Capital as cause-that-is-not-a-subject escapes all accountability structures

Evidence

This was what happened with the Hillsborough football disaster, the Jean Charles De Menezes farce and so many other cases. But this impasse – it is only individuals that can be held ethically responsible for actions, and yet the cause of these abuses and errors is corporate, systemic – is not only a dissimulation: it precisely indicates what is lacking in capitalism. What agencies are capable of regulating and controlling impersonal structures? How is it possible to chastise a corporate structure? Yes, corporations can legally be treated as individuals – but the problem is that corporations, whilst certainly entities, are not like individual humans, and any analogy between punishing corporations and punishing individuals will therefore necessarily be poor. And it is not as if corporations are the deep-level agents behind everything; they are themselves constrained by/ expressions of the ultimate cause-that-is-not-a-subject: Capital. — Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism, 145

Categorization

• DEFINE: The idea of Capital as ‘cause-that-is-not-a-subject’ is Fisher’s precise diagnosis of why corporate punishment fails; a core conceptual framing for the whole book.
• XREF: connects to: Capitalism has no center, only entities incapable of responsibility; Ethical appeals to individual responsibility let impersonal structures evade accountability — Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism: Is There No…, 139; Capital precedes and shapes resistance rather than resistance driving capital — Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic…, 923 (+8 more)

Related

• Capitalism has no center, only entities incapable of responsibility (similarity 0.90)
• Corporations resist ethical chastisement because they are not human individuals (similarity 0.87)
• Blame-shifting alternates between individual scapegoats and diffuse structure to shield capital (similarity 0.84)
• Capital’s center is missing yet still posited as a responsible agent (similarity 0.83)
• Capitalism shifts blame between individuals and structure to deflect accountability (similarity 0.82)
• Corporate vices are engendered by structure, not by individuals (similarity 0.82)
• Individualistic ethical models cannot grasp how corporations and Capital act (similarity 0.79)
• Corporate structure deadens and subsumes hopeful individual managers (similarity 0.79)
• Ethical appeals to individual responsibility let impersonal structures evade accountability (similarity 0.79)
• Capital’s missing center still gets posited because what exists cannot take responsibility (similarity 0.78)

Broader Connections

• Capital precedes and shapes resistance rather than resistance driving capital #corroborates (0.85) — Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic…, 923
• Real subsumption makes social relations emerge from capital itself #corroborates (0.82) — Grant Bollmer, Katherine Guinness, The Influencer Factory, 104
• Capital is a hyper-abstract structure that runs on our voluntary cooperation #expands (0.80) — Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism, 33
• Slow, distributed environmental harms escape moral accountability because causation is invisible #exemplifies (0.80) — Albert Bandura, Moral Disengagement, 2707