Acid Communism: Mark Fisher on Psychedelics and Society

Acid Communism was written by Mark Fisher in 2016 and first published in 2018 (available in German from Edition Tiamat). It is the (unfinished) introduction to a book that Fisher, who took his own life in 2017, never began to write. Despite the tragic circumstances, Fisher's text is a hopeful plea to take the early psychedelic movement seriously in its desire for freedom.

But: LSD and communism, how does that fit together? Why is this interesting – even for those who might politically situate themselves elsewhere?

Mark Fisher, born in 1968, studied and earned his doctorate at the University of Warwick, where he was also a member of the notorious Cybernetic Culture Research Unit (CCRU) around Sadie Plant and Nick Land, and taught at Goldsmiths College in London until his death. Fisher engaged with a variety of philosophical schools of thought. However, Fisher cannot be clearly assigned to any single tradition. What consistently characterizes him is a lifelong, curious engagement with popular culture:

His blog K-Punk features writings on music genres like Jungle and Punk, on films like Terminator, The Passion of the Christ or eXistenZ, or on writers like J. G. Ballard or William Gibson (who, if you like, invented the genre of Cyberpunk). He also constantly intervened in current discourses and debates, such as in his critique of cancel culture in his 2013 text Exiting the Vampire Castle.

Even if Fisher had a soft spot for the post-punk of The Banshees or The Smiths, psychedelic culture was particularly important to him. Fisher repeatedly engaged with the books of William S. Burroughs, the well-known Beat writer who, in his legendary Yagé Letters (co-authored with Allen Ginsberg) in 1963, brought Yagé, or Ayahuasca, to widespread attention.

Fisher gained particular renown with Capitalist Realism (2009), in which he addressed the growing prevalence of depression, from which he himself suffered. He viewed depression as a political problem: capitalist realism, he argued, had successfully destroyed all hope that a different, better world could ever be possible. In everyday life, therefore, a feeling of aimlessness and thus hopelessness prevailed. This was also reflected in pop culture. Especially in the 2000s and 2010s, according to Fisher, there was a retromania, a craving for "retro" (which continues into the 2020s): Millennials, now between 20 and 45 years old, have been listening to the same lo-fi beats and 'new' wave basslines for decades. Millennials copied the 80s, and Gen Z then copied the 90s. Just a few weeks ago, a meme circulated on social media in which Gen Alpha romanticized the year 2016. Fisher called this The Slow Cancellation of the Future.

Do we really have to give up all hope? Work until 85, unless the climate crisis or a new pandemic gets us first? In Acid Communism, Fisher answers this question with a clear no. Because: The psychedelic culture of over half a century ago showed that history could have turned out differently. There's no reason not to be as optimistic today as the Peace & Love generation of our (great-)grandparents, at least according to Fisher.

Fisher’s considerations start with the counterculture of the 1960s. Beat literature spread, hippies celebrated at Woodstock to the sounds of Jimi Hendrix and Jefferson Airplane. Students demonstrated against the Vietnam War, while communes were founded on American coasts and in European cities, and happenings and free love were practiced. All of this was accompanied by the smell of marijuana and the visuals of LSD. Psychedelic culture was new in the truest sense of the word. It was not even remotely retro, because nothing like it had ever existed before. Psychedelic culture spread through social strata and classes.

This also had economic reasons, according to Fisher: The prosperity achieved in the 1950s and early 1960s – cars, home ownership, holidays, and radio – allowed young people not to have to pursue their parents' careers in factories or businesses. "Careers," as we know them today, were rare anyway. People worked here and there. Nevertheless, people were financially well-off. This material security created a feeling of freedom. The youth of the 1950s and 1960s was a generation to whom new and even entirely unconventional paths were open. It was a generation that was no longer ashamed of being "unemployed."

This youth rebelled against the narrow confines of the working world of the time. It was by no means rosy, but characterized by hard factory work and the first debilitating jobs in open-plan offices. They rebelled because the world was full of new music and new technical, social, and, above all, aesthetic possibilities, but they didn't get any of it. The operaist Franco ‘Bifo’ Berardi observed with astonishment during the strikes in Turin, Italy, that the people at the demonstrations were mostly hippies and not (only!) the unionized factory workers.

But what does that have to do with acid? And why this dusty, failed communism?

Fisher means something more utopian by Communism. He means a consistent democracy: when people can come together of their own accord and decide what they want to produce and consume. "Unemployment" is then not a punishment, but an opportunity to live self-determined lives. Perhaps some of you find this naive. But, it should be clear: it has about as much to do with the communism of the Soviet Union as the German Democratic Republic (GDR) had with democracy back then.

Fisher thus takes his cue not from Lenin, but from the lyrics of The Temptations' 1969 song Psychedelic Shack:

Fisher’s unfinished introduction to a never-written book reads like a "What if...?" of the 1960s and 1970s:

What if the psychedelic provos and bohemians, the dropouts and artists, had joined forces with the workers at BMW and Daimler – as in the 1972 miners' strike in the UK? What if the psychedelic movement had not gone into esotericism and spirituality and had read Bakunin instead of Bhagwan?

Fisher cautions that history should not be viewed as a sequence of iconic images: it is not so important to know all the lyrics of White Rabbit. But it is important to remember that psychedelic culture was once part of a progressive movement. The history of psychedelic substances is a history of untapped potential. We bear the responsibility not to let this knowledge be buried, because these potentials are still there. Remembering the past, not forgetting, is an active shaping of the future.