Mark Fisher - the Old and New Left

Provenance

Self-transcribed from the recording's audio/video with Whisper ASR, then drawn from the frozen curation of the CCRU oral archive. The identifiers below fingerprint the exact source transcript files.

Listen

Adjudicated APPROVED 2026-07-11 (basis: stage-1 acceptance ruling — lane open-web-talk approved for opus-only hosting; mp3 tier deferred pending a disk volume). Series: standalone. Source: audio original (.mp3).

Timestamped map

These jump targets come from timestamps preserved in the source transcript, so they work as navigational anchors rather than editorially invented section labels. Timings are approximate — they mark where a passage begins, not exact word timing.

• 00:00:00

  I think we saw that a lot of rhetoric around the student protests, not necessarily generated by the protestors themselves, but rather rhetoric of it was as if a lot of ideas, anarchistic ideas, weren't completely new and never been heard of before. And this was supplemented by a kind of technological rhetoric, which…

• 00:02:03

  If there's no institutional memory, or no mechanism for maintaining institutional memory, how can struggles be learned from, as it were? Because, I mean, part of the things that I think the capital is quite happy for, lots of this network rhetoric. Yes. And the horizontal rhetoric to proliferate. No, because whilst…

• 00:03:52

  You know, capitalism is the only game in the world. The only game in town. All that we can do is adapt ourselves to it. And to be new meant abandoning the idea of only-time capitalism. And, you know, that is flat with this, the overall neoliberal meaning of the term modernization. You know, typically when the term…

• 00:05:56

  Quite clearly that doesn't happen. But it does mean there's a space for contestation of what modern alternative modernity might be. So I'd like to sort of outline sort of four elements of what can be left. And I think one of them is anti-authoritarianism. We had a discussion about that in the previous panel. You know…

• 00:07:30

  I mean, we've seen this week some of the backlash to the Occupy Londoners. Look at these protesters. You know, they're anti-capitalist, but they've got iPhones. But I mean... Okay, so why does that ludicrous kind of critique seem to make sense? It seems to make sense because of some of the kind of political aesthetics…

• 00:09:06

  That we're increasingly required to do our own self-surveillance as part of work. Okay. You know, particularly, you know, working in public services. Absurd levels of, you know, if you're a teacher, like a kind of thing of log books. You know, absurd kind of inventory of self-surveillance which is now, you know…

• 00:10:45

  But I'm sure that all our experiences were basically... You know, you find that our jobs are somehow there to justify the jobs of managers, rather than the other way around. So the question is... I think we have to think of, again, what kind of management do we want? Given that, you know, if we're not doing this... We…

• 00:12:12

  And that's one of the good things about trade unions is that they can occupy that space. Because it's making the link between people's everyday life as a worker and the broader political programme. And so that's the space that we need to be occupying in order to shift things forward. Thank you.