When Mark Fisher published his book Capitalist Realism, in 2009, he couldn’t have predicted that it would become one of the biggest philosophical pit stops on TikTok.
Reworking a line from the Marxist critic Fredric Jameson (or, from the other end of the political spectrum, Margaret Thatcher), Fisher’s best-known work, written in the aftermath of the financial crash of 2008, argued that capitalism had become so dominant that alternatives were impossible to imagine.
Combining reflections on politics, culture, education, work and mental health, Fisher distilled a growing sense of social malaise into a mood that would become synonymous with his work: the oppressive feeling that it’s easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism.
The volume launched with little or no fanfare. Fisher himself questioned whether his hybrid approach, part cultural criticism, part personal reflection, part political theory, would find an audience. Instead, Capitalist Realism eventually became one of the most influential political books of the 21st century, selling more than 100,000 copies in English plus many more in translation.
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A new experimental documentary, We Are Making a Film About Mark Fisher, explores his continuing influence nine years after his death.
“Mark Fisher is one of those individuals who talks about capitalism in a way that makes people ask, ‘How do you fight something you can’t really see?’” says Sophie Mellor, who directed the film with Simon Poulter. “His work gives language to things that often feel invisible.”
Mellor and Poulter’s 65-minute feature eschews the conventions of the standard biographical documentary. Self-funded and assembled with the help of dozens of volunteers, it describes itself as a “decapitalised” production: a collective project made outside traditional funding structures and distributed through grassroots networks rather than commercial channels. Anything else, Mellor and Poulter reasoned, would be an affront to Fisher’s philosophy.
Through the @markfisherfilm Instagram account they recruited contributors, shared research, documented the film-making process, and co-ordinated screenings, effectively treating the social-media platform as both studio and distribution network.
Fisher was already a cult figure in British intellectual and cultural circles before he wrote Capitalist Realism. Born in Leicester in 1968, he studied at the University of Hull before in the 1990s joining the hugely influential cybernetic-culture research unit at the University of Warwick, where he developed an interest in critical theory, technology and popular culture.
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After years spent moving between precarious teaching posts, postgraduate study and insecure writing work, he began publishing online under the name K-punk, launching a blog in 2003 that became essential reading for a generation of writers, artists and musicians.
Marrying philosophy, politics, music criticism and personal reflection, Fisher wrote about everything from Karl Marx to the electronic musician Burial, and from Jacques Lacan to The Hunger Games, building an audience far beyond academia and becoming one of the defining voices of the early internet.
The freedom he gained through the K-punk blog is echoed by the methodology underpinning We Are Making a Film About Mark Fisher.
“Mark talked a lot about collective action: about people coming together through unions, networks and communities,” Mellor says. “We wanted the process of making the film to reflect some of those values.
“We’re artists rather than traditional film-makers, and we’re quite critical of the funding structures in England. Increasingly, arts funding is becoming instrumentalised. Artists are often expected to become social workers, administrators or policy deliverers. The art itself can become secondary.
“That can feel very constricting. One of the liberating things about this project was that we weren’t beholden to anyone. That freedom was really important, both for us and for the people who worked on the film. We often describe it as an artwork that contains a film rather than simply a film.”
Fisher, who died in 2017 at the age of 48, has become a touchstone for artists, musicians, writers and activists trying to understand life under contemporary capitalism. His struggles with mental health and his insistence that psychological distress cannot be separated from the crippling social and economic conditions of neoliberalism form another strand of the hybrid documentary.
“One of the biggest responsibilities was looking after Mark’s legacy,” Mellor says. “Because of the circumstances of his death, many people felt a deep responsibility to care for his work and to protect what he represented. Tariq Goddard” – who founded Zer0 Books with Fisher – “spoke about this during one of our discussions. He said that something had shifted for him and that he finally felt able to let go a little, to stop feeling that he personally had to hold and protect Mark’s legacy.
“Obviously, the books are already out there in the world, but there was still a sense among many people that they needed to look after Mark somehow. We were very conscious of that and tried to tread lightly.”
There is, appropriately for a project about the man who relished such concepts as the eerie and the weird, a ghostly quality to Mellor and Poulter’s work. The film combines archival footage of Fisher with interviews, fictional sequences structured around a professor, and more than a decade of protest footage shot by its makers.
Demonstrations against the Iraq War, student-fee increases, Donald Trump’s presidency and the destruction of Gaza are layered together into a haunting visual essay about political hope and frustrated idealism. As Mellor explains, they had been shooting this film long before they thought of it.
The effect of these depictions of collective struggle mirrors one of Fisher’s central ideas: that contemporary society is haunted by futures that never arrived.
It’s fascinating to see how much his work resonates with people who were children, or not even born, when some of his major works were published
That concept of hauntology runs through much of the film. Drawing from the French philosopher Jacques Derrida, Fisher popularised the term to describe a culture increasingly unable to generate genuinely new visions of the future. Instead, society recycles fragments of the past while abandoning ambitions that once seemed attainable: secure work, affordable housing, public provision and collective political action.
“We have a lot of Gen Z at our screenings,” says Mellor. “I think that’s partly because of the internet and the culture that young people are growing up in. Many of them are interested in analogue technologies and older forms of culture, but they don’t have the social foundations that previous generations had. They came of age after many of the structures that people once relied on had been eroded.
“It’s not just economic insecurity. Things that used to be straightforward now involve layers of bureaucracy and assessment.”
Younger cinemagoers offered the film-makers troubling confirmation of this rolling alienation.
“We spoke to one young woman who had completed dozens and dozens of psychometric tests just to apply for jobs,” Mellor continues. “Before she could even fill in an application she had to go through all these screening processes.
“Many are still living at home because they simply can’t afford to move out. They can be quite isolated, but they’re also searching for explanations and answers.
“It’s fascinating to see how much his work resonates with people who were children, or not even born, when some of his major works were published.”
Fisher’s final, unfinished work, Acid Communism, argued that the left had become trapped between nostalgia and defeatism, and called for political imagination and a return to counterculture. Despite existing only in fragments, it has become a springboard for many artists and thinkers.
“Capitalist Realism can be quite depressing,” Mellor says, “whereas Acid Communism points towards possible futures and alternatives. Change rarely happens overnight. People must keep organising, keep coming together and keep making their voices heard. That’s part of what we hope the film encourages. The limits of collective action are real, but that doesn’t make collective action meaningless.”
We Are Making a Film About Mark Fisher has been on a global tour. After screenings in dozens of cities, it will, in the coming weeks, be shown in Dublin, Belfast, Barcelona, Milan and Mexico City.
“We’ve had screenings organised by tiny anarchist groups in community centres in remote parts of the countryside,” Mellor says. “Because the film is playing in different countries with different cultures, it’s been fascinating to see the different cultural reactions to Mark’s theories.
“For example, we screened it for an indigenous group in Auckland, in New Zealand. As indigenous people, they’ve experienced the impacts of capitalism very directly in their lives, so they were particularly interested in the way his ideas connected to their own experiences.
“The film has become a space for connection and conversation. The entire process, the interactions, the relationships formed around the world have become part of the work.”
We Are Making a Film About Mark Fisher is at the Light House Cinema, Dublin, and Queen’s Film Theatre, Belfast, on Wednesday, June 17th
