give youth a chance, stop f#cking assessing them
We are compelled to awaken from the illusion of neoliberal individualised freedoms and liberate our intrinsic drive towards collective emancipation. Fisher jests that perhaps the only way to conceive of this new space in the deflated horizons offered by capitalist realism, is to imagine ourselves as if we had taken a hallucinogenic trip. Acid Communism might be the antidote for fractured individualism, where the entheogenic properties of LSD can inspire the user to perceive that there is a greater cosmic and spiritual order that is often experienced as a sense of interconnected oneness.
Within the concept of acid communism, at the heart of the 1960s counterculture was an inevitable of a socially progressive communist project based on; ‘the convergence of class consciousness, socialist-feminist consciousness and psychedelic consciousness’. Under neoliberalism acid communism exists as potential in the simulation and structures which make freedom impossible. In other words, the extracted values of the 1960s counterculture that are presented to us through consumerist propaganda, need identifying as points of collective action and activated with the revolutionary potential of acid communism.
Fisher develops the idea that mainstream left-wing socialist politics of the 1960s effectively marginalised the counterculture by persistent reference to state control and centralisation. Although the politics of the counterculture rejected capitalism, it did not reject everything that it manufactured. For essayist Ellen Willis capitalist products can be subverted as objects of rebellion;
‘the mass media helped to spread rebellion, and the system obligingly marketed products that encouraged it, for the simple reason that there was money to be made from rebels who were also consumers. On one level the sixties revolt was an impressive illustration of Lenin’s remark that the capitalist will sell you the rope to hang him with’.
Fisher proposes that we step outside ideology into a new form of psychedelic consciousness to liberate ourselves from past struggles; towards ‘something radically Other’. Like in the 1960s experimentations with popular consciousness, acid communism offers a place where a ‘new humanity, a new seeing, a new thinking, a new loving’ are possible.
Despite this individualisation, research carried out at the Teesside Studies of Youth Transitions and Social Exclusion in the early 2000s, suggest that structural inequalities still manifest collectively in youth. Although consumer culture has enabled skint young people to express themselves as individuals, this is forged in a class-based society where the only escape from poverty is still the adoption middle class values and their expression through consumerist identities.
This is especially true in areas of de-industrialisation such as Teesside, Glasgow and Hull, where working class ways of life have not merely evaporated with the neoliberal, postmodern concepts of individualism, fluidity and choice. Youth culture is still significantly linked to working class culture, as this group tend to make the quickest transition from education into work, parenthood and independence. These youth also have the greatest risk of suffering the negative impacts of social exclusion. Here there retains a link between community culture and the normalisation of life lived in poverty. Working class culture developed around industrial work, whose ghosts still haunt and shape a shared sense of identity. Social networks bond poor communities together with a strong sense of subjective social inclusion that have an implicit acceptance of poverty, keeping these people in place on the margins of society. These social bonds become increasingly embedded in the locality, as young people grow up into adulthood. Paradoxically, these community bonds not only enable people to survive poverty, they also can limit the possibility of moving towards new horizons
This attachment to place and former employment, limits opportunities for young people to imagine a different reality. Here the collective consciousness of community restricts young people’s ability to see beyond the poltergeists of a bygone era and familial ties to work, ways of life, social solidarity. In localities like this Fisher argues that freedom from poverty can only be achieved when people realise how much they are determined by culture, socialisation and the consciousness cancer of neoliberal capitalism.
Far from destroying the emancipatory potential of the 1960s counterculture, capital’s repurposing it to sell units of consumption to atomised individuals, has in some way preserved the potential for psychedelic ways of thinking to reveal the true nature of reality and our interconnectedness. Under neoliberalism capital creates the illusion that consumer purchases are expressions of individual freedom achieved through work. The 1960s serve as vivid reminder of what was once possible in a reality created outside of capitalist realism. In this past reality we were once ‘freed from drudgery’ and energised by the potentiality of democracy and a world in which we were not defined by work. Since then, neoliberalism persistently seeks to reinstate the limitations of capitalism as a means of social control.
