Under Construction Journal Issue 6.1 UNDER CONSTRUCTION JOURNAL 6.1 | Page 110

accelerationism 77 which constitute Fisher’s previous Warwick Cybernetic Collective work. None of those
neoliberalisms are ‘acid’s fault as a technology of the self per se, but call for concepts to supplement
each other: the thinking of class through aesthetics includes the production of aesthetics by wrestling
with class in the fashion- fashion and music and literature- including that seventies class awareness
which scepticises reactive workerism without futurology, Fisher describes, being mobilised 78 . It
embraces Gilbert's formulation, shared by Fisher, that very notion of ‘class politics’ is simply
oxymoronic. The point is that all politics involves class issues (2017, 24).
Acid Practices
Fisher was not programmatic; however, examples of what it seeks to reclaim include varieties of the sit-
in, the reinvention of consciousness raising. Examples of how it seeks to enact reclamation,
engendering the will to do so, are similar, i.e. the workshops enacted by Plan C, since such praxis of
desire applies to present and future practices. We have criticism in the form of Gilbert’s 2017
“Psychedelic Socialism 79 and the Acid Corbynism’ session at The World Transformed’s 2017 conference;
this is framed in terms of ‘Post-Capitalist Desire’ taking inspiration from ‘cultural forms which promote
feelings of collective joy (festivals, disco, etc.’). Although empathetically Foucaultian in terms of
‘technologies of the self‘ as a neutral categorization there are myriad practices likely to contribute to its
political-cultural ecosystem, its structure of feeling, from transformation of living spaces by central
authority, to graffiti art and the derive. Proper meditation, Gilbert notes, is not reconciling itself to a
complex world; rather it resembles the abyssal self in the face of history and political commitment,
whose humanist integrity can only at best be recaptured in a modified form- whether this is in the
alienatory power of recognizing the commodity production or in the ghosts of place in a Marxist-
hauntological sense which speaks to the imaginaries behind past practices in an untimely sense 80 as well
77
“Marketisation as the “revolutionary path”. This was a version of “accelerationism”, but it has never been
properly articulated as a political position; the tendency is to fall back into a standard binary, with capitalism and
libertarianism on one side and the state and centralisation on the other. But working in the public sector in Blairite
Britain made me see that neoliberal capitalism did not fit with the accelerationist model (Fisher 2019, 410-411)
78
This recalls, pace any 'class' separation from the liberation of energies around the loci of sexuality, the politics to
which Acid Communism makes reference, as Gilbert elucidates, are rooted in social class
79
Jeremy Gilbert, The Politics of Consciousness, the Legacy of the Counterculture and the Future of the Left 2017
https://jeremygilbertwriting.files.wordpress.com/2017/09/psychedelic-socialism2.pdf. 2017 accessed 10.12.2019]
80
In this sense the binary between renunciation and political engagement he proposes may be traversed by the
'Marxist spirituality' as a variation of acid communism.
101