Parenting within Capitalist Realism

I have so much swirling around my head these days. It’s hard to focus. It’s also really hard to write about anything other than Palestine, but I want to talk about something related (because it’s all related) yet unrelated: capitalist realism and how exploring this notion is opening up new ideas around how to help my kids thrive in the current neo-liberal late-stage capitalist landscape.

I wrote a few posts back about the notion of removing efficiency as a goal from the different facets of our day to day lives, and how this might be a tangible approach to dismantling the push of capitalism from an individual’s perspective; namely how to quiet “mother culture”.¹

After I wrote that post, an online friend pointed me towards a book by the late Mark Fisher, British writer, philosopher, and teacher titled Capitalist Realism, which has since sent me down a bit of a rabbit hole. I haven’t finished the book yet, but Fisher’s main statement is that late-stage capitalism, not only as an economic system but as a complete and pervasive culture, has reached a point where we cannot imagine life any other way. He describes capitalist realism as…

"the widespread sense that not only is capitalism the only viable political and economic system, but also that it is now impossible even to imagine a coherent alternative to it."

Fisher then goes on to show how capitalism does not require enforcement by those in power to maintain it’s dominance, but instead infiltrates the world of education, mental health, pop culture, etc. creating a narrative that tells us that capitalism is the only way to exist.

If you happen to be a recovering radical unschooling parent, or have kids who play “too much” video games, or have teenagers, or have a possible social media addiction (I could go on…), the book is a hard look at the state of things. Fisher talks at length about the influence of the industrial entertainment complex under late-stage capitalism and what it’s doing to our brains. It’s been a difficult read for me (as I can tick all of those boxes from the aforementioned list), but has also confirmed my belief that this notion of slow work as practice and slow work to reconnect has an important place in this conversation, especially in exploring how we are raising our children.

I haven’t talked about unschooling in while on this blog and that’s mostly because I’m not always sure about unschooling as a pedagogy. I can see very clearly how life without school works, and I know that kids can learn quite comfortably without modern schooling systems. I also absolutely believe in unschooling as an alternative to the mainstream style of parenting, but I can also tell you that there are certain ways that unschooling led my family astray. As such, it’s sometimes hard to write about our own approach to home education and consent-based parenting because sometimes it’s messy and sometimes we fuck up and sometimes the messy things that we fuck up aren’t always for sharing.

But please don’t think for one second that that doesn’t mean that I don’t hyper fixate on my children for at least 50-80% of my waking life.

Because I do.

When I think about all these other big things like capitalism and colonialism and wars and genocide, I almost always think about it as the world my kids are growing up in and wonder what kind of landscape they will inherit as they become adults. I think most parents worry about this.

When I dream of solutions like systems that are based in reciprocity and anti-colonialism and slow work and mutual care, I spend a great deal of time wondering how in the world I will share these values in my children in the spirit of home education when mother culture (that other mother) speaks even more strongly to them than it does to me.

When I read Fisher’s notions about being “hooked into the entertainment matrix” and pair that with the understanding that this is not only becoming the new normal, but that this generation will grow up believing that the world cannot exist in any other way, I wonder at the ways in which we are failing our children.

When I consider our approach to home education, what has worked and what hasn’t worked and what direction we should head next, it’s hard to simply remove efficiency as a goal, but it is more concrete to centre slow work and focus on showing these kiddos that another world is indeed possible.

So what if my role as a parent isn’t to indoctrinate my children in to popular culture like the modern education system does, but instead is to co-create a collective dream outside of that culture so that they can fathom another world without late stage capitalism? Or maybe even outside the digital industrial entertainment complex where we so keenly reside? Is it even possible to do that in a consent based way without plain old mom-lecturing?

Fisher spends part of his book talking about the students he teaches and their notable habits from within a state of capitalist realism:

“Many of the teenage students I encountered seemed to be in a state of what I would call depressive hedonia. Depression is usually characterized as a state of anhedonia, but the condition I’m referring to is constituted not by an inability to get pleasure so much as it by an inability to do anything else except pursue pleasure. There is a sense that ‘something is missing' - but no appreciation that this mysterious, missing enjoyment can only be accessed beyond the pleasure principle.”

Reading this passage, I was struck by the idea that perhaps my job as an unschooling parent no longer to introduce educational content to my kids (most of us could tell you that you can’t actually prevent your kids from learning…) but instead to help my kids out of this hedonic loop where micro-dosing on dopamine is the new part of capitalist realism. Maybe my goals should be to guide them towards slow meaningful work that helps them reconnect and reset their poor brains to experience happiness and joy and pleasure on the level that so many of us are struggling to do.

From where I am right now, this actually feels impossible. I type that with the exasperated lol of the mother of a teenager. I’m not sure how to do this. I’m not even sure if it can be done.

But then I have to wonder, is that because it’s impossible or is it just mother culture telling me so?

1. Mother Culture is a term taken from Daniel Quinn’s Ishmael, referring to the cultural narrative of the dominant colonial capitalist culture. More here.