ACFM - #ACFM Trip 1: Out of the Box

Episode Date: April 9, 2019

Nadia Idle, Jeremy Gilbert and Keir Milburn bring you #ACFM, a new show examining the links between left-wing politics and culture, music and experiences of collective joy. In this episode: what is �� or was – the counterculture? What is ‘Acid Corbynism’? And is expanding consciousness anti-political? You can find the Acid Corbynism project on Facebook. PRS […]

Hello, you're listening to the podcast version of ACFM on Navarra Media. And on the podcast version of this show, you'll get the stimulating and mind-expanding discussion from our hosts, but you won't get the music. That's because of the way rights and licenses work in the digital age. So you're really only getting half the picture, but there is an easy way to fix that. If you head over to the Navaramedia.com website, you can stream the full show. It's easy enough just to follow the link in the description of this podcast. Otherwise, enjoy the standalone discussion in this episode of ACFM. Politics is actually about everyday life. It's about all of us, what we dream, what we want, what we achieve, and what we want for everybody else.

It changed your whole context and it happened in a group with other people who were experiencing the same thing. So you felt validated. You didn't feel crazy anymore. And you knew that really what you were saying and feeling was the truth. And you know what? That politics that got out of the box

is not going back in any box because we're there demanding and achieving something very different in our society and then our lives. Welcome to ACFM, the home of the weird left. The last few years have seen an unexpected opening of political possibility within British politics. This radio show will explore the history of the relationship between theory, culture and politics to offer some ideas on how the left can make the moment count.

For us, that will involve the left staking a claim on ideas it is not traditionally associated with, such as collective joy, creativity, and freedom. In order to reflect this idea, this show is not intended to be a traditional podcast, but more of a radio show. We are going to mix up our chats with some tracks that loosely relates to themes. Well, what's freedom?

What's free to me? Same thing it is to you? You tell me. No, you tell me. No, no. Because I have to talk me for such a long. It's just a feeling. It's just a feeling. So I'm Nadia Idol.

I'm Jeremy Gilbert. I'm Keir Milburn. So the first thing we want to talk about is our hopes for this radio show and why we got involved in this project in the first place. So I think for me, I haven't seen that much media out there, which connects sort of the amazing conversations that I, I've been having with people, which are quite euphoric, in a sense, with the political reality that exists today. So I'm really interested in the politics of everyday life, but also how politics can be transformative.

And I think I've had conversations with people here and others that I found really exciting. And I thought, well, if this is, every time we talk to other people about this stuff, they think, yes, this is the sort of stuff we want to be doing. So we thought, well, since our chats are so good, then other people seem to enjoy them, then maybe let's try doing this radio show and also talk about the involvement of music in politics and where culture is at, because that seems to be something that doesn't really, there's not really talked about that much on the left. So, yeah, that's why I'm excited about this project.

Okay, well, broadly, I hope that the show is going to open up a space, a bigger space than we seem to have at the moment for talking about cultural politics. broadly conceived. We're talking about culture in the sense both of music and other expressive arts, but talking about the way we live, the way we use our time, the way we relate to each other on an everyday level in a broad political frame and a sort of broad political context. And I think thinking about what it means to have a broad, broadly conceived radical politics, which is utopian in its aspirations, which really does want to make a better world, but it doesn't confine itself solely to industrial strategy.

economic policy which I think is a real problem with current left discourse that the political discourse of the political the radical movement which were to some extent attached is almost exclusively focused actually on just conversing austerity and building an industrial strategy which is fine and we all support that but we want to know what else what else is radical politics going to look like in the 21st century and I think that's broadly speaking the question that we want to try to answer no I totally agree with that yeah and in fact I'd go further at the risk of hyperball, the future of the world

depends on this podcast. I'd go with that. I'd go with that. I'm not really committing myself. Well, we'll see how it turns out. But we should set out the political situation a little bit more of, you know, so we're in a sort of phony war period at the moment in the UK, right?

Where I think it's fairly likely we're going to have a Corbyn-led Labour government. And I think within five years, that probably means we're going to have a fairly serious political confrontation in this country, and it won't just be limited to this country. It's a confrontation with international capital and the forces lined up behind it, and that will have a big impact. It will decide the future for the left in this country,

no matter whether you're in a Labour Party or not, we're all tied together in this period around this looming confrontation. And you can sort of see people trying to prepare for this, in the phony war period prepare for what's coming for the battle to come you know positions are being being being

things are being put into place you know people are trying to build up the sort of forces that they need trying to construct the narratives that they want you know so on the left I think you can say you know

people are sort of trying to get trying to build up or trying to build up the forces the extra parliamentary forces of the left you know people are struggling to get some union movement up so that it can can resist the sorts of attacks we're going to face.

People are trying to set renters, unions, acorn, etc. All of these things, you know, they're good things to do. But I think that also a lot of people are seeing them as we must prepare our forces. And on the right, you can see how. You know, Brexit is being articulated in order to try to weaken the left, the left of Labour Party and the left further afield. I think we do fit into that. And I think we fit into it for the reasons that Jen was just talking about,

which is there's a weakness on the left and there's a weakness to do tied up with Jeremy Corbyn, right? So Corbyn's stick is, he's a very moral person and that's part of his attraction. That's what he's not changed his mind through all of the years of corruption and compromise in the new Labor years.

