Welcome to Episode 11 of Class Unity Transmissions!

In this episode, we are joined by Efraim Carlebach to discuss the 10-year anniversary of the publication of Mark Fisher’s seminal essay, Exiting the Vampire Castle. 

Published on November 24, 2013, Fisher’s essay is remembered today as a powerful shot across the bows of what was known at the time as the “call out” left. In particular, the essay was a response to a recent controversy stemming from the appearance of “working class” comedian Russell Brand on the BBC’s Newsnight program. Feminists expressed outraged at the BBC’s choice to interview Brand at all, noting the sexually insensitive nature of his content. Fisher repudiated these critics as “PoshLeft moralizers” and witch-hunting scolds, leveraging Brand’s apparent deafness to the linguistic norms of the middle-class gender lexicon in exchange for online clout. In their insistence that Brand’s white male privilege made him one of the oppressors, they had blinded themselves to the foundational role of working-class culture in revolutionary politics. 

Fisher’s defense of the working-class culture notwithstanding, his position on the priority of working-class politics was more ambiguous. In this discussion, we start by trying to situate Fisher as a left anti-capitalist. After his suicide in 2017, Fisher’s work on “capitalist realism” became something of a totem for the millennial left. However, as Carlebach argues, Fisher was never fully clear on what he meant by the term. On the one hand, he often referred to the idea — frequently attributed to Fredric Jameson — that we are so profoundly mentally stuck in within capitalist ideology that “it’s easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism.” On the other, he would sometimes make the interesting move of saying that capitalist realism was specifically “a pathology of the left.” 

Ultimately, the ambiguity was short-lived. Where Fisher has once posted approvingly of Adam Curtis’s documentary HyperNormalization, a pointed criticism of the counter-cultural left, the defeat of Jermey’s Corbyn’s leadership of the British Labour Party would see this theme would soon drop out of his work. The culturalist nature of Fisher’s defense of the working class folded easily enough into Fisher’s late-life return to the New Left, the politics of “consciousness raising,” and the idea of what he called “acid communism.”

Here he embraced the idea that capitalism is essentially a problem caused by “modernity.” Capitalism as an economic system was a problem primarily insofar as it worked towards the subsumption of belief systems, cultures and “lifeworlds.” In this respect, the influence on Fisher’s work of British New Left thinkers such as Stuart hall and Raymond Williams is evident. The political question, for Fisher, concerned the repudiation and overcoming of bourgeois epistemology. As such, his work stands as a paragon example of why it is not enough to be merely an anti-capitalist. 

For Carlebach, the goal of Marxism is not so much to tear down of bourgeois society but to transcend it, and to liberate it from the contractions of capitalism, the very mode of political economy that it itself created. Marx, seeing capitalism as the harbinger of our liberation as a species, eschewed the purely negative critique of capitalism as reactionary. The point of Marxist politics therefore is not to destroy the bourgeois revolution but to liberate it from capitalism, and make its fruits and rights available to all. 

This episode was recorded on Friday, September 29, 2023.

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Your hosts for this episode are:

1. Nicholas Kiersey: @occupyirtheory
   
2. C. Derick Varn: @skepoet
   
3. Noah LC
   

Relevant links:

• Carlebach’s article, “Forgetting Mark Fisher,” in Platypus Review 115 (April 2019), https://platypus1917.org/2019/04/01/forgetting-mark-fisher/
  
• Carlebach’s discussion about Fisher with the Association for the Design of History (January 17, 2021), https://www.youtube.com/live/Y-aOATKC4J0?si=idJ4NqGYfX-iSNQr
  

PRODUCTION NOTE: Due to a production error, the original version of this posted episode contained an “empty air” moment around the 14:30 mark. A corrected version of the episode was posted on January 9, 2024.