The Problem is Not the End of Capitalism but 'the End' Itself

Rethinking Capitalist Realism

Dear Brothers, Sisters, Readers,

Perhaps it is true that God (regardless of whether or not he exists) individually blessed each of us with one way in which we can engage with, and possibly even influence, the world. I believe my method of doing so is through writing. Yet as any fellow writer knows, this is at times a cruel industry.

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In the last few years, our obsession with post-apocalyptic and end-of-the-world zombie films seems to have gained a renewed investment. Within the space of only a year, productions such as 28 Years Later, 2073, Apocalypse Z, or The Last of Us all appear to conveniently bring to mind the famous motto of Mark Fisher’s Capitalist Realism, that “it is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism.” For every hundred films imagining some form of the collapse of civilisation, hardly any films present visions of a civilization that continues after capitalism comes to an end. The historically more recent problem of the end of capitalism, it seems, is more difficult to face than the end of the world as such.

But is this really the right conclusion to draw today in the face of a proliferation of apocalyptic cinema? We should recall one of Freud’s methods of interpretation here: in dreams or literature, multiple presentations of an object often signifies that this very object is in fact what is missing. For example, a multiplicity of maternal imagoes will arise at the exact moment where maternal affection is the very thing that is most traumatically absent. In the same way, what seems clear from the masses of apocalyptic, end-of-world films is that it is precisely the end of the world that we have a great deal of trouble in thinking. ‘The end of the world’ is in fact a very malleable term: it could imply the almost complete end of biological life due to a solar or nuclear event, or it could more solipsistically imply the end of human civilisation. It could be triggered by a virus, global warming, a nuclear fallout, a zombie apocalypse, or universal infertility. The endless catalogue of films depicting ‘the end of times’ is not a testament to the fact that we have a well-defined idea of this end, but rather to the fact that we are almost entirely incapable of thinking this end without simultaneously obscuring it.

Following a Freudian logic, we have hundreds of theories of the end of the world because we do not have real understanding of it. The capitalist realist line therefore needs to be rethought: we can think neither the end of capitalism nor the end of the world. In fact, it is very possible that the two are intertwined, that we cannot think the end of the world (or that we can only think it in incoherent ways) because we cannot think the end of capitalism. The uncomfortable implication of this is that the distinction between the end of the world and the end of capitalism is a false distinction. Capitalism and the ‘world’ as such are indeed perplexing structures – Marx showed the dynamic complexity of the former, and for the French philosopher Alain Badiou, even the notion of a ‘world’ is incomplete and at times self-contradicting. Yet they are profoundly entangled. The wish to draw a neat division between the two has the inevitable consequence of not only confronting us with capitalism or the world, but with the very meaning of the ‘end’ itself.

The difficulty with which we think an ‘end’ – whether it is the world or capitalism, or any absolute limit-point – was the topic of Jean Baudrillard’s book The Illusion of the End. When we speak of the end, Baudrillard insists, we often in fact imply a latent form of continuity. The end eventually becomes manufactured: