Review: Capitalism and Nothingness

Capitalism and Nothingness: Critical Theory in Unwanted Times #

By Peter Fleming Bloomsbury Academic, 2025

Fleming, Peter. 2025. Capitalism and Nothingness: Critical Theory in Unwanted Times. London: Bloomsbury Academic. ISBN 978-1-3504-4187-3 (paperback), 978-1-3504-4188-0 (hardback).

In May 2020, Rio Tinto dynamited the Juukan Gorge rock shelters in Western Australia, destroying a 46,000-year-old sacred site to get at eight million tonnes of iron ore. The usual explanations are greed or stupidity. Peter Fleming opens Capitalism and Nothingness by rejecting both. Drawing on Hannah Arendt's account of Eichmann, he argues the executives who signed off on the blast "were not thinking at all." The corporation, in his governing image, has become a "thought-terminator." That claim sets the book's agenda: contemporary capitalism no longer works by hiding an exploitative content behind ideology; it works by producing emptiness itself, an "absentification of power" that leaves nothing behind the curtain to expose.

While Fleming's diagnosis is his sharpest theoretical move in years, I will argue that the book delivers it as a set of brilliant fragments organized by a mood rather than a demonstration, by showing 1) that the genealogy of managerial thoughtlessness and the case studies genuinely earn their keep; 2) that the conclusion's reworking of ideology critique is the actual contribution; and 3) that the nothingness thesis, stretched across every chapter, grows elastic to the point of tautology.

The genealogy that anchors the book #

Chapter 1 sustains the book's strongest argument, and it earns the Arendt comparison rather than just gesturing at it. Fleming knows Arendt's ontological account of thoughtlessness "won't do in the realm of economic practice," so he historicizes it through a speculative genealogy of three managerial character types. Amoral man treats metrics as reality, a "quantitative psychosis" whose emblem is the Ford Pinto memo pricing a burned human life at $200,725. Anti-moral man is the corporate psychopath of the Welch and Skilling era, filtered through American Psycho. Faux-moral man is the ESG hypocrite of Larry Fink's annual letters. Fleming's point is that these types do not replace each other in sequence; they "fold into each other like a palimpsest," and the sedimented result is today's non-thinking executive. The chapter closes with Garrwa artist Jack Green's painting Diggin a Hole in Our Heart, a moment of restraint that trusts the image to do work the argument cannot. The iconological instinct is right; the painting carries the indictment.

The middle chapters extend the diagnosis across an impressive range of terrain, and the case-study selection is the book's second great asset. Chapter 2 reads the Sackler family's OxyContin empire as the emblem of "no-dimensional man," a deliberate degradation of Marcuse: where Marcuse's one-dimensional subject retained a residue of indivisibility that made the 1960s revolts possible, the opioid economy strips even that. Richard Sackler answering "I don't know" more than 100 times across an eight-hour deposition is the perfect specimen. Chapter 5 builds the "humachine" from Oxfam's poultry-plant reporting and James Bloodworth's Amazon warehouse ethnography (workers in diapers because they cannot leave the line). Since these jobs cannot yet be automated, Fleming argues, the second-best option is to robotize the human remainder. Chapter 6 centers Australia's Robodebt scandal, where an algorithm mismatching fortnightly welfare payments against averaged annual income issued false debt notices at industrial scale and asked recipients to disprove debts that had never existed. These are not decorations. Each one is sourced to parliamentary inquiries, court transcripts, and NGO reports, and each carries a real share of the argument.

The conclusion is the actual contribution #

The theoretical payoff arrives late. In the conclusion, Fleming reworks ideology critique for a capitalism that has stopped hiding anything. Traditional demasking assumes something real sits behind the curtain. Fleming's counter-image is the blue drape that covered Picasso's Guernica during Colin Powell's 2003 UN speech: the curtain was hiding nothing, and ideology now succeeds precisely when we believe power still needs it. What critique uncovers today is "a traumatic absence," a "supply-chain of nothingness" running from the cypherization of labour (workers transposed into notational code until they disappear) down to what he calls vacuity syndrome, the ordinary citizen's total non-knowledge of the systems governing their life. In my estimation this amounts to a sharp, Žižek-adjacent update to Ideologiekritik, and it gives the Frankfurt School inheritance something to do besides mourn; the humbug behind the curtain has been replaced by no wizard at all. The book ends with Fleming drinking a Stella in a London pub, admitting he understands none of the financial and technical infrastructure around him: "A fog of nothingness descends on everything. I don't even know myself." Few works of critical theory allow themselves an ending this good.

One play, run eight times #

The book's real problem is formal. Every chapter executes the identical template: a lurid opening anecdote, a canonical theorist "updated" for worse times, and a coinage built on negation or death (thought-terminator, no-dimensional man, necromathmatics, humachine). By chapter 6 I could predict the move before Fleming made it, and the effect corrodes in a specific way. "Nothingness" gets asked to explain managerial non-thought, opioid numbness, abolished leisure, algorithmic cruelty, touch deprivation, and epistemic opacity, phenomena with quite different mechanisms. A concept that unlocks everything starts to explain nothing, and the book asserts its unifying void more often than it demonstrates one. The chapters on touch (built from Harlow's rhesus-monkey experiments through supermax solitary to Covid) and on work-time are vivid in themselves but connect to the thesis mainly through the shared vocabulary of emptiness; the concept, once coined, takes on a life of its own.

The second weakness is the one Fleming half-owns. Chapter 8 attacks the "new utopian movement" of Bregman, Erik Olin Wright, and Ghodsee, and defends a "dark realism" said to hold "emancipatory qualities." But this dark realism is defined almost entirely by what it rejects. The book concedes it is not absolving individual agency, then gives resistance, organizing, and any positive program almost nothing to work with. For a book so alert to how critical theory "arrives too late," it remains oddly incurious about what critical theory should arrive for. And the villain gallery, effective as it is, sometimes slides into caricature; the physical put-downs of Jeffrey Skilling sit awkwardly in a book claiming to transcend the critical psychology of bad actors.

How it reads #

Fleming writes better than most people working this seam. The prose runs dense but propulsive: short declarative bursts, a heavy jargon load (apperception, aphephobia, noetic splitting) leavened by deadpan humor and genuinely good reportage. "Society begins to feel like an open labour camp," he writes, "let's call it a post-modern labour camp, replete with wearables, Teslas and crumbling municipal infrastructure." The register mixes Adorno with Joy Division and videogames, which makes the book far more readable than its Frankfurt School ancestors while still demanding you know your Marcuse; the pop-cultural material works as source, not seasoning. Stefano Harney's foreword ties the project to Cedric Robinson and the racial-capitalism lineage, a connection the book itself picks up mostly in chapter 1 and then lets drift.

Verdict #

Capitalism and Nothingness stands as the strongest statement yet of Fleming's pessimist realism, and the conclusion's argument that ideology now masks an absence rather than a content deserves serious engagement from anyone teaching or writing ideology critique. The case studies alone make it assignable; Juukan Gorge, Robodebt, and the Sackler deposition will work hard in any critical theory seminar. But read it as a set of brilliant fragments organized by a mood rather than a demonstration. The nothingness thesis is elastic to the point of tautology, the structure repeats itself chapter after chapter, and the dark realism on offer refuses to say what it wants. Fleming diagnoses a capitalism that produces emptiness and answers it with a book that is, deliberately and sometimes frustratingly, empty-handed. That may be the honest position; it is not yet an argument, and the difference between the two is the lacuna this book leaves for someone else to fill.