In 2013, the British cultural and political theorist Mark Fisher wrote an article called “Exiting the Vampire Castle” in which he took issue with the censorious moralism of much of the online left. “Poshleft moralisers,” he maintained, were enamored of “kangaroo courts and character assassinations” in place of “comradeship and solidarity.” “While in theory [this tendency] claims to be in favour of structural critique,” he wrote, “in practice it never focuses on anything except individual behaviour.”
Fisher had struggled for years to inspire and energise an imaginative left. His weblog “K-punk” had been a fascinating mix of thoughts on everything from speculative realism to Girls Aloud, without a trace of knowing postmodern pretension. He was passionate, and curious, and wickedly intelligent, and fiercely devoted to the socialist cause.
Zero Books, the publishing house that Fisher built, left a micro-manifesto in all its early books, decrying the “cretinous anti-intellectualism” of modern culture, where “expensively educated hacks in the pay of multinational corporations … reassure their bored readers that there is no need to rouse themselves from interpassive stupor.” As a young leftist I bought (and barely understood) such exhaustingly erudite books as Dominic Fox's Cold World, Owen Hatherley's Militant Modernism, and Fisher's own 2009 monograph Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative?
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