Acid Communism as conservation

The case for radical ordinariness

So I recently came across this Vice article from a few years ago titled Psychedelics Weren't As Common in Ancient Cultures As We Think which seems to show that a lot of ideas about indigenous psychedelic use is simply indigenous people reflecting westerners orientalised notions of them back at them.

Brabec de Mori a researcher studying ayahuasca use amongst the Shipibo people states that he found “a double discourse, which happens in all societies where there is tourism … People start to tell the tourists—and I found that most Shipibo people did not distinguish tourists from researchers—the stories they think are interesting for them and not what they really live with.”

Other preliminary research cited in the article suggests that ancient psychedelic use is incredibly uncommon across almost all cultures in the world bar very limited pockets.

However, it doesn’t just reveal the tendency of westerners to orientalise indigenous cultures (a phenomenon relatively common in progressive circles) it also show something else which is genuinely quite interesting. What it suggests is that there is the tendency of psychedelics to be reached for as a response to oppression.

To quote from the article again “What the researcher did [find] was ‘ that, in their traditional stories about ayahuasca’s origins, many Shipibo-Konibo people said the brew came from the Kukama—one of the first peoples to be missionized and resettled during the Spanish conquest. Other Indigenous peoples from the region remembered adopting it in the last 50 or even 25 years. When he examined old reports of travellers, he found that he could even connect the historic diffusion of ayahuasca to the movements of missionaries and the spread of the rubber industry through the western Amazon.’”

We get a more fleshed out account of this process in Mike Jay’s Mescaline: A Global History of the First Psychedelic. In it, Jay discusses the use of psychedelic cactuses amongst indigenous people in North America. He describes how the use of cactuses for religious ceremonies only became widespread in the last 150 years or so spread from its origins in Mexico and south Texas by the introduction of the railway system.  

As Jay describes it the cactus allowed for religious rituals to take place on reservations where various languages and religious traditions were being forced together. The psychedelic experience allowed for a depth of feeling previously provided by community ties now weakened by colonialism and the reservation system.  Various languages and rites were used within the peyote tepee ceremonies with each participant reaching into their own cultures as part of the ritual.

Under the banner of the Native American Church (NAC), apparently named as such due to the claim that the psychedelic experience allowed for a protestant style inward communion with God, the peyote and the tepee ceremony gained legal protection in the USA. Until the recent state-level decriminalisation of magic mushrooms, this was an unprecedented situation for a psychedelic in America.

The way that various cultures have reached for psychedelics in the face of oppression seems to make Marx's famous opiate of the people line more literal than he intended:

“Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people.”

Basically, Marx here is saying that religion is a response to the downward pressure that capital places on our very humanity. In light of this, it does make sense that something which makes a spiritual tradition seem much more tangible would be reached for when a belief system is faced with an existential challenge. It's an attempt to put down roots to resist the capitalistic tendency to turn all that is solid into air.

In some ways, a similar process to the formation of the NAC took place during 60s and 70s psychedelia. All too often a technologically deterministic view is taken that LSD became so popular because of something inherent in the substance itself. Yet perhaps an alternative, more materialist, argument could be made by looking at the societal conditions.

In Mike Jay’s history of mescaline, many Native Americans were willing to take on the use of peyote as a sacrament yet the majority of the European bohemian’s who tried it (including Walter Benjamin) often decided that the body load (the physical side effects of psychedelic substances) was too much. I’m in no way claiming to be an expert in indigenous religious practices but I think it can be reasonably argued that because Native American’s were already undergoing a more direct challenge to their way of life, they felt more willing to accommodate the side effects within their practices. For Americans and Europeans, not at the sharp end of imperialism, to be drawn to these substances in any sort of significant numbers it took the deracinating and alienating effects of a more globalised and totalising capitalism.

The removal of the previous certainties of life can be seen as a continuation of the process that had begun decades earlier and is described by Erich Fromm in Escape from Freedom. As Fromm describes it “The compulsive quest for certainty” in the face of the constant flux of modern capitalism “is rooted in the need to conquer the unbearable doubt”.  Where a generation before, many Germans had reached for Fascism, in American in the 1960’s they reached for Psychedelics and eastern spirituality (the fascistic turn in modern new-age communities perhaps supports this claim). The fact that LSD was there ready to be embraced by this lost generation, a substance more palatable for consumer tastes than mescaline, with the technology in place to produce it en masse and distribute it across the world, is one of those curious synchronicities of the historical process.