He's a man who does what needs to be done, which is great, but it's not enough. We also need the left to be built around the project of freedom. And so I sort of see this show as like we're going to sort of explore what freedom means, what the concept of freedom that mobilising, that's mobilising the left, but also the concept of freedom which is mobilising the young because age is a big divider in this. I'm interested in the fact, and this is a decision that I think we made about five minutes ago,

is to put the term weird left in the beginning of our introduction. Now, I don't know the history of the weird left as a category at all, but it was invented five minutes ago. Right, okay, fine, there we go. but it can be traced back to the Dadaists long before but it appeals to me because A of the juxtaposition which is something we're going to talk about

about what the left is and what weird is things which people imagine is very different but also there's something about talking about weird and acid in these terms which actually speak to human beings experienced reality in a way that a lot of left politics doesn't And the reason why that's important is it seems to be that we're talking on two different levels.

On one level, there's the what's going to happen to capital, what's happening in elections, etc. But we know that people in the West, in Britain especially, are very anxious, mental health, all of that are really serious things, which are affecting people on a day-to-day life, and they're talking about them. But we're not talking about them on a level of how can culture alleviate and transform on that level. And I think for me, that's why this is really important. Well, yeah, I agree. I think in terms of the mapping of where we are politically, I think it's worth observing. I mean, you can say pretty clearly that there's an emerging cultural politics on the right,

which is the culture of the old right, the kind of new racism. And it's kind of weird synthesis with various kinds of authoritarianism and kind of libertarian anti-statism. There's clearly a well-established culture in the centre, which is the culture of cosmopolitan neoliberalism. And we all know what that is. It's the culture of meritocracy, radical individualism, a certain kind of multiculturalism,

but one that's based very much on seeing people just as individuals who are to be allowed to compete with each other on an equal footing, irrespective of background or culture. And it's not really, but, I mean, it's much harder to say what the culture of the left is, to discern the culture of the left. And I think there's quite a lot of where to be done in kind of both on drawing on our own history

and in seeing what the kind of imminent possibilities are in the present moment to construct like a distinctive culture for the left and to not be apologetic about it. I think one of the features of the situation we're in today is that after the terrible political defeats of the 80s, the left became completely apologetic

about its own cultural history and its own culture. And it still doesn't really know, we still doesn't really know how to articulate a kind of confident vision of our own version of our own version of anti-racism, our own version of feminism in ways which are not just very authoritarian.

I mean, with reference to the notion of freedom, one of the dangers, I think, is actually what is emerging as the distinctive culture of the left is a very authoritarian, actually just a very authoritarian kinds of identity politics and very kind of moralising kind of politics

that are not going to be fun, are not fun for anybody, and are not going to win us any friends. So I think that that's partly why the question of, you know, what does it mean to have a fun left, actually, as well as a weird left. What would it mean to have a fun left?

Is a major question for us, I think. It's one of the things I want us to explore. Because people want to have fun like that's important. We have to be saying yes it's important you do want to have fun as opposed to stop having fun because there's more work to be done. More fun. We were against capitalism because

it's not fun enough. Exactly like capitalism has shit parties our parties are much better. But the left also has shit parties as in that's true. There is a culture on the left and it is a miserable culture formed of years and years of defeat basically of sectarianism

and very very low expectations So the other thing we could say is that the other thing about the conjuncture at the moment is there wasn't space for a conception of freedom on the left because it was occupied by a sort of centrist or neoliberal idea of freedom, which would be entrepreneurialism or some sort of weird sense of entrepreneurialism tied up to individualism. So now I think there is room for a culture of freedom on the left. Now I think the culture on the right are trying to adopt or occupy the space of freedom.

freedom, reducing it to the idea of free speech, which is then reduced to the idea that Nazi should be allowed, or races should be allowed to say things without consequence, I think that's a week, that's, at the minute, that's disorientated the left, this shift by the alt-right towards occupying this discourse of freedom. But I think it could turn out to be a really big historic strategic mistake for the right, because it's not a natural, it's not, we could come up with a much stronger, more attractive version of freedom, you know, a democratic version of freedom about freedom as capacity that you can only exercise of other people. The other motivation, I think, is we don't just want to talk about this.

We don't just want to sort of excavate this idea of freedom. We also want to work out how you create the technologies and tools to turn that version of freedom into something which is livable. The word is psychedelic. I'm not quite sure on my own mind precisely what it means. I mean, does it literally mean mind? and revealing. Does it mean a substitute for LSD? Does it mean LSD itself? Does it mean art forms like underground movies? I mean, is it any of these things, all of these things, or none of these

things? Psychedelic music is music that expands your awareness, your consciousness. So I feel like we do need to talk about this term acid, because this is where the AC radio, as in acid carbonism or communism or acid something, came in. And that attracts me. because I love the juxtaposition of acid with communism because it totally screws up the images in your head. And it makes, I just like things that provoke people to think differently about something. But maybe one of you guys can talk a little bit more about that

and obviously the origins and Mark Fisher and his influence on our ideas and stuff. Well, okay. So Mark was working on a book that eventually he was going to call Acid Communism. communism and he actually got the phrase from a book about the life of the radical psychotherapist R.D. Lang, which referred to Lang as an acid Marxist. Actually, he got it, he actually got the phrase from an interview with David Tennant in which he talked about the book. So I remember

