Declinist realism

It is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of the welfare state. I am, of course, doing quite a bit more than merely paraphrasing Mark Fisher, but there is something about his 2009 book Capitalist Realism that strikes me as correct.

Fisher argued that after 1989, capitalism managed to present itself as the only feasible economic system. He was not the only person to proclaim, in one way or another, the end of history, but he certainly believed it had ended abruptly, just before we got to the good part. Now we are all stuck in the traps of late-stage capitalism, convinced that our situation is inescapable.

Irrespective of what you might believe about capitalism, free markets or any other economic concept, Fisher makes two points that I find, with some twists, highly applicable to modern Britain. The first concerns the system’s ability to absorb opposition. In Fisher’s conception, anti-capitalism can circulate as entertainment, advertising or virtue signalling without seriously threatening the underlying economic arrangements it condemns.

From this perspective, criticism of the system is a quintessential part of the experience of participating in it. Every opposition eventually settles into demanding relief from the system’s excesses, with the question of replacing it slipping from view.

The second idea is that of “reflexive impotence”. Yes, people recognise the issues with capitalism, but they fail to imagine a way of producing change. Understanding the problem becomes fully compatible with doing nothing about it.

With this in mind, perhaps an accurate diagnosis of political thinking in Britain is something I will call “declinist realism” — that is, our collective inability to imagine what functioning capitalism with moderate economic growth even looks like any more.

We struggle to imagine an economy in which increasing productivity leads to more investment, competition improves services and ordinary work allows people to buy themselves better lives.

In this cruel and relentless zero-sum world, economic life boils down to a contest over who pays and who receives

To many people, particularly young people who haven’t experienced a single year of economic growth since they were born, prosperity increasingly appears to mean securing a protected claim on somebody else’s income. In this cruel and relentless zero-sum world, economic life boils down to a contest over who pays and who receives.

As an early prophet of declinist realism, the nation’s favourite Money Saving Expert has spent years bombarding us with quick guides on how to embrace zero-sum thinking in a declinist world.

The key feature of declinist realism is that it produces a thoroughly ingrained form of false consciousness

We are led to believe that any improvement in our finances comes from managing their eternal scarcity, such as getting the timing right when buying a railcard, constantly switching current account providers to juice abysmal switching bonuses and investing all our life savings in underperforming cash ISAs. After all, in declinist realist Britain, we cannot even entertain the idea that investing in equities might be a better alternative (although objectively it is and the expert himself has done a U-turn on this topic recently).

The key feature of declinist realism is that it produces a thoroughly ingrained form of false consciousness. Of course, criticism of economic decline and stagnation exists. Plenty of think tanks, economists and other brave voices dedicate their entire careers to pointing out obstacles to growth and sound public finances.

Nevertheless, the political class must process this criticism through the lens of declinist realism. Opposition to economic decline ultimately becomes a rallying cry for exemptions from its consequences.

Once you see it, it’s hard to unsee it. Yes, of course we need economic growth, but it needs to be good growth or, better still, small, organic amounts of growth carefully distributed around every postcode. Yes, we need to level up, but we’re going to do it through an overly expensive government office building that barely anyone goes to. Yes, there is a chronic shortage of housing, but ultimately what people need is state subsidies for mortgage deposits. Yes, we can’t build infrastructure, but we’re creating a new government body to oversee how much non-construction happens, and we’re monitoring the situation. Yes, we need to shorten NHS waiting lists, but we’re going to do that by suppressing demand and redirecting patients to alternative (and potentially inappropriate) forms of care. Yes, we’re marching headfirst into a debt crisis, but we need to renew our commitment to ancient Anglo-Saxon institutions such as ye olde winter fuell payment.

This thinking also encourages other inexplicable behaviours, such as petty authoritarianism (your choice of diet selfishly adds to demand for NHS services, how dare you?) and policy outsourcing when the government wants to avoid scrutiny for decisions its client groups may find uncomfortable (like the Fair Pay Commission either suppressing public sector wages or increasing them beyond the state’s means in what appears to be a random walk).

Perhaps what Fisher fundamentally understood was that societies are fully capable of recognising their own failures while treating them as inescapable. We are all declinist realists. Even the most true-believing and optimistic YIMBY has a sense, deep down, that any prospect of improvement is merely utopian.

The task of every government now is to undertake a programme of criticism and self-criticism, overcome its declinist false consciousness and discover through practice that what it assumes to be historical necessity can be avoided.

In other words, you can just do things, provided that you can bring yourself to imagine them.