In her book Kill the Normies, Angela Nagle discusses how resistance to the cultural hegemony of globalisation became manifest through ‘culture wars’ between left and ‘alt right’, where the likes of Alex Jones (infowars.com), seized power in the post historical world of ‘liberal individualist culture’. In common with Generation X, Millennials came to realise that in post 2008 economic collapse world, contemporary material progress ceased, leaving a huge void where identity politics confound efforts to move onward as a collective voice against neoliberal capitalism. In the world of cyber communities, the alternative right has emerged as a powerful voice of the politically dispossessed, enter Nigel Farage, Donald Trump and Boris de Pfeffel Johnson.
Nagle posits that the ‘alt right’, became more successful at challenging the ruling elites on issues like anti globalism because they have become a less dogmatic subculture than those who support social progress. Online battle grounds characterised by profit motive algorithms that extract wealth through phycological warfare. Here the ‘alt left’, are triggered to self-flagellate by right wing keyboard snipers who stoke infighting between radical feminists and all kinds of sex and gender identity queer.
Meanwhile in the material world Millennials were left in a reality where nothing could be done except experience the crisis of capitalism as identity politics. Nagle explains how Millennials soon realised that identity politics was the creation of the new left, a continuation of Thatcherism that enabled neoliberal capitalism to thunder towards the global financial crisis oblivious to the truth that lay behind capitalist realism. Identity politics infighting replaced the collective fight to overcome the political economy of life and death capitalist government policy. Rather than acting to change the material world through actions in the physical world, the social media has moulded a fractured landscape where virtual subcultural communities of left and right alternatives troll each other personally.
Transgression opposing social mores exist in a cyberspace that fizzes in the political typography of ‘post truth’, formally known as lies. As it becomes ever more apparent that standards of living are falling in the developed world, younger generations turn to the ‘alt right’, to confirm that ‘the system’ is at fault. For Nagle, identity politics of the left has led to a void of political resistance towards the crisis of capitalism and become self-absorbed. Meanwhile, the alt right has pulled itself together, presenting itself as authentic rebellion against globalisation.
In K-Punk: Politics, Fisher argues that artists in the 1960s created a social, egalitarian and democratic space which departed from everyday reality where it was possible to ‘imagine really existing’. In the art of this rebellion, drugs permitted minds to be blown and the very nature of consciousness to be deconstructed as relative features of a malleable reality.
‘The crucial defining feature of the psychedelic is the question of consciousness, and its relationship to what is experienced as reality. If the very fundamentals of our experience, such as our sense of space and time can be altered, does that not mean that the categories by which we live are plastic, mutable?’
Capitalism rationalised psychedelic imaginings to create the illusion that individual freedom was greater than the collective freedoms as experienced by the 1960s counterculture. Referring to Jonathan Miller’s 1966 BBC television adaptation of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, Fisher examines how this countercultural era was characterised by a desire to expose the ‘madness of ideology’ and ‘the inconsistency of what had been taken for common sense’ by creating a ‘psychedelic laughter’. For Fisher this adaptation of Lewis Carroll’s classic tale, that replaced the animal characters of the book with human beings, compelled the viewer to observe that like Alice, we are compelled to accept the ‘dreamwork’ of ideology in the same way that the adults ‘torment and perplex Alice’. Ideology keeps us dreaming, ‘by terrifying us with its sudden, unpredictable and insatiable violence’.
In post-World War 2 Britain young people’s exploration of different ways of thinking through music, art, style and political debate opened the possibility of creating different, more imaginative and egalitarian worlds. Urban populations grew increasingly interconnected between gender and ethnic groups, finding new ways to express themselves through experiments of agency rooted in community groups.
Neoliberalism reimposed limits on what was possible for collective thoughts and socially progressive action. Radical individualism promoted a way of destroying social consciousness by extracting the cynically perceived idealism of youth culture, to be commodified and sold back. Meaningful political ambitions were hollowed out as artifacts, values such as peace, love, freedom were turned into marketing slogans for trainers, cars, cleaning products and disposable fashion brands. In this context Fisher’s capitalist realism manages expectations by reducing expectation, social transformation as brand identity, bar scanned in the shopping cart of self.