when he told me he was very excited about this great phrase. And, but what Mark was using the term massive communism to designate was a general sort of set of ideas, moods, political project, attitudes, which very broadly speaking, we could say, was the kind of the politics and the culture of the counterculture of the the psychedelic movements and the new left, etc. in the kind of late 60s and early 70s. I mean, for me personally, it's very difficult to disentangle like Marx account as we have it in the one, you know, the couple of the one text and one talk, really. wrote on the theme from my own kind of approach to it because Mark and I were always kind of talking about those ideas together and always in kind of dialogue and always like pinging back

and forth. But broadly speaking, acid communism designates the idea that there was this set of radical political and cultural demands, this set of radical cultural and social possibilities which had a real presence, as a real, you know, really having the potential to create some form of post-capitalists, sort of utopian, we're not really literally, literally, utopian, but much better than we've got now, kind of society, which was present in the kind of global cultural and political sphere in the late 60s and into the 70s, which was then ultimately sort of suppressed and defeated by the success of neoliberalism. And then acid corbinism was a phrase that Matt Ful came up with, which was sort of playing on this term, sort of designating, sort of

gesturing towards the idea that acid, that, you know, we might take some of. of those ideas informing the idea of acid communism, which in Mark's account was still quite general, quite detached from any kind of immediate political possibility, and instead apply them to an approach to understanding and relating to the actual political moment we're in now, and the possibilities of actually developing kind of mainstream political programs and policies and strategies, which were informed by some of that same democratic, utopian, experimental spirit. And so one of the things that Mark was really interested in with the idea, I mean, why acid is actually what we're supposed to be talking about. Why acid, partly because it partly because one of the main components of that whole formation was the psychedelic movement.

But partly because Mark was identifying a clear affinity between the psychedelic movement proper, which wants to use psychedelic drugs and culture to kind of change people's way of thinking about the world, relating to the world, to expand their consciousness in their terms. Mark kind of slightly translated that into the idea of people sort of inflating their consciousness and a broader, you know, a set of attempts to change people's consciousness, whether it's the women's movement trying to raise consciousness about, you know, the impressive effect of patriarchy, whether it's the classical idea of class consciousness being raised. So what Mark saw as being sort of shared between a whole range of different projects, you know, and, you know, from, you know, the sort of musical experimentalism of, you know, of sort of acid rock and the kind of popular appropriations of it, like in the work of the Beatles, to kind of radical movements,

like the Black Panthers, et cetera, was this desire to really push forward, you know, the possibilities people might have, how they could understand themselves and their relationship to the world, et cetera. So, I mean, in that, in that notion, in that focus on consciousness raising and consciousness as an idea he was really you know he was really influenced by the work the plan C had been doing actually the plan C the kind of a libertarian communist group which both of you guys have been involved with which was you know experimenting with kind of reviving the idea of the consciousness raising group and consciousness raising as a deliberate practice so I think maybe a key can add more to that than I can yeah well let me I'm going to get to that I think so I want

I was thinking, I had a long, lonely, very long, long, delayed train journey down from Merlis this morning. And I was trying to think about what is the acid. What does the acid bit do? And I was thinking, acid is like a technology of defetishization, basically, right? And I think consciousness raising is also, or could be seen as like, I never saw one of those technologies of de-fetishization. So I should explain what de-fetishization is.

Although I also have a theory that Corbyn and Acid have the same effect, which, which is. which I can have a whole radio show on, but we'll see what's going to come out of your train journey. We should definitely do that. We should definitely have an episode devoted solely to consciousness rays and exploring all of that. All right. So look, a fetish is,

of fetishism as it's used in Marxist terms. So basically, I'm going to try and explain acid in Marxist terms, which is, if that's not what this radio show is about, I don't know what it is. Go for it. So a fetish is something, which is a result of social relations, social processes, but then it gets detached from those processes and it seems to be independent

of them and then quite often works its way back. So it appears to be the generator of those social relations themselves or the base upon which those social relations themselves are. So Marx uses the term fetish because it's the fetish in anthropology and kind of 19th century anthropology is a kind of magical object which people worship, which they invent and people think the object itself has some magical power. And so for Mark, the commodity or other kinds of social phenomena become fetishized at the moment when people think of them as having some kind of autonomous value or power and lose sight of the fact that they're always the product of collective action and social relations. Yeah. And of course the important

thing about that is if they don't if they lose their if they appear not to be the result of social processes then they cannot be changed right. So God is another example of a fetish if you're not religious and I'm not religious. You know basically so that's a creation of human minds which basically appears to be independent of humans and in fact it appears to be the thing that caused humans and as soon as it gets to that position it cannot be changed which is the importance of de-fetishization in a way. So another way to think about it is

well it's not just money that's a fetish perhaps society is a fetish perhaps individuals are fetishes, perhaps race is a fetish right so I like this term I like it so much I can't remember who's said it. But there's this phrase which says that racist is real and is made up as Wednesdays. As in, you know, there's nothing in nature which designates, you know, a period of the Earth's rotation as a Wednesday, right? It is completely made up. But of course, it's concrete,

it's real. If you've got a bail hearing set for Wednesday and you decide it's just a construct and you turn up on a Monday, then that will be turned into a concrete, well, I'll be turned into a concrete room with a bar on a window. These things are real, right? They have real effects, but they are changeable because they're made up, right? And so I think acid is one of those technologies. The effects of LSD, you know, LSD, when we talk about acid, one of the effects is it can, it sort of can reveal those sorts of things as fetishes.

