Under Construction Journal Issue 6.1 UNDER CONSTRUCTION JOURNAL 6.1 | Page 106

3) conducted through Capitalist Realism’s 2009 publication and Zero Books, but also his blogging as K-
Punk, and engagements with the ‘radical affinity group’ Plan C. It is crucial to grasp it as a continuation
of Capitalist Realism as well as hauntology.
Acid Communism is a provocation. It merges two dissonant but collective forms, which
conjoined in past within anarchism, libertarian communism and specific practices, by engaging with a
Marcuse in Eros and Civilization (1955, 1974) and One Dimensional Man (1964) rooted in the Frankfurt
School’s (anti-totalitarian) Marxist-Freudianism as well as associated with 60s liberation of libidinal
energies as abolition of ‘ surplus repression’ and the associated ‘law of the father’ in which energies
were unduly repressed or orientated towards the ‘one dimensionality’ of the consumer spectacle as a
false saturation. As a term it also tarries with terrible imaginaries and melancholia of lost futures in
Benjaminian terms behind the commons. Genealogically it is a political project and personal as politics,
asking what comes after Capitalist Realism, which diagnosed contemporary ‘dreamwork’, a false
imaginary which forecloses possibilities, one internalised by the left in its reservations as well as its
hesitations around projects of the commons around transforming mass conscious; the need to
contemplate ‘health’, most specifically in Marcusean 56 and Spinozean (after the 17 th Century
philosopher Baruch Spinoza) terms (Fisher 2009, 70), and with a gesture towards Nietzsche too (Fisher
2019, 494) 57 which sees feeling in political terms 58 rather than atomized 59 , in the sense of expressing
desires. It is rooted in the plural self, one coterminous with the world, so rather than a solipsistic type of
‘health’ asserts that ‘ you can only change yourself by changing the world around you’, citing Gilbert.
Finally, the Marxist Supernanny - Fisher had a knack for crystallising in resonant images- of action. The
desire as it seeks to release thus revolves around the conceivable, believe in and possibility through
supply.
The term itself draws upon Acid as the drug which provoked a set of political imaginaries, but for
‘post-acid’, metaphorical acid, books and ideas as forms of dosing [ as indeed explored within ‘acid test’]
in order to similarly figure systems of power, exploitation and ritual that was more, not less, lucid than
56
‘Protest will continue because it is a biological necessity. "By nature," the young are in the forefront of those
who live and fight for Eros against Death, and against a civilization which strives to shorten the "detour to death"
while controlling the means for lengthening the detour.’(Marcuse 1974, xxv)
57
In this case Spinozean conatus, in addition to a Nietzschean aristocracy- indifference to time and the
imprecations of capital which is formed by non-ressentiment relations
58
‘Dependent all the time upon interaction with the rest of the ecosystems we inhabit for their ability to function
at all; that even our dreams are not merely our own’ (Gilbert 2017, 12)
59
depression into a political anger is an urgent political project (2019, 419)
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