The 2010 student protests expressed discontent with capitalist realism itself

Evidence

The only thing I can compare the current situation with is emerging from a state of deep depression. There’s the rush that you get simply from not being depressed anymore — the occasional lurching anxieties, a sense of how precarious it all seems (don’t drag me back into nothing) — and yet not only is it maintaining itself, it’s proliferating, intensifying, feeding on itself — it’s impossible, but it’s happening — the reality programme resetting itself — David Cameron’s response is both patronising and misjudged. The students should understand what they are protesting against before they protest. Yet it’s clearly Cameron who doesn’t have a handle on the current situation (who does?). As Richard argued in his talk at the UEL occupation, these flabby toffs don’t have the experience, the strategic intelligence or the ideological consistency to win a bitter fight. Cameron was a Tory leader constructed in, and geared up for, the pre-2008 “consensus of indifference” (Baudrillard) — he didn’t expect a struggle, certainly not with those who intend to win. What Cameron doesn’t grasp, doesn’t want to grasp, is the way that the fees are only the immediate cause of the new militancy. What has been provoked is a generalised discontent with nothing less than capitalist realism itself. — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk, 1527

Categorization

• DEFINE: Fisher’s own coinage ‘capitalist realism’ is given operational content here as the deeper object of generalized discontent.
• XREF: Fisher’s core thesis across this collection: protest movements as ruptures in the capitalist-realist horizon of no-alternative. — connects to: The 2010 protests broke through the end-of-history consensus onto uncertain terrain; Anti-capitalist protest becomes carnivalesque background noise without an alternative model — Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism: Is There No…, 32; The near-simultaneous 2011 protests revealed a shared deep crisis of neoliberal capitalism — Arthur Borriello and Anton Jäger, The Populist Moment: The Left After the…, 88 (+4 more)

Broader Connections

• The 2010 protests broke through the end-of-history consensus onto uncertain terrain #expands (0.90)
• Six persistent structural grievances sustained the student movement’s radicalization #expands (0.90)
• Anti-capitalist protest becomes carnivalesque background noise without an alternative model #contradicts (0.80) — Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism, 32
• Student protest compensated for failing democratic control mechanisms. #qualifies (0.75) — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School, 2614
• Capitalist realism is itself a pathology of the left #expands (0.75) — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk, 1643
• The near-simultaneous 2011 protests revealed a shared deep crisis of neoliberal capitalism #corroborates (0.72) — Arthur Borriello and Anton Jäger, The Populist Moment, 88
• Loathed-but-complied systems typify capitalist realism #expands (0.72)