And I think consciousness-raising groups are another sort of technology which can sort of do something like that, do you know what I mean? But the important thing is, it's that thing of they're real and concrete, right? And that's the difference between, and this is something that came up in a counterculture a lot, that's a difference between like a revolution in your head. Let's just, I can just, you know, change my attitude towards Wednesdays. But that's still real unless you change everybody else's attitudes towards Wednesday. So that's a revolution in your head versus a revolution in the world.

And I think that was one of the, the relationship between those two things was one of the things that the tensions, probably the productive tension that drove the counterculture in 1960s and 70s, probably one of the things that broke it as well, although I think the neoliberal counterattack had more to play on that. Yeah, I think that's really, that's really useful. I think that's a really good way of thinking about it, because it's also, I mean, Mark was interested in this notion of plasticity, which I don't, I think, I don't think in the text, does he explicitly refer to Catherine Malibu?

It's a kind of, I don't think he does, but Catherine Malibu, a French philosopher, who's very interested in what's called neuroplasticity, which is a very, basically the recognition that brains are always changing and so there are all kinds of things that go on outside of the brain like you know the exercise you do the food you eat just you know falling in love or not falling in love will will actually change your brain chemistry so it's against a kind of way of understanding the brain that sees the brain is just the thing that produces the self and the world and recognizes that it's always part of it and so plasticity but for mark like psychedelic culture the point about psychedelic culture was there it's a sort of celebration of the plasticity

of the world and the plasticity of social relations and I think that's really yeah I think that's a really good way putting it that yeah the LSD and it is I mean it's one of the it's a really consistent I mean you can go and look this isn't just kind of people speculating you can go and look at the vast streams now of scientific literature studying the kind of predictable effect of psychedelic experience on people and you know one of them is a kind of confrontation with or a recognition of the contingency of social relations and those kind of social the kind of social the kind of socially constructed nature of all kinds of various sort of phenomena even though those phenomena as you say are real it's also it's an interesting point of affinity with some of those

strands of you know asian contemplative practice that and philosophy they've got they get bound up with psychedelic culture from the 60s because actually in them in in sort of in Taoism in Buddhism etc there's also a tradition you know one of the reasons they prove so appealing to people actually is because it's because they also actually have notion of social construction. They have a notion of the arbitrariness, the conventionality of things that people take for granted, and they're part of that tradition. So that is really important. And it's a really important point about understanding Marxism, the point of recognizing the ways in which things are socially, materially constructed is to recognize that they're changeable.

But isn't there also something about the use of the term assets in terms of saying, We want to move outside the frames of reference of which neoliberal ideology has such control over people. And so when we talk about anxiety and atomization and people's material reality, it feels so stuck and it feels so disempowering and so oppressive being in a lot of social realities in Britain today. but you can't quite say it's one thing or another. And I think the usefulness of acid communism, acid corbinism or whatever is saying, actually we do have to have some kind of consciousness-raising project through culture, which actually sidesteps. And it's through the sidestepping of what people see as a perceived reality

that things can really be transformative. And you don't need to actually take acid for that to happen. Yeah, I think that's really important. We have to make, we have to be that clear. Like, we're not, we're not, we're not telling people to break the law or, you know, use psychedelic drugs. I just, I mean, I was really, tell me that before I drank that orange juice. But, but, you know, I mean, I was really struck by it.

I mean, Kear and I, so, you know, similar generation, similar backgrounds. But that was sort of, you know, when I was a kid on a council estate in the 80s, like before I'd had much exposure to the sort of grand tradition of sort of kind of of California-centered psychedelic culture, that was all, that was already part kind of street law, actually about, about psychedelics, about acid. like you take it and if you take it it will show you something about social reality that you wouldn't have seen otherwise

I mean I remember being told that when I was 15 but like 16 year old sort of you know scallies and it is so it is really interesting that is really strong but yeah you're right of course actually I mean with reference to Mark wasn't really interested in psychedelics as such as an actual practice as a technology

you know and you know and none of us are kind of you know current or habitual or sort of committed you know users of those things so yeah absolutely absolutely it's about it's more that i mean there is there there is this kind of interesting way actually in which modern cultural history psychedelics and psychedelic cultures stands as this kind of ultimate image of being willing to experiment with consciousness and experiment with the self and but you're right i mean yeah you're absolutely right to some extent when we use that word acid. We're talking about that same level of kind of experimentalism, that same level of

willingness to kind of, you know, expand consciousness, but translated into a political context, translated into a cultural context, amusing. And maybe in a later episode we'll do something on the question of how do we move from that kind of breaking outside of like the group psychology mode and mold, I suppose, from being something of interest. groups where you have a small clique of people who know each other to kind of and I'll borrow Mark's term again Mark Fisher's term of red plenty of how do you move that kind of breaking through on a mass level where it isn't just about a group of people sitting in a room together talking about something they all agree on or like taking drugs together or something how does it move to the street

that is one of the one of the one of the problems that has run through the idea of counterculture or the practice of countercultures and it is probably one of the effects of acid as well, actually. I mean, in the 60s, there was this big distinction between people who turned on and square society. And the more people turned on, the further they got from square society and the problems of square society. But that's just a problem of the avant-garde

if it's seen as something that needs to be turned into a mass practice. You know what I mean? Yeah, but wasn't that, weren't we all, isn't there also a theory of saying, well, okay, if only some people take acid, it comes out in the music, and it affect social relations as well. Well, that's right, yeah, but yeah, that is there.

