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What is Acid Communism?
Mark Fisher’s unfinished philosophy challenges us to imagine new ways of imagining the future.
Acid Communism was the proposed title and last substantial philosophy of the late Mark Fisher. The unfinished nature of acid communism has left a tremendous amount of debate and hypothesising about the nuances of concept. This lack of clarification has also had an unfortunate side-effect, with people taking the phrase, “acid communism,” at face value.
Acid communism is not a doctrine of hippy-esque communal living and psychoactive drugs. The commune, and psychoactive substances, have a role to play in the philosophy of acid communism, but acid communism is not a valorisation of a hedonistic, hallucinogenic culture. In my opinion, acid communism is an evolution of thought, following from Fisher’s work on the hauntology of culture and capitalist realism. To grasp what acid communism is, therefore, we need to understand these preceding ideas.
Amongst the many things Mark Fisher did so well was his ability to distil complex ideas into brief but powerful summaries. Hauntology is the belief that the future has been cancelled. Capitalist realism is the belief that there is no alternative to capitalism. It is from these statements I will begin.
Hauntology
What does it mean to say that the future is cancelled? For Fisher, it meant an inability to imagine anything new. His work on cyberpunk is a testament to this. The cyberpunk aesthetic we all understand is one that meshes advanced technology with late-stage capitalism. But to build that aesthetic, the familiar yet alien are transposed into the scene: the Japanese culture of Blade Runner, for example, may adorn the futuristic scenery, but its presence is a product of 1970s/1980s American xenophobia of the Japanese economic miracle subsuming their own. The great pyramids, skyscrapers and flying cars are all futuristic, but it’s retro-futuristic. It is how we used to imagine the future.
This is hauntology. In a world where the future has been cancelled, where we are unable to imagine new futures (we will get onto why shortly), society and culture is forced to look back onto the imaginings of previous generations. This, I would argue, is as good an…
