Anti-capitalist protest becomes carnivalesque background noise without an alternative model

Evidence

Since it was unable to posit a coherent alternative political-economic model to capitalism, the suspicion was that the actual aim was not to replace capitalism but to mitigate its worst excesses; and, since the form of its activities tended to be the staging of protests rather than political organization, there was a sense that the anti-capitalism movement consisted of making a series of hysterical demands which it didn’t expect to be met. Protests have formed a kind of carnivalesque background noise to capitalist realism, and the anti-capitalist protests share rather too much with hyper-corporate events like 2005’s Live 8, with their exorbitant demands that politicians legislate away poverty. — Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism, 32

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Believing capitalism is bad licenses continued participation in it — Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism: Is There No…, 31; Anti-control politics must invent discontent forms beyond wages — Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism: Is There No…, 68; Left protest shifted from workplace to spectacle because it lacked embedded organizations. — Arthur Borriello and Anton Jäger, The Populist Moment: The Left After the…, 156 (+7 more)

Related

• Anti-state rhetoric across the spectrum now sustains capitalist realism (similarity 0.84)
• Austerity protests can win determinate goals unlike symbolic anticapitalist carnivals (similarity 0.82)
• The 2010 student protests expressed discontent with capitalist realism itself (similarity 0.80)
• Anti-capitalist messages on screen can end up reinforcing capitalist realism (similarity 0.80)
• Jungle carried an anti-capitalist politics that never met a matching political movement (similarity 0.78)

Broader Connections

• Anti-state rhetoric across the spectrum now sustains capitalist realism #corroborates (0.82) — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk, 1580
• Anti-capitalist messages on screen can end up reinforcing capitalist realism #expands (0.80) — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk, 2223
• Covert framing, not policy substance, determined public protests #complicates (0.75) — Saher Selod, Forever Suspect_ Racialized…, 480