Herbert Marcuse in the 21st Century III: Acid Communism

In an unfinished introduction to a book that would’ve been called Acid Communism, Mark Fisher speaks on Marcuse’s ‘declining influence’; due, he claims, to an attempt to revise the 60s, and suppress certain narratives that emerged out of it. ‘One-Dimensional Man’, he says, ‘has remained a reference point’ — possibly because it ‘emphasises the gloomier side of his work’ — whereas Eros and Civilisation, ‘like many of his other works, has long been out of print’.

This is why Mark Fisher proposes ‘Acid Communism’ — a concept he calls ‘a provocation and a promise’:

It is a joke of sorts, but one with very serious purpose. It points to something that, at one point, seemed inevitable, but which now appears impossible: the convergence of class consciousness, socialist-feminist consciousness-raising and psychedelic consciousness, the fusion of new social movements with a communist project, an unprecedented aestheticisation of everyday life

Acid Communism is an attempt to resuscitate the spirit of the 60s. This means rethinking the last sixty years, throughout which we’ve been inundated with ‘narratives that neoliberalism has woven’:

Moving far beyond the simple story that the “Sixties led to neoliberalism”, these new readings of the 1970s allow us to apprehend the bravura…