Under Construction Journal Issue 6.1 UNDER CONSTRUCTION JOURNAL 6.1 | Page 105

Acid politics and the working-class within contemporary literature; an initial reading of working-
class art practices and the quasi-political estate collective within Ten Storey Love Song (2010 )
through an engagement with Mark Fisher’s Acid Communism.
Martin Goodhead• PhD in English, Keele University
This article will engage with Mark Fisher’s Acid Communism reading this theory in light of
literary form and oppositional collective practices amongst working-class subjects within Richard
Milward’s Ten Storey Love Song (2010), set in the late 2000s. It situates becomings and assemblages of
‘joy’ within more ambivalent historical-hauntological aspects of culturally-materialist (and classed) social
subjectivity which recur within Fisher’s political and critical work ( for instance on ‘uncanny’, weird and
eerie) as well as the accompanying necessity of working-class contestation within a liberatory project
and approaching a subjectivity which is ‘inherently disturbing as such. Briefly proposed are literary ‘acid
communists’ as material voices -- haunted, aware of political crisis and external encroachment, agonistic
and in ambivalent discourses of class-escape or refusal, yet able to mark lineage of resistance and
distinct new practices related to a class-centred becoming. Within Ten Storey Love Song it will explore
the comparable relationship between acid, working-class art and the collective’s immediate material-
psycho-social environment, with quasi-utopian claims again problematised by the external/internal
pressures of class-centred violence, appropriation and narrative-mediation. Read here are not fully
realized visions, rather an envisioning of liberation as emergent, a politics of haunted-agonistic-joy
understood in relation to those autonomist practices detailed by Skeggs and Le Bas (2015) as forms of
resisting class -names and embodying an ‘aristocratic’ (in Fisher’s own reading) working-class
subjectivity.
Keywords: Acid Communism, Hauntology, Working Class Studies, Contemporary British Literature, Herbert
Marcuse, Autonomist Politics
Definitions
The late cultural theorist Mark Fisher, progenitor of the term ‘ Capitalist Realism’ in its popular usage,
proposed in his last work the concept of Acid Communism as a critical category and cultural practice.
This essay wishes to propose first of all that Fisher’s use of this term, and the way it has been taken on
by his erstwhile collaborator, the political theorist and activist Jeremy Gilbert
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-- as communism, but
one which is ineluctably modified by this strange ‘acid’ seemingly apolitical, libertarian consumed with
pleasure -- marks a tool, incitement, illumination, node or modality, which takes up possibilities 55 .
Fisher developed this in 2016 or so as part of his ongoing critical work (pace Gilbert’s comment that
‘Acid’ was ‘quite different from the positions he’d held before we started collaborating’ : Gilbert 2017,
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That is, a form of machine- language in Deleuze’s terms.
The concept of acid communism is a provocation and a promise. It is a joke of sorts, but one with very serious
purpose’ (Fisher 2019, 492)
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