But, yeah, of course, I mean, this will come out more when we discuss the counterculture more specifically. I think we're all probably committed to a very specific kind of political understanding of what countercultural practice might mean. And that was always, that's always been a minority position, both within self-identified counterculture and within psychedelic culture.

I mean, yeah, the mainstream, the mainstream of the psychedelic movement, even in the 60s its approach to politics was turning on to union drop out and indeed that's another way which resonated with traditions like Taoism and Buddhism

their traditions and for the mainstream of those traditions have said well once you've realised that there's no such thing as the self and all social conventions are arbitrary what you do is you just remove yourself from them you go sit up a mountain and move into a monastery it doesn't preach revolution

that's the response so but I think and I think that also speaks a little bit to something Keir was kind of alluding to earlier about the way in which you know what what kind of attitude we want to promote to the to the record to the implications of the recognition that you know everything we everything we do to some extent is the course up an arbitrary social conventions because it's also absolutely case there's a huge industry today in training people to just to change their attitudes to adjust their attitudes to you know the lived reality, I mean, there's the whole kind of self-help industry. There's specific

traditions like neurolinguistic programming, which is actually like a huge thing. It's a huge part of contemporary culture in one way, which just specifically teach you to basically hypnotise yourself to not be bothered about, you know, the level of exploitation you're subject to or the shittiness of your job or what have you. And that always has been one of the logical implications and one of the logical possibilities in here and in actual psychedelic practice is, well, you just, you know, you don't really worry about your shit job and your, you know, your shit social relations. You just, you know, you just sort of trip out every few weeks and that's what, and that's sort of what you live for. And I think there's very little question that for the, well, actually there is question.

But certainly lots of people have, you know, that that's how they've used those things. That's how, you know, the accusation from the kind of non-psychedelic left, even, of course, in the 60s and the 70s was that really what was being promoted was just a kind of escapeism. What was being promoted was a failure to confront social reality and it can failure to do anything about it. And I would say, of course, the gambit of kind of acid communism and acid communism is to say, well, it's not enough just to denounce these things as hedonistic escapism, that actually we've got to sort of make a play for them. We've got to talk about how do we link our political practice

to these potentially very powerful technologies, so they're not just appropriated by our enemies. In the mid-1960s, rock and roll. was enjoying a golden age, basking in the intricate lyrics of Bob Dylan, the growing sophistication of the Beatles, the exuberant dance music of Motown. But from California, a new, more radical sound was emerging, from a desire for musical experimentation and a new drug subculture focused around LSD. Rock was about to go psychedelic. The sort of soundtrack of the counterculture is Acid Rock, which is quite hard,

it's still quite hard to actually play people bits of music and say, well, this is what it sounded like, because acid rock for the most part was a kind of improvisational form. It was kind of borrowing from jazz, it was kind of collective group improvisation. And it was supposed to be, it was this kind of

manifestation of the idea that a kind of egalitarian, collective and free social relations could produce something beautiful. So there's all kinds of examples that we could pick. I mean, kind of class, I mean, in America, the kind of classic example, normal would always refer to be the Great or Dead.

The British audience has always had, the British listeners always hate the Grateful Dead because they listen to the studio albums, which is just these kind of honky-ton, you know, country rock songs. But actually, they're just the sort of templates for these kind of, these kind of extraordinary group improvisations, which they would play at these concerts where everybody would dance and sort of, you know, so it was more like a rave.

And then what's really important as well from gets left out of that history is the presence of kind of black culture and black musicians in that moment. So the early 70s is an extraordinary moment when those sort of collective improvisation, both in funk music and in strands of music coming out of jazz, whether you're talking about the spiritual jazz of Alice Coltrane, you're talking about the work of people like Simand, I think that's how you pronounce the name of the band, whether you're talking about people like Slime the Family Stone,

whether you're talking about the early parliament funkadelic records, they all come out of this fantastic matrix of sonic possibility in the early 70s. which always and all of this music combined a kind of utopian determination to kind of imagine a better world to assert the possibility of freedom but absolutely to assert that in a collectivity like it's always all of these things

all of that music is about kind of it's all about large groups of people you know with relatively little you know formal constraints nonetheless cooperatively producing kind of experience it's quite hard to actually it's quite hard to get that from any of the music we've got now because it was supposed to be, because really it was

supposed to be a live experience. It's supposed to be something that you participated in. The audience had to be part of the process. So there's always something missing from hearing the recordings. But I think whenever you're listening to that stuff, you've got to bear that in mind that what's going on there is really quite a sketchy representation of what was a real, this kind of expression of a collectivist utopianism. Acid rock kind of emerges very quickly from the Bay Area counterculture to get taken up by some of the most popular artists of the day. So you have the Beatles, you have the Beatles adopting, you know,

getting really enthusiastically, actually proselyitizing for LSD and sort of psychedelic culture and getting records banned from the radio because of their apparent references to LSD. So Lucy in the Sky with Diamond and A Day in the Life, two tracks from Sergeant. Pepper's both got banned, but probably the best manifestation of that, the most obvious manifestation of that is the track from Revolver from 1966 called Tomorrow Never Know, where they actually adapt some lyrics from the psychedelic experience, which is Timothy Leary, Richard Albert, and Ralph Metzner's original kind of psychedelic manual, kind of loosely adapted from a translation of the Tibetan Book of the Dead, and it was just kind of manual for tripping.

