An Intro to Capitalist Realism: How Subculture hits the Mainstream
The Beast must Feed! And it craves Mountain Dew!
Capitalist Realism is a term coined by the late Mark Fisher and is an excellent piece of literature for anybody seeking to explore the human condition living under modern globalized capitalism. But we’re here today not to speak of Fisher or the cronies running the economy, but to touch on another portion of Capitalist Realism that goes a little underappreciated and what we’re all about here at SRL. We’re talking about our namesake; Subculture.
Capitalist Realism has a way of consuming elements of culture, subculture, and counter-culture, and then reducing it down to parts “safe” and “acceptable” enough for customers to consume within the bubble of a specific class.
That’s a lot of academic language that doesn’t explain much. Let’s look at some examples.
In the modern day, Netflix comes immediately to mind particularly with the program, Trailer Park Boys. The show is filmed in a mockumentary style and focuses on three caricatures of trailer park living while the main antagonist is the alcoholic authority that supervises the park. Life in a trailer park is not something the vast majority of consumers are familiar with. It’s an alien environment to them. It may as well be a foreign country as far as they’re concerned, but what the humor disguises, is this is really how people live, even in a nation as developed as Canada. The social commentary is often missed in light of the humor.
The trailer park subculture is made consumable for classes that would otherwise never set foot in such a place through the avenue of parody and humor. For those that do find themselves in a similar class, it is homely and familiar. The situations are relatable and they can appreciate seeing themselves represented. In the context Netflix provides, the residents of the park are lovably stupid which brings a certain charm to the fact that they are criminals that the higher classes would very likely regard with utter contempt in the real world.
It is this irony that allows Capital to tear subcultures down, destroy everything that subculture ever produced on it’s own, and then render it consumable for a mass market. All without ever paying a cent to the early adopters.
Defining Traits
Before we continue with the examples, of which there are many, let’s take a moment to define what a subculture is, and how people traditionally “enter” one. Subcultures are cultures that exist within a host culture and while some ethics are adopted from the host, much of the subculture forms it’s own identity, values, norms, and in some cases “artifacts”. People enter these subcultures by holding similar beliefs and sympathies towards the subculture, however subcultures in their early stages (before Capital gets a hold of them) usually have some barrier to entry or full immersion.
Most subcultures are usually deemed to be “cool” by onlookers because people in subcultures create what others feel they are missing. It is the creation of a tribe within a country, and in this age of isolationist atomization, such things are in high demand. Nothing sells like fulfillment and by extension, false promises of fulfillment but we’ll get to that. Two recent examples of this are skateboarding and gaming.
The Modern Subcultural Experience
Skateboarding is an activity that many 20-somethings today grew up with, and maybe even some of their parents before them. Skateboarding is perhaps the finest example of a subculture with a barrier to entry. You cannot fake being a good skateboarder and the only way to improve, is to actually participate and practice. Combine this with an aesthetic and disregard for authority that says “you can’t skate here!” and you have all of the makings of a subculture.
Gaming subculture began in the form of competition between 2 players in arcades and then later, home gaming consoles. Eventually the medium would grow to be able to tell interactive stories with narratives previously only seen on television programs and in books. The difference gaming had, was that you had to be relatively good at the game to experience these narratives, and this acts as the barrier to entry for the narrative portion. Players formed brackets or tiers in competitive play, and in order to reach higher tiers, an individual’s skill at the game would have to increase through practice. Gaming also grew a disdain for traditional social norms, like sleeping before midnight and regularly bathing and developed it’s own terminology. How barbaric!
Both of these subcultures now have hit the mainstream being featured in commercials, TV shows, novels, the news, blamed for all manner of social ills, and have their own dedicated corporate merchandise. But how did these go from small time subcultural communities to being omnipresent in The West?
The culprit? Is Mountain Dew, behold, exhibit A.
What is this commercial saying? It’s not just a sale for Mountain Dew, it’s saying that skating is cool, and cool kids drink Mountain Dew. It is a corporation inserting itself into the subculture and bringing hordes of inexperienced onlookers that want to be cool with them. For those that cant or wont skate, they can simply get by if they drink Mountain Dew, right? This is how what subcultures refer to as “posers” are created. Outsiders, invasive species, those that seek to pillage the subculture’s temples and bring the exotic stolen goods and icons back to the safety of the upper middle class boardroom.
Following this, people would eventually copy the skater aesthetic in attempts to be cool, but these people never make it through the barrier to entry, which is actually skating. However, they can trick all of their upper middle class friends into thinking that they’ve got this cool group of friends (which are also now a commodity for these invaders looting the subcultural temples) that they do COOL things with, and they’ve got all of the clothes, posters, and skateboard decks to prove it. Video of them doing tricks? They left it at a friend’s house.
Exhibit B is gaming, and look who’s back? It’s Mountain Dew again, here to reassure you that no amount of skill or effort should hold anybody back from entering the subculture, all you have to do is scream at the TV.
Exhilarating.
What the commercial is conveying here is that all of the good players drink Mountain Dew, and that by buying their product, you can get ahead of the competition by using their performance enhancer. Sounds like something a “poser” would probably want so they can pretend to belong to the subculture right?
