Labour’s crisis paralysis reflected capitalist realism’s saturation of the party’s infrastructure

Evidence

You say “reflexive cringe”, I say “reflexive impotence”… Labour’s slowness to respond to the crisis was not merely some failure of judgement or strategy; it was a consequence of how deeply capitalist realism had saturated the party. There was no question of Labour using the crisis to impose its own programme, because, by 2008, it didn’t have much of programme beyond capitalist realism. Everything had been set up for a corporate appeasement, and there were neither the organisational nor the intellectual infrastructure to come up with anything new. Capitalist realism wasn’t something that Labour was waiting out and planning to overcome, one day; it was embedded as an effectively permanent baseline set of conditions — conditions which receded from visibility even as they imposed strict limits on what could be said and thought. — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk, 1796

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Capitalist realism restricts the horizon of what is politically possible — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk: The Collected and Unpublished…, 410; Capitalist realism defines politically possible options, which diverge from physical realities; Capitalist realism’s required realism is an escalating series of depressive thresholds (+1 more)

Broader Connections

• Capitalist realism restricts the horizon of what is politically possible #expands (0.95) — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk, 410
• Capitalist realism defines politically possible options, which diverge from physical realities #expands (0.80)
• Capitalist realism’s required realism is an escalating series of depressive thresholds #expands (0.75)