So they read, they effectively, you know, John Lennon kind of reads out, kind of, you know, sort of sing some adapted lines from that book over this backwards drumbeat where over this track, which is mostly made from, it's a kind of tape collage of music they've made in the studio, but then they've used kind of backwards tracking and multi-tracking at a time and those technologies are still really new. When it's a really new idea, just to use the studio as an instrument in its own right, and it still sounds kind of incredibly,

sort of ahead of its time. And, I mean, again, this is something, this is one of the, I mean, you know, Mark and I would, you know, had this kind of back and forth conversations, you know, starting from a point where Mark had historically been very skeptical about kind of the historic value of psychedelic culture or kind of hippie culture. But one of the things that he got very excited about was the kind of recognition that, you know, the people like the Beatles adopting these kind of techniques was a real eruption of kind of utopian experimentalism into the mainstream of popular music. it's not just the Beatles but like a bunch of bands that the mob bands all get into

all get kind of turned on and start writing these producing these songs about um you know about LSD culture so one of the great kind of pop anthems of the late 60s is small faces itchiku park you know with a fantastic chorus it's all too beautiful just about taking LSD in a park in illford um so it's about the kind of urban working in class kind of embrace of that kind of utopian possibility and and you wanted to mention another possible yeah well there was this song called my friend jack and it goes my friend jack sugar lumps oh the wonderful things he sees it's not a subtle song and it's a bit of a cash in actually because sugar lumps because one of the ways people were taking acid in london in the late 60s

so it was dropped on sugar lumps yeah yeah and it's sort of like a cashing but it's also part of that you know, this is like a mod band who are sort of seeing something that's going on. It later got termed freak, freak beat or trip mod you mentioned earlier. Tripods is the phrase I made up this morning. Yeah, I know, but like post-trip hop, it's a better term. Was it trip-mod? Trip-Mod.

But it's sort of an interesting moment because basically, mod is almost, you know, the paradigmatic post-war youth culture movement, basically, of like, you know, young working class, lower middle class, kids taking the new consumer culture and using it to try to invent different ways of living, basically. And it was sort of, people have talked about it before Ian Penman talks about it

as mods use style as armour. It's that, you know, a defence against the sort of indignities of class in a way. Style is a weapon, as we've talked about in workshops before. We have used that, yeah. but that's where I got it from with him and style of style of armour yeah and so basically

it's the idea of you know basically you know we may have to be we may be lowly clerks but you know what we decide is fashionable today the manager is going to be wearing next year and we'll be on to something else that's sort of style of armour sort of thing

so this that this sort of like freak beat moment marks a moment where when that starts a break mod starts to break into two different directions and end up very different. So one of them, it goes into hippiedom. And the other one, it goes into Skinhead. Skinhead emerges out of hard, hard mod.

And these two, you know, are at war within a couple of years. Oh, well, one side is at war of the other. The other side's not bothered about. It's on its back in a park in Ilford. It's important politically and historically to recognise the material conditions for that countercultural emergence in the 60s, the material conditions for the Beatles, as a popular phenomenon

are the success of post-war social democracy. They're the success of a set of reform movements and radical movements. Money and time, right? Yeah, exactly. Yeah, exactly. Which make it materially possible for people to experiment, so with lifestyles

and music, etc. But also space, right, that people had a garage or whatever to record music. Or squatting in London. Or squatting, yeah, all of those things. The counterculture in London, punk rock couldn't have happened without it, etc. But when we're talking about counterculture, we're not just talking about these set of practices and tell me if I'm wrong, but I understand it's not just that set of practices and a bit of

anti-authoritarianism, is it? It's basically saying, okay, there was at least a culture, a group of people who in their day-to-day lives, they wanted to do things differently, and they thought they had the right to do things differently, and they wanted to live out that. experience till they die or whatever as opposed to saying I don't know I'm trying to tease out whether it has something in it about believing that you're gonna win on some level and when I say we're gonna win I don't mean as in all guns blazing I mean as in we are going to be able to actualize our lives in this way which is not the way that the mainstream wants us to because

to me and this is going back to like Mark's stuff about capitalist realism, that's the bit that's missing. There's a lot of people out there who are anti-authoritarianism, who are anti-authoritarian in a sense. You know, they want everyone to leave them alone. They just want to do their own thing. But it seems to lack, and again, I might be wrong, but that kind of, that kind of collectivity of believing there's enough of us out there who don't want it to be like this. We don't want to live our lives like this. In fact, we're trying to live our lives another way. You're totally right now. At that time, it wasn't just in a counterculture though. I mean, the thing we're separated from was the extreme confidence of the left. A general feeling is that capitalism was

going to die. Something has to replace it. Communism will win was not an ironic statement at that point. There was this huge confidence that, you know, if you were on the left, you were on the side, history is on your side and you were going towards progress, progressive, etc. I mean, it's all built into the words. One way into this, though, right? One way to think, I'm trying to link these things up is that is the subtitle of Mark Fisher's book. So it's going to be acid communism on post-capitalist desire.

