, corporate accountability, and reform, but it wasn’t so good at making authoritative demands. 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. His accelerationist view – which explicitly counterposed his hauntological writings – was that no political project of resistance will achieve much of anything if it abstains from involvement with new communicative-capitalist infrastructures.
This is one the sharpest contradictions we currently face. Social media is a hellscape, more so now than ever, as the enshittification of everything intensifies, but how can a movement spread through networks it otherwise wants to abstain 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 more direct action broadly impotent. Indeed, Occupy was lacking both direct action and indirect action.
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.
That lack of faith is understandable, of course. What we’re dealing with, most often, when engaging in direct or indirect action, are abstractions – both rhetorical and real. In another essay, entitled “Politics Beyond the Street”, Fisher borrows a question asked by McKenzie Wark during the Occupy movement – ‘How do you occupy an abstraction?’ – and adds:
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.
The pro-Palestine movement of the 2020s has made considerable headway in developing this kind of struggle. It is a “hub struggle” uniting and expanding the left as a whole. It has brought the virtuality of the arms trade — anonymous UK factories ideologically and physically distanced from the atrocities they facilitate abroad — firmly into touching distance. Actionists themselves like to say that the trials they inevitably face on criminal damage charges are extensions of their actions, but here too, the action is of a more indirect sort. The judiciary clearly knows the power of indirect action in this sort of space, because it has resorted to denying many actionists legal defences. In essence, actionists are denied the opportunity to tell their own stories in a court room.
That makes the stories we tell outside of court all the more important. Advances have been made here too. Israel’s genocide has revealed the true horror of their exaggerated political system — that is, as the sharp edge of Western-imperial geopolitics overall — to a world that has, on the whole, 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 the left has seen in decades.
The strength of the Palestinian solidarity movement is also found in its diversity. Activists, actionists, journalists, investigators, academics, social-media influencers, artists, writers, organisers, etc. – not only are all present in the movement, in active face-to-face communication with one another, but many individuals occupy multiple roles at once. It’s been my recent pleasure to get to know the Moi Ko theatre company, for instance, whose members have both engaged in direct action themselves and also produce street theatre telling their stories as to why. It’s a movement that has also utilised social media both proactively and effectively.
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 inform actionists who transform abstract structures into real-world locations. Both materially and ideologically, there is no 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 being defeated. Clampdowns on direct action only emboldened indirect action, which encourages more to take direct action themselves. Far from being maligned, these movements explicitly seek to answer 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?
It’s a striking approach to a broken economy, because it is proceeds somewhat counterintuitively. Our economy is broken, and part of the reason that Keir Starmer has come down so hard on direct actionists is because he has sought to use the flow of capital through the so-called ‘defence’ industries to address this. As far as Starmer is concerned, direct actionists are setting out to break the things he hoped would fix the country. But it is precisely this approach to a broken economy – broken not just practically but morally, because it is soaked in blood from the Global South – that offers up a clear demand for an alternative. It doesn’t so much demand but declare that the economy the right seeks to fix through more immiseration will only be broken more and more frequently by a newly revitalised left. If Fisher was partial to Nietzsche’s strategy of philosophizing with a hammer, our contemporary protest movements have taken that sentiment literally. Neo-luddites aren’t just blowing up data centres but smashing up factories and their insurers and all the logistical nodes that normalise capitalist realism.
As ever, I’m ultimately left wondering what Fisher would make of the present. If he was here, I think he’d be no less horrified at the state of the world, but he’d also be hugely pleased by what he saw – at least as far as the left’s newly militant approach to logistical disruption is concerned.
Thanks.
I was on Voices Radio earlier today after getting an invite to come down from the lovely Nida Jafri. Neither Nida nor Juno could join me today, unfortunately, but the show was basically a live rendition of the new mix series that Juno and I have been occasionally putting together.
That series has so far been tracks that have been defining this new “bailed” period of life; this was an hour of tracks they requested down the phone whilst on remand in prison for six months from the end of August 2025 to the end of February 2026.
Their trial starts this week, so we’re heading up to Birmingham tomorrow, and I’m trying not to be overcome by the “you’re about to go off the edge of a big drop on a rollercoaster” feeling that’s been in my stomach the past few days. Who knows what will happen… If this is all news to you, you can learn more about their case here.
Shouts to Hiren for producing and saving me from hapless tech dramas.
Tracklist for today’s show below:
