“It is clear that capitalism, with its ceaseless boom and bust cycles, is itself, fundamentally and irreducibly, bi-polar”
Ewan Morrison has just written an in memorium of Mark Fisher:
https://areomagazine.com/2023/01/18/the-great-reboot-in-memoriam-mark-fisher/
I met Mark Fisher a few times around the turn of the millennium in London when he was still part of CCRU and I followed his blogging career from 2003 until his death. I always enjoyed his work even if I didn’t always agree with his judgments. The mixture of culture, politics and philosophy very much resonated with my own influences and experiences. A passionate engagement with many disparate elements of life. Although his style is not my style - crucially my work has more nob gags in it.
I am now going to do something incredibly reckless. I am going to speculate on the psychiatric condition of a dead person - but there is a reason for this. I suspect that Fisher had bipolar 2. Bipolar 2 is sometimes described as the less severe form of bipolar disorder where the mania does not reach levels that require hospitalisation (and is thus called hypomania) but the depression is deeper and more frequent. Those with bipolar 2 will generally present with recurrent depression that is often difficult to treat with common tools such as SSRIs. That “less severe” bit is misleading. Yes, the hypomania doesn’t put you in hospital, but the depression can kill you.
Fisher himself described his own recurrent depression since his teens and accounts of others illustrate classic hypomanic behaviour. His own output demonstrated periods of extreme productivity and then nothing. How do I know about this condition? (hint: look at the posting patterns on this substack)
So why does this matter? Speculation like this is not going to bring him back nor is it going lessen the loss for those who loved him. But it does provide a view into his own obsessions with Capitalism and its Others. In 2005, Fisher wrote October 6, 1979: Captialism and Bipolar Disorder: http://k-punk.abstractdynamics.org/archives/005660.html (a title with multiple Deleuze & Guattari references - where’s the Morecambe & Wise, Mark?). There is much in this article to agree with. I do think he pushes the link with Captialism causing bipolar too far. I don’t think that mental illnesses suddenly appeared in the eighteenth century along with the industrial revolution - although it is possible to say that the upheavals of moving to cities and decline in living standards for industrial workers compared to rural labourers probably had a negative impact on mental health. I would also say that our understanding of mental illness has improved in the last 18 years - although it is still woeful. The notion that depression is simply due to low levels of serotonin has now been thoroughly debunked (while it still exists in some parts of popular culture). Mental illnesses have a broad mix of causes (often genetic, physical, and emotional). You can make the link that elements of capitalism exacerbate the stresses and strains of life on us. But feudalism wasn’t a walk in the park either.
Which brings me to a broader critique of critiques of Capitalism. Many on the left will probably read the following as the waffle of a Centrist Dad, a social democrat milquetoast who doesn’t have the stomach for revolution. And they may well be right - but part of being a Centrist Dad are enraging tactics of accommodation and reasonableness like the one I just did. Anyway, calling it “Capitalism” with a big “C” makes it seem bigger and more uniform than it actually is. There are many capitalisms - the state capitalism of China, the crony capitalism of many countries, the social welfare capitalism of Europe, whatever it is that the US is currently doing. There are many components to these systems - governments, companies, banks, workers, consumers, investors, the non-human world that we inhabit. Fisher’s critique of Capitalism’s claim that “there is no alternative” ignores that there are already many alternatives. When people say that we must get rid of Capitalism, I generally wonder which capitalism it is that they want to get rid of. Are we talking about a little more banking regulation or the abolition of all private property? Because these are two very different propositions.
Personally, I think we need to experiment more economically and socially. What do new, cooperative forms of commerce look like? We need to stop running our welfare states in the ground (there is no good reason for poverty in our lands of plenty). And democratic governments (as the collective representatives of all their people, not just the rich) need to show more willingness to exert countervailing control over the commercial entities that operate within and across their borders. Authoritarian states have demonstrated no compunction in reining in their businesspeople (just ask Jack Ma, although he will need to check with Xi before he answers) - although I am not advocating that we ditch rule of law. Just that we apply the laws we have fairly and maybe draft a couple of new ones. Unions are probably a good idea.
Will this be enough? Possibly not. The disturbing work of Walter Scheidel - https://press.princeton.edu/books/paperback/9780691183251/the-great-leveler - indicates that the only things that substantially reduce inequality are mass-mobilization warfare, transformative revolutions, state collapse, and catastrophic plagues. BTW COVID doesn’t count as “catastrophic”, we are talking Black Death-style, 30%-of-your-population-dying plagues. The reason that inequality declines in these environments is that everyone loses but the rich have more to lose than others. You say you want a revolution? Well, be careful what you wish for. It’s not going to be hugs, puppies, corn fields, and ballet in the evening. That being said, we’ll probably have a revolution some day anyway. Nothing lasts for ever.
While capitalism is bipolar, I think it’s more accurate to say that human history is a cycle of good times and bad - 7 years of plenty, 7 years of lean. We as a species are bipolar. That’s cold comfort when you’re in the depths of a deep depression. But nothing lasts for ever. That’s what gets you through.
Capitalism with its ceaseless boom and bust - I like to juxtapose it next to socialism and communism which seem to be ceaseless bust and bust cycles. I love to poke capitalism bashers on what life would be like under their ideal form of government, first they don’t actually know what capitalism is, then they like to imagine socialism (or their preferred form) as the one in which life is basically the same as today but in which all of the hard problems they had have been magically dealt with by someone else and they don’t have to think about them anymore. They remind me of the lovely Jehovah’s Witness lady who used to hang around in Cronulla plaza when I was very young, she used to tell me that when the kingdom of heaven came I would have lions and tigers to play with - to which I (demonstrating my 9 year old savvy) replied “what about a Nintendo?” Apparently that wasn’t part of her gods plan but I experienced heaven on earth the following Christmas anyway.