Right. So one way to think about this as the counterculture was, you know, this was this huge experiment in creating desires which could not be fulfilled within capitalist social relations. And in fact, it sort of even works better when you say the 1960s was this period when the whole social democratic settlement, the whole post-war

deal, you know, reached its limits and people were pushing beyond it, basically. The confidence that comes with material security makes you want more and that people wanted more and more and more. And so that's post-capitalist desire and we can't get back to that sort of confidence that the left and the counterculture

had. That is just not available to us anymore for lots and lots of reasons. Perhaps we can build up more confidence and the more, you know, and that would be a positive feedback loop. I think we can get to that confidence. I totally think that we can. But if we think about it as like as post-capitalist desire, there are lots of desires that are being formulated in contemporary society, which have got a post-capitalist dynamic to them.

If we want to follow those desires to their fulfilment, we will need a different form of economic and social and political setup. so that's one way to think of it and one way we can think of the project of ACFM is to work out what those desires are because those desires are the things that butt up against the dynamics of capital and therefore those

that's a strong indication of like that should be the place where we develop tools and technologies to try to push that and try to draw out the observation that is capitalism the dynamics of capitalism that are limiting your desires that seems like a pretty

explosive politics to me. The question of what is or was a post-capitalist desire is a really important one in understanding the trajectory of the left and the counterculture from the early 70s because of course one of the things that's really interesting from a contemporary vantage point is that one of the kind of thing that a lot of people thought was a desire that could not possibly be contained by capitalism in the early 70s was, for example, you know, legalising gay marriage or something. People really thought that. People thought that capitalist, that the form of capitalism they were currently inhabiting was so dependent upon certain kinds of traditional

familial relations that even a little tweak with them would burst it open and that turned out not to be true and the fact that that turned out not to be true is one of the things we're still confronting actually and we're still trying to process the left but what happened but it is the case that what the counterculture succeeded well now I'm using the counterculture very loosely and I would say let's just say what the sort of the new left and the kind of movement the new social movements of the late 60s and early 70s and the general proliferation of utopian democratic demands did to the left was to really put on the table

issues like gay liberation, women's liberation, anti-racism, etc, and to make them part of the culture of the left. And sections of the left in the 1970s also partly under the influence of ideas coming through the counterculture but also partly because of the influence of kind of radical traditions with a much older history and just the kind of spontaneous logic

of class struggle became committed to ideas like workers' controlling industry of the democratisation of welfare state services, etc. And a kind of radical democratisation of political institutions, social institutions, etc.

But I think at the same time, I think the mainstream left, I mean really it has to be be said that, I mean, apart from a few figures like Tony Ben and the people associated with him, if you're talking about the British left, I mean, it was mostly hostile to the counterculture. It mostly saw the counterculture as a threat that he had to neutralise or contain. I mean, its response was mostly reactionary. The response of the leadership of the Labour Party and the Labour movement in the 70s was almost exclusively and explicitly reactionary.

You know, people like James Callaghan, you know, saw themselves. They saw the counterculture as essentially manifesting a set of decadent, Bohem. medium, middle class desires, which had no relevance to. But are we talking about people's behaviour? So are we talking about bits of music? Like when you say, like, the left was said, this is, this is all of these things that you've just said, like, I mean, about the counterculture. Is it talking about people walking down the street, how they behaved, how they were

voting, what they were doing or not doing? Like, what are we actually talking about? Well, I'm talking about what, you know, the left did when it had state power. I'm talking about the fact that largely that most of the demands that emerged from the new left and the counterculture were seen as demands which basically threatened the stability of that post-war social democratic settlement.

So, and that, you know, I mean, one of the great examples is on schooling. I mean, it was really near the Canahan government which decided that you had to put a line under the influence of the progressive education movement in schooling. and really kind of started to reintroduce or to introduce the idea that the kind of people the school should be producing were, you know, hardworking, entrepreneurial, kind of, you know, career-oriented, you know, industry-ready, you know, workers rather than the sort of holistic, creative subjects, which the progressive movement education, influenced by traditions like romanticism, had been trying to produce. So the effect, so I would say to a large extent, the effect of the, the effect of the, the effect of the counterculture on the left was quite limited and it actually really, that left open a lot of space for neoliberalism then to come along and say, you know, well, we can at least, we're not going to give you the kind of utopian, egalitarian, democratic world you want, but we are going to give you a world in which individual lifestyles for those who have the money to take advantage of,

of the opportunities afforded to them will be much freer, actually. It will be much less regulated than they have been at any kind of comparable moment in history. So it was able to, and I think, but I think the real point of tension there that it's really important to bring out for us

is that a key feature of the counterculture and of the new left at the time, a really important feature of the counterculture which a lot of subsequent of historical representations of it completely ignore was its real opposition to bourgeois individualism, that it really saw,

even in the kind of post-war, egalitarian culture of Social Democratic Britain and New Deal America, it still saw the prevalence of very individualistic, materialistic, consumeristic,

kind of values and culture as being one of the obstacles to the realisation of its desires, and that what it wanted was a world in which, you know, social relations would be much more collective, but in which collectivity

would be understood as a condition of freedom, in which, you know, you would have a more freer way of raising children because it would be done more collected. Can we see any traces of a new counterculture emerging today? Apart from us, I don't. I guess for me, I still don't fully understand, like, what a counterculture would look like. I'm not trying to problematize it,

but it's like I have to understand how it would actually. lies itself and that's what I think I'm working my working through through this experience that we're putting together as part of the show I think I don't know what do you think I think well what do you think I think the desires are there the desires that are obviously there you know we we started quite a while ago we said you know the ability the ability to to explore what freedom means for you has material and opinions a lot of those material and opinions aren't there then definitely not there in the same way as they were in the 50s, 60s and 70s. Perhaps we'll just say 60s and 70s.

