Ok so this is a completely freeform post where I try to explain Mark Fisher.
Mark Fisher was a writer who got very famous on the left for an essay called Vampire Castle about how canibalistic the left was. He was a philosophy geek and wrote about how growing up as a working class guy in the 1970s and then being a professional academic was just this huge disappointment.
He took his own life in 2013 and although this sounds like a barrel of tears, his writing is pretty iconic for post post modern people, he was not a happy guy, but his writing becomes more relevant by the day
So what he posited was that The End of History was true and we live in a world with no time or ideology. things don’t progress. the 20th century everything was changed and we ran out of ideas. Nobody wants a Mao Zedong, nobody wants anything we just want to be left alone to be sad.
This is of course, an illusion. We have relative comfort that came abour through socialism we want to stop when we we reached it but the entire rest of the world didn’t.
He called it luxury communism, there’s a story he tells in one of his books about how his family went to the Norfolk Broads (a bunch of canals in England) and he was just looking at the sun, a working class kid just having a nice holiday with his nice family and expecting life to get better. He actually did get to be a famous writer and it was working, but then this was the product of England being like how we see Japan or Korea nowadays, super high tech building canals and really mad weapons and technology that nobody could oppose, and then it all stopped. like these ghosts don’t sleep.
Like imagine being a pretty normal 18th century country, and then a bunch of the British Empire turn up in red coats with rifles, you are just fucked lol. maybe a couple of rich people have rifles but they will probably join the brits. your army have arrows and are normal people. It’s an insane thing to think about. What a bunch of twats we are lol. Sudan had the best army in Africa and Britain turned up with a machine gun in 1860 and killed everyone. Twats.
I’ve heard people say that Europe got social welfare because we were going to be socialist so the capitalists gave it to us. It is kind of true, but it’s also true that we have power and also wanted the shit to stay as well. I’m from Northumberland and everyone is Newcastle fans, some people would legit kill for the club, knowing full well it’s a scam.
I might join in to be honest,I am nothing, it’s the most interesting thing about me
Stay with me, it’s going to make even less sense .
So. When the USSR ended, it also ended capitalism, because it was Capitalism vs Communism, but then if they stop saying Communism then you can’t say Capitalism, like it just became Russia, and you can no longer explain Russia in such a simple way.
I’ve met a lot of Russians and wow, Russia, like they are all off their heads they are usually smarter than you but also have something sad about them. Which was called Communism, but then it just turned out that we were off our heads and had something sad about us.
And of course China kept the Communist government so they could win, which westerners didn’t even realise because China is so magic and far away
I’m not explaining anything to be honest lol
But it became this kind of assumption that Communism was dead and Capitalism won, even though capitalism didn’t win, and the real progress that capitalism enjoyed was through socialist ideas like a strong state and workers rights. but because it was set up in the west as this oppositional binary where capitalism won on penalties they got credit for everything.
and the world stopped
i am tiring myself out typing this
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