Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? by Mark Fisher

Author:Mark Fisher [Fisher, Mark]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 1846943175
Amazon: B008H3WB36
Publisher: John Hunt Publishing
Published: 2012-08-07T04:00:00+00:00

This is only the beginning, however. For the degree program as a whole, academics must prepare a ‘program specification’, as well as producing ‘annual program reports’, which record student performance according to ‘progression rates’, ‘withdrawal rates’, location and spread of marks. All students’ marks have to be graded against a ‘matrix’. This auto-surveillance is complemented by assessments carried out by external authorities. The marking of student assignments is monitored by ‘external examiners’ who are supposed to maintain consistency of standards across the university sector. Lecturers have to be observed by their peers, while departments are subject to periodic three or four day inspections by the Quality Assurance Agency for Higher Education (QAA). If they are ‘research active’, lecturers must submit their ‘best four publications’ every four or five years to be graded by panel as part of the Research Assessment Exercise (replaced in 2008 by the equally controversial Research Excellence Framework). De Angelis and Harvie are clear that these are only very sketchy accounts of only some of the bureaucratic tasks that academics have to perform, all of which have funding implications for institutions. This battery of bureaucratic procedures is by no means confined to universities, nor to education: other public services, such as the National Health Service and the police force, find themselves enmeshed in similar bureaucratic metastases.

This is in part a consequence of the inherent resistance of certain processes and services to marketization. (The supposed marketization of education, for instance, rests on a confused and underdeveloped analogy: are students the consumers of the service or its product?) The idealized market was supposed to deliver ‘friction free’ exchanges, in which the desires of consumers would be met directly, without the need for intervention or mediation by regulatory agencies. Yet the drive to assess the performance of workers and to measure forms of labor which, by their nature, are resistant to quantification, has inevitably required additional layers of management and bureaucracy. What we have is not a direct comparison of workers’ performance or output, but a comparison between the audited representation of that performance and output. Inevitably, a short-circuiting occurs, and work becomes geared towards the generation and massaging of representations rather than to the official goals of the work itself. Indeed, an anthropological study of local government in Britain argues that ‘More effort goes into ensuring that a local authority’s services are represented correctly than goes into actually improving those services’. This reversal of priorities is one of the hallmarks of a system which can be characterized without hyperbole as ‘market Stalinism’. What late capitalism repeats from Stalinism is just this valuing of symbols of achievement over actual achievement. As Marshall Berman explained, describing Stalin’s White Sea Canal project of 1931-33:

Stalin seems to have been so intent on creating a highly visible symbol of development that he pushed and squeezed the project in ways that only retarded the development of the project. Thus the workers and the engineers were never allowed the time, money or equipment necessary to build

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