The final blow to the gaming subculture came in the form of Gamergate, a relatively recent movement that sought to expose corporate games journalism for being corrupt and serving corporations, not the subculture, in addition to journalists themselves. This became a problem for the subculture because eventually, players stopped having influence over what was popular in their own subculture, but instead, journalists and reviewers began to dictate which games were good or bad, and what journalist doesn’t want some cash slid their way from corporate marketing teams? It’s a rough economy post-’08. Gamergate as a movement is a well so deep it deserves it’s own article, or you can look it up yourself if you’re really curious. For now, we shall put a pin in it and stick with that very brief summary.
So what is the effect of this corporate insertion? Is it really so bad? Well, to the early adopters of the subculture, yes it is. As communities grow in size, they have to cater to the needs and wants of a broader community. Too many cooks in the kitchen so to speak. So then what happens is as these communities expand the organization and hierarchy in that subculture stop being horizontal and very cooperative and start resembling a pyramid, where centralized authorities dictate to many in the now corporatized subculture just what is “truly” in the subculture.
What of the early adopters then? Their contributions to the subculture are ignored now to cater to the masses who are there to buy the product and fake it ‘til they make it. The early adopters and founders become outsiders in their own home, deemed to be too hardcore, or seen in the same light as religious fundamentalists. They have been replaced by looters looking for the next big wave in Subcultural Capital.
Counterculture is not Immune
Finally, we’ll examine how even counter-cultures are consumed in the same way. The infamous example of course being punk. As far as a date for it’s start, sources vary but the earliest account of it occurs in the 50’s, following the rise of the situationists, but that is yet another article all on it’s own.
Most accredit Punk’s heyday to occurring in the 70’s and 80’s, so we will begin there. The tagline that was all over punk, was rebellion against, well pretty much against whatever you wanted. In the case of the UK it was against the monarchy, in the case of America it was against concepts like social norms, Mom and Dad, and the government. The list of things that punks were against is a very long and rich one. While few of those sentiments are far from dead, punk as an art form is very much dead, and no amount of “art projects” that are simply shock value is going to change that. You took a poop on a canvas? Yawn, seen it before. There’s nobody left to shock I’m afraid, especially in the age of the internet and billions of people having access to video cameras in their pocket. That leaves us with the question, how did a concept as nebulous as punk-inspired rebellion die?
It died when it was sold to the ruling classes. When it was sold to the upper middle classes who were very much comfortable in that system. Punk’s barrier to entry was purely aesthetic, but it demanded such a radical breakaway from traditional aesthetics, that you were guaranteed to get looked at funny or even thrown out of the public for wearing spiked and studded leather and having 7 inch long liberty spike hairdos. That was the barrier to entry, making yourself so unappealing to mainstream (at the time) society. However, it made punks very easily identifiable to each other, and when the dude with the liberty spikes saw a stranger in leather, poorly fitting jeans, and neon green hair, he knew he was in good company. In addition to this, punk music was flying off the shelves and seemed to be omnipresent in music.
But how did punk even succeed then? Or rather, why was it allowed to succeed if it was all about rebellion and weird hair? It succeeded because culture in The West is bottom-up. The wealthier you are, the further away you are from Subcultural Capital, and by extension, Cultural Capital. Why is this? Because the poor don’t usually work that many hours, and the hours they do work are not usually well compensated. So the poor reach for the mediums that allow them to express themselves, in the absence of meaningful and fairly compensated labor. Meanwhile the upper middle class is so bogged down with responsibilities and debts and social obligations that evolutions in Cultural Capital don’t usually interest them, and progress up the pyramid at a slower rate. The slope to move the Cultural Limestone is steeper and steeper the higher you go, and thus requires more energy to push to the top. They have skin in the corporate game, and they choose to take part in the much larger, broader, more rewarding, host culture that subcultures find themselves as enclaves in.
All of the work the punk subculture put in, basically for free, was dumped into the Capital machine and they spit out hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of music records and merchandise so that the upper classes, who were highly complicit in the system punks were rebelling against in the first place, could be “punks” too. Once that barrier to entry was broken, and the punk style took hold, it was pretty much over. There was no other activity that punks did beyond DIY projects that could prove as a barrier to entry that separated the “poser” invaders from the early adopters. Much of punk activity is just what people have been doing for fun for generations anyways. Consuming drugs and/or alcohol, partying, and playing music. The subculture practically sold itself when those things were considered acts of rebellion.
Is There No Alternative?
If “rebellion” such as punk can be consumed, bought, and sold, what is immune then? If anything? Well, there are things that Capital cannot consume and re-package. In all of the previously mentioned examples, there are aspects that could not be fully expressed within the context of the mainstream western culture. Gaming is a subculture rife with competitive anger and anybody that’s spent more than 5 minutes playing online games with a voice chat can tell you it doesn’t take long before people start using slurs, which has been a long time practice in gaming subculture. The disregard both skaters and punks held for private property is also a piece that could not be digested by the beast that is Capital. Those undigested subcultural/countercultural fibers have the potential to stand in opposition to Capital, once they can be processed into a single place: Capital’s colon.
Where is Capital’s colon? Well, we have to look no further than to the internet. Whatever or wherever it ends up on the web, we here at SRL are reasonably certain the next countercultural movement will spawn from it. Wherever it is that the indigestible fibers of subculture and counterculture meet and synthesize. Hegel is in the air, and the process of synthesis is probably already occurring.
Your’s Truly,
Subcultural Research Lab.
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