acid communism

Music and art are capable of conditioning the aesthetics of the mechanisms of protests and participation of social movements; they are also capable of printing sounds to the process of cultural consumption. The purpose of this work is to provide a theoretical framework through which it is possible to study the ideological foundation of a particular artistic space in Latin American societies that has been called «perreo combativo», which is determined by the aesthetics of reggaeton and permeates acts of mass demonstrations. For this, a conceptual research is carried out; an original terminology is being built from concepts present in the work of several authors, specifically about the relationship between music, aesthetics and social movements. The concept of cultural industry present in critical theory and in authors such as

In his book Ghosts of My Life, Mark Fisher borrows Jacques Derrida's term hauntology and repurposes it to describe a sense of a lost futurity haunting contemporary music. He singles out party hauntology as a specific subset of hauntology in pop music in which uneasiness looms behind a facade of excess and pleasure. This paper revamps Fisher's term by focusing on the music of the Canadian artist The Weeknd. Exhibiting what Fisher terms depressive hedonia and interpassivity, The Weeknd is an example of the retreat into privatized suffering which cannot recognize its social character. However, the paper goes further by arguing that The Weeknd's music possesses an eerie quality due to a clash between upbeat, dance rhythms and dark lyrics which depict The Weeknd's constant plunging into recreational sex and drugs although they do not satisfy him. As Fisher explains, the eerie is necessarily bound up with issues of agency and the paper will argue that the invisible agent behind The Weeknd's compulsive repetition is the death drive understood as Žižekian undead wandering around in guilt. Ultimately, as the mechanisms of capitalism in itself operate by the rules of the death drive, it will be shown that, due to his inability to understand his place in the system and submission to the necrocratic symbolic order, The Weeknd's music is the perfect soundtrack to the capitalist realist regime.

Acid communism. Psychedelic socialism. The freak Left. What do these terms mean? The Youth International Party, with a red star and a marijuana leaf on its flag, formed in 1967, a youth-oriented countercultural revolutionary party, who ran a pig, Pigasus the Immortal as its presidential candidate, and the campaign of Hunter S. Thompson for Sheriff of Pitkin County, Colorado in 1970, on the “Freak Power” ticket, whose logo for Gonzo journalism and his Sheriff campaign was the “Gonzo fist” which interestingly has 6-fingers and is holding a peyote button; these examples better embody than any others the fusion of revolutionary libertarian socialist politics with the counterculture of the 1960s.

Mark Fisher, forefather of the “Acid Communism” project, committed suicide in 2017. In ‘Capitalist Realism’ he included a discussion of mental health in terms of the dominating hegemony of capitalism, his personal mental health struggles, and the effects of capitalism on individuality. He argued that the revitalization of democratic socialism and libertarian communism as alternatives to contemporary neoliberal capitalism had to move beyond the politics of anti-capitalism to a politics of post-capitalism that would recognize that the destruction of the organized left was predicated on the failure of this movement to come to terms with the cultural divergence of 1960s counterculture from the political mainstream. Furthermore, he warned of the transition from anti-statism to anti-politics in postmodernity. His argument, however, was that even in the midst of a total economic and ecological catastrophe, that the very functioning of the neoliberal ideology as hegemonic negates the forms of class struggle that challenge capitalist realism. In ‘Capitalist Realism’, the second chapter is called “What if you held a protest and everyone came?”. He goes on to argue that neoliberalism since the 1960s has maintained its system of dominance but in our contemporary era of technological acceleration, it has changed form: into a “more desperate, even faux-melancholic edge”. His main thesis is that the “strategy” of neoliberalism is not to condemn anti-capitalist protest, but instead present the idea that there is no viable alternative to capitalism - i.e. capitalist realism.

The 1960s was defined by the emergence of the New Left, the civil rights movement, anti-Vietnam War protests, environmentalism, the anti-nuclear movement, second-wave feminism, the gay rights movement; as well as the rise of middle class drug culture, beats, mods, hippies, and of course psychedelia. The focus of this analysis, based on the basic idea of Mark Fisher’s posthumous introduction to his unfinished ‘Acid Communism’, we see through the lens of Derrida’s concept of hauntology (e.g. the idolization of Ché Guevara during Occupy Wall Street) of the “slow cancelation of the future”, and the persistence of cultural elements that return like a ghost from the past, and Fisher’s unpublished book attempted to advance a solution to the earlier outline of ‘Capitalist Realism’ through the excavation of Marxism and 1960s culture to return to the cultural revolution of the 60s in the vein of the reality of hauntology such that we see both Derrida’s original idea of the atemporal historicity of Marxism to haunt Western culture, such as how Marx’s critique of political economy can be viewed as an objective science that is always applicable in discourse to criticize capitalism as a monolith of political economy that seems to always only get more advanced as history progresses; so how can we speak of progress? Marx’s historical materialism is the very essence of progress; we cannot concede to the fashionable concept of “accelerationism” because Marx himself thought that the capitalism of the 19th century was almost at its point of implosion; we have heard this same refrain all throughout history, so though accelerationism is here rejected, Derrida’s hauntology is relevant in the sense that Walter Benjamin conceptualized revolution as the awakening of the dead of past revolutions; will the ghost of the 1960s return?