An Analysis and Comparison of Capitalist Realism - and its Potential Alternative, Afrofuturism, Through an Exploration of Music and Art
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Capitalist realism traps people in a seemingly endless present. This stops culture from evolving because artists are not engaging with and reproducing artistic and cultural works from the past in meaningful ways. It has erased the past, is dictating the present and is constraining possible futures. In the past, cultures evolved by introducing new members to previously created works and traditions. This is no longer happening under capitalist realism because everything is assigned an economic value and is stripped of its generative cultural value. This renders cultural works into static icons. However, there is an alternative to capitalist realism - Afrofuturism. Afrofuturism proposes an alternative to capitalist realism by facilitating glimpses of the sheath that masks people from the Real. Mark Fisher describes the Lacanian Real as, “what any reality must suppress in order to sustain itself” (2009, p. 19). Fisher’s book Capitalist Realism: Is There no Alternative? and Kodwo Eshun’s 2003 article “Further Considerations of Afrofuturism” will be mobilized as the main texts in this exploration of the tensions between the two ideologies. The present paper analyzes capitalist realism as an ideology and compares how both Afrofuturism and capitalist realism use images and sound as a method in different ways. Finally, it presents hope for a different future where a non-capitalist world is imaginable by examining contemporary Afrofuturist art.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.004 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.006 | 0.017 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.010 | 0.008 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".