Capitalism is an infinitely plastic system that dismantles all transcendent codes

Evidence

If Postmodernism, as an enlarged third stage of classical capitalism, is a purer and more homogeneous expression of classical capitalism, from which many of the hitherto surviving enclaves of socioeconomic difference have been effaced (by way of their colonization and absorption by the commodity form), then it makes sense to suggest that the waning of our sense of history, and more particularly our resistance to globalizing or totalizing concepts like that of the mode of production itself, are a function of precisely that universalization of capitalism. Where everything is henceforth systemic the very notion of a system seems to lose its reason for being, returning only by way of a “return of the repressed” in the more nightmarish forms of 406 the “total system” fantasized by Weber or Foucault or the 1984 people. — Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic…, 865 (#expands, via linked claim)

I don’t for a moment want to excuse New Labour for its part in such disasters, but it has to be recognized that focus on government, like the focus on immoral individuals, is an act of deflection. Scapegoating an impotent government (running around to clean up the messes made by its business friends) arises from bad faith, from a continuing hostility to the Nanny State that nevertheless goes alongside a refusal to accept the consequences of the sidelining of government in global capitalism – a sign, perhaps, that, at the level of the political unconscious, it is impossible to accept that there are no overall controllers, that the closest thing we have to ruling powers now are nebulous, unaccountable interests exercising corporate irresponsibility. A case of fetishist disavowal, perhaps – ‘we know perfectly well that the government is not pulling the strings, but nevertheless…’ The disavowal happens in part because the centerlessness of global capitalism is radically unthinkable. — Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism, 130 (#complicates, via linked claim)

Both Marazzi and Sennett point out that the disintegration of stable working patterns was in part driven by the desires of workers – it was they who, quite rightly, did not wish to work in the same factory for forty years. In many ways, the left has never recovered from being wrong-footed by Capital’s mobilization and metabolization of the desire for emancipation from Fordist routine. … Antagonism is not now located externally, in the face-off between class blocs, but internally, in the psychology of the worker, who, as a worker, is interested in old-style class conflict, but, as someone with a pension fund, is also interested in maximizing the yield from his or her investments. There is no longer an identifiable external enemy. — Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism, 74 (#builds-on, via linked claim)

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Capitalist realism makes alternatives to capitalism unthinkable — Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism: Is There No…, 8; Capitalism differs from fascism in requiring no propaganda or subjectively assumed belief — Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism: Is There No…, 29; Capital absorbed the left’s own liberation desires against it — Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism: Is There No…, 74 (+6 more)

Related

• Total universalization of capitalism erases the concept of the system itself (similarity 0.83)
• The centerlessness of capitalism is unconsciously unbearable and disavowed (similarity 0.82)
• Capitalism sustains itself by recycling readymade archaisms, never creating the new (similarity 0.82)
• Capitalism is an infinitely plastic entity metabolizing all prior codes and social systems (similarity 0.82)
• Capitalist realism subordinates people to a reality that is infinitely plastic rather than solid. (similarity 0.82)
• Capitalism’s supposed pragmatism masks credulous fantasies of its own exceptional survival (similarity 0.81)
• Capitalism dissolves fixed moral codes and absorbs every outside force (similarity 0.81)
• Capitalist realism is the belief that capitalism is the only viable game in town (similarity 0.80)
• Capitalist realism reflects social decomposition, not just individual persuasion. (similarity 0.80)
• Capitalism subsumes all prior history by converting beliefs into monetized aesthetic objects (similarity 0.80)
• Postindustrial capitalism severs the continuity with the past that genetic criticism relied on (similarity 0.79)
• Capitalist realism requires materialist explanation, not individual psychology (similarity 0.79)
• Capitalist realism is a pathology of the left, not merely a right-wing imposition. (similarity 0.79)
• Advanced capitalism needs two contradictory legitimating discourses at once (similarity 0.79)
• Mistrust of hierarchy and organization fuels capitalist realism’s freeze on systemic change (similarity 0.79)

Broader Connections

• Total universalization of capitalism erases the concept of the system itself #expands (0.90) — Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic…, 865
• The centerlessness of capitalism is unconsciously unbearable and disavowed #complicates (0.75) — Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism, 130