The Spectre of a World that Could Be Free: On Acid Communism (Fisher's Ghosts, part 6)

The book that Mark Fisher was working on at the time of his death was to be entitled Acid Communism. Its introduction is available in the K-Punk: The Collected and Unpublished Writings of Mark Fisher. There has been a lot of speculation about this subject since his passing, especially in conjunction with the last course that Fisher was going to teach on “Post-Capitalist Desire." The general theory is that Acid Communism was his name for a future political project, marrying the psychedelia of the 1960s to Marxist thinking,

Escaping the Prison of Contingency: Another Attempt to Pin Down the Utopian Impulse

What I am calling the Utopian Impulse is a hypothetical third drive, something to break the Freudian dichotomy of sex and death. What Marcuse called “The Great Refusal” and Mark Fisher called “the Specter of the world that could be free”, I view as expressions of the Utopian Impulse. I don't want to think of it as anything mystical, but I can't help but feel inflected by mysticism when I discuss it. It is a haunting spirit, a radical outside, an alchemical potential. (Image is taken from instagram user @prismattco.)