What can this revelation about the conservationist nature of psychedelics tell us about the project of building socialism?  Eric Hobsbawm discusses in his book Age of Extremes how 20th-century communism similarly played a conservationist role protecting the traditional cultures within it far more than in the capitalist world. He states that “it is not often recognized that communist revolution was an engine of conservation. While it set out to transform a specified number of aspects of life - state power, property relations, economic structure and the like - it froze others in their pre-revolutionary shapes, or at any rate, protected them against the universal continuous subversion of change in capitalist societies”.

This is the dialectical process known as “aufhebung” a German word with the contractionary meanings of abolish and preserve. Aufhebung allows for the overcoming of limits. We see the same process at work in Jay’s depiction of how the NAC used peyote. It was wrestling with the limits placed in its way by the protestant dominated colonial project and the tensions caused by trying to merge numerous different traditions and languages. It took these limits and through the process of aufhebung created a radically new tradition no longer tethered by its limitations but instead strengthened by the previous contradictions.

In his unfinished introduction to an unwritten book on Acid Communism Mark Fisher states that “We must regain the optimism of that Seventies moment, just as we must carefully analyse all the machineries that capital deployed to convert confidence into dejection. Understanding how this process of consciousness-deflation worked is the first step to reversing it”.

One of the major machineries that capital deploys in the aim of consciousness deflation is the “universal continuous subversion of change” that Hobsbawm described. Capitalism asserts that nothing can be built which can withstand this force. On the other hand an Acid Communist project brings together two powerful forces of conservation: Psychedelia and Communism. It must take these strands and use them to assert a radical ordinariness.

A lot of the focus of the Acid Communist project has been on the power of raves as a limit experience (and as the organiser of an Acid Corbynism boat party I’m not knocking this aspect) but perhaps of more interest (despite the left's fascination with family abolition) should also be the use of MDMA in family therapy. When Fisher describes the limit experience he say that “The conditions which made ordinary experience possible could now be encountered, transformed and escaped — at least temporarily” and surely this type of therapy fits within that framework.  

I’m not arguing that you should take pingers with your dad. However, what the therapeutic potentials of MDMA gesture towards is a schema for the psychedelic thinking to “encounter, transform and escape” the trauma’s contained in family making them generative sites of joy, more resistant to the atomising forces of capitalism. Of course, without a fundamental economic restructuring of society, these changes will only be temporary or individual, but perhaps they present a map of how we can take the old to build the new.  Taking these conditions that create ordinary experience and revealing their radical kernel. By moving the focus from abolition to aufhebung we give ourselves a bedrock of 1000’s of years of tradition from which to build a project of transformation.

A radical ordinariness for Acid Communists is one that celebrates the past and yet opens space in it for radical inclusion where previously oppression was found. Acid Communists should stand for (amongst many other things) rootedness, community and family although expanding these terms beyond possible connotations of ethnic exclusion, patriarchy and limiting frameworks of sexuality and gender. Fundamentally, we should stand against the flattening, boring, soullessness of late capitalism that demands you to learn to code, drop everything and everyone you know and move to London to work for a faceless tech company.

If we build a well organised communist organisation we can go into our communities of workers and renters and we can find traditions at threat from the destructive tides of global finance to share in, champion and defend. We can put down roots of radical resistance to defend everything from local rugby clubs to incredibly dangerous flaming tar barrel festivals.  We can build networks to safeguard these traditions, bringing people into our movement by protecting and celebrating that which they hold most dear.

I think we get a flash of what this would look like in ACORN which brings together blue-haired students and working-class families. Currently, in Bristol, it’s fighting for the defiantly unsexy but vital cause of re-opening public toilets so people can better enjoy public space. The #unlockourloos campaign has seen people brandishing slogans ranging from discussions of serious health problems to the more amusing “because pissing in the street is not an option for me”. This is a glimpse of the power of radical ordinariness that an Acid Communism can champion. Taking on causes that materially impact peoples lives, winning them results and using the process as an opportunity to reveal the ways in which capitalism is literally taking the piss.