I’d like you to join me, dear reader, to puff and pass along, and spare a moment to journey with me into the psychedelic! In our chemical-washed contemporary of fast consumerism, complacent apathy, and rising fascist demagoguery, the world can sometimes feel a bit bleak. It can be hard to maintain a sense of optimism. However, for those of us on the political left, it is more important than ever to meditate on exactly how best to combat this. To reflect on how to build a mass movement, as much as with ourselves and comrades, lest we burn half as long, if twice as bright.
Anyone who has had to sit through a particularly bad lecture, bored to tears, knows a good argument is not always enough to convince or motivate. Likewise, whilst the left must not abandon rational argument or material analysis as vital weapons of the class war, they are not always enough to inspire people to action. I’m sure many of us have encountered countless students and young people, who purport to socialist ideals or progressive politics, but for whom it seems would sooner pull teeth than appear at a rally or working bee. It is this contradiction that occupies much of my thoughts.
Before his tragic death, the late philosopher and cultural theorist Mark Fisher, wrote an unfinished introduction to what would have been his next book, titled Acid Communism. This alongside his final lectures, as detailed in the book Post Capitalist Desire, paint a picture of how the left might begin to undermine this melancholy. In other words, how the left can disrupt the culture of consumption and capital, and replace its desires with one for a better world. First of all however, we should dissect exactly what the acid in our communism is, or rather what it represents.
Mark Fisher was well known for his disdain of hippies, as many leftists, especially marxists, are. This common feeling arises from the overwhelmingly bourgeois white male middle class character of these movements in the 60’s and 70’s, exemplified by infamous events like Yoko Ono and John Lennon’s “Bed-in” for peace. However, Fisher seemingly tries to extract a revolutionary potential from somewhere in its utopian mix.
He’s not suggesting that if we all drop a tab next weekend (though maybe we should anyway???) the revolution would begin. Rather, the neglected character of this movement was its capacity to create a culture that challenged the everyday conventionality and normative standards that reinforce cultural capitalism and consumerist desire. The counter-cultural movements initially imagined beyond the scope of what society expected of them or thought possible as a collective, for a time — even if this was eventually subsumed into individualism and new age consumer aesthetics. This imagination is precisely where the left needs to look in its analysis.
The psychedelic here means the capacity of the human consciousness to break free of the boundaries of what has been deemed possible by normative capital — to imagine a world where we want for more than owning a house, a job we enjoy, or new products to buy and consume, as these are still based ultimately within capitals logics (in fairness, not mutually exclusive). Capitalism needs more than exploitation to function, it needs to suppress and destroy any alternative possibilities or rationalities. The task of the left then is to manifest an imagination for a better world, resilient to this disruption, before we can build it.
We need to move beyond the purely deconstructive nature of rote moralisation and critique, and construct a culture that is joyful and compelling, that revels in prefiguring and exploring what a truly liberated society could be, through art and community sharing in this desire. Leon Trotsky, in Literature and Revolution, stressed the very importance of art, culture, and imagination flourishing for its own sake to develop the consciousness needed for a classless society, well before acid communism or the 60’s counterculture.
Applying this to our vacuous contemporary of doom scrolling, retail therapy, and apathetic consumerism, it seems obvious to suggest that we are ripe for constructing a movement that addresses peoples social and cultural malaise whilst maintaining a genuine political character. If desire could be reclaimed from capitalism as a revolutionary force, we could imagine people reveling in the solidarity of picket lines, and connecting with their community through labour that mutually aids and supports each other. Perhaps, in the vein of Graeber and Lenin, we can even imagine protests and even revolutions literally as festivals of resistance and the oppressed!As for the work we do on our own campuses, we should explore ways we can engage with people’s imagination and playfulness, as much as what our next protest should be. We should collaborate and foster artistic spaces, interesting discussions and constructive debates, write music and perform protests! We should prefigure the culture of a free world, and create positive feedback cycles of merriment, rather than negative ones of burnout. So please, the next time your cup is feeling full, take some time, drop some acid, and imagine a world which could be free!
