The late Mark Fisher, arguably the most important cultural critic to emerge from the UK in the last two decades, explored the psychic, emotional dimensions of politics, forcefully arguing that contemporary mental health crises are the product of political conditioning. His work provides a set of critical tools for understanding the motivating passions and affective fallout of Brexit, Trump’s Presidency and the rise of the European Far Right, not so much as ruptures within the smooth functioning edifice of liberal order but rather as symptoms of neoliberal capitalism and the deflated political subjectivities it both cultivates and relies upon. Fisher argues that under neoliberal conditions public institutions – including universities, broadcasters and museums – have become beholden to a punitive, restrictive managerialism leading many to reject them as sites for radical political activity and desire. However, Fisher argues, that spurning public institutions as inherently corrupt accepts the ideological ruse that there is no other path than neoliberalism and overlooks the possibility for alternative modes of organisation to release the radical potential locked dormant within them. 

 

What if – contrary to all carefully constructed appearances – the problem in neo-liberal culture is that there isn’t enough management? Although neo-liberalism presents itself as an economic programme, it is better understood as a massive control apparatus designed to thwart the democratic socialist and libertarian communist experiments that effloresced in the late 1960s and early 1970s. The systemic anti-productive inefficiency engendered by neo-liberal managerialism is neither a mistake nor a failure: it has precisely succeeded in its aim of producing a generalised resubordination of workers, and a disabling of former «red bases» such as universities and art colleges. The route to overcoming this consists neither in the (capitalist) realist accommodation to managerialism nor in the fantasy of exit from institutions. Democratic socialism has always been about the promise of a better managed society (where management is precisely not synonymous with top-down control). In order to assert democratic control over our lives and work, we must therefore reclaim management from managerialism.