You know, and I'm sure we could go and look at, you know, instances of rave culture, instances even of festival culture and see, you know, some of the coordinates of what we think could turn into a counterculture. But I think that's the project. That's the project we're going to try to explore. We should definitely do an episode on the history of festivals. We should do an episode on the California ideology where how all of these desires. from the 1960s and 70s

get turned into this weird, get embedded in our technology, basically. So I'm just going to ask, I'm just going to ask for clarification. So when you say that there are material underpinnings of post-capitalist desire or of desire, is like, what are we talking, what would you mean? No, there are material underpinnings to the ability for you to have the space and time

to explore how you would like to live. Okay. To recognise the way that you live now is built up of all of these sort of power relations, and all this sort of stuff, say, I'm going to break with that and I'm going to explore what I'd actually really like the world to be like, what I'd like to be like myself. There's hundreds and hundreds of years of people exploring that, but for most of that, it was available only to this tiny proportion of the population.

It was basically aristocrats, those of independent wealth, or those people who had the patronage of wealthy people, artists, basically. So for the brief period In the post-war period there was a level of security This suspension from the fact that if I didn't get a job If I lost my job I would be destituting on the streets All of a sudden that wasn't true And guess what?

Loads of people said, great, great, in that case Well, I'm going to work less, I'm not going to work at all I'm going to find other way to do it Oh lots of other people who want to experiment with that as well That's what I mean by the counterculture We're in an interesting historical moment because, I mean, clearly we're not at a moment like the late 60s, which is the culmination of arguably 150 years of cycles of struggle.

Like, we're in a moment, we're 30 years on from a moment of catastrophic defeat for the global left, and we're kind of figuring out what it means to have a left again in the era of the internet, platform technologies, et cetera. But I think also we're in a weird historical moment is indeed, the material conditions don't really exist for something like the counterculture of the 60s, And there's a whole argument. There's a perfectly reasonable argument actually, which is silly even to talk about it now, that we need to reconstruct something like social democracy so that a later generation might have the opportunity to do that. But what's different about the historical moment is indeed we have the memory. There are still plenty of people alive who live through it of this moment when everybody was capable of doing that. And I think we can't get away from that. That genie will never be put back in the bottle, if you like, that experience of a time of a moment when it's seemed like that kind of freedom might be available to everybody. And I think that kind of comes on to this. So I think in a sense, I think we're all agreed. There isn't really a, there isn't

really a countercars. I think there are the potential seeds of it. We recognize the need for one. We'd like there to be one. We want to think about how you articulate one and how you might make it possible. One argument, one answer to the question is how you make it possible is, well, indeed, you just do exactly what we've criticized Corbynism for doing. You pursue a kind of economic agenda which counters austerity and rebuild social democracy. So the question then is this final question on our list is what is the counter to that? I mean, why do we think cultural politics matters to the possible success of Corbynism? Because I think one of our arguments would be, I think we would all agree on this,

is actually it's not enough. It's not enough for Corbinism or a contemporary left politics simply to try to restore the kind of political project of the 40s and defer to some infinite moment in the future or even some moment a generation in the future for the dreams of the 60s and 70s, the dreams of democratising workplaces, of genuine kind of social liberation. And so I think the argument we would want to make

is that, well, correct me if I'm wrong on this, why we think this is important. Because I feel that the genie which gets out of the bottle in the 16th and 70s has never gone back, actually. I mean, there's a piece I wrote on Open Democracy, which Mark kind of borrowed from a fair bit, I think, which, you know, there was a couple of pieces. the one I'm thinking of particularly that, you know, I said,

I think you look, neoliberal culture and capitalist culture since the 70s and 80s, it has to do lots and lots of work to keep trying to suppress the desire for kind of collective freedom. You know, it has to, it doesn't, it's not just, it didn't just destroy the institutions of social democracy in the Labour movement and then just stop doing it. It's constantly having to do more and more work to stop, you know, potent free forms of connectivity emerging. Otherwise, it wouldn't still be attacking the universities. It wouldn't still be trying to privatise public utilities. It wouldn't just be doing everything that it's still doing. So I think those desires, to some extent, are still there. They're still there in the culture.

And I think no, we can't, we're not going to have a successful, even kind of social democratic project, which doesn't connect with them. I think if, if Corbinism doesn't do some of what we want, which is to say to people, okay, we're going to take culture seriously. We're going to take seriously the need for government to create material conditions. now for creative freedom, whether it's through universal basic income or free services for everyone or just investing, or just investing some community arts, whether it doesn't take seriously the democratic demand for people to have more say over running their communities instead of just having them run for them by benevolent technocrats, etc. If it doesn't do that, then in fact, in fact it won't

succeed. And the thing that Keir warned of at the beginning of the discussion, the right actually successfully, you know, to something that capturing the idea of freedom. it is what will win that some kind of or some resurgent neoliberalism will win because I think I mean the biggest danger in the world right now is that it's not even the new right the biggest danger right now

is that after five years of Trump that a return to Obama or Hillary Clinton a kind of Blairite, cosmopolitan neoliberalism will seem like a pretty good deal to lots of people in America and Britain and people will just go for it and if the left and if I think if the left can't develop a conference

politics, you know, which speaks to the desire for a cosmopolitan culture and, you know, sexual freedom and all of these things in a more meaningful way, then we just won't succeed. But we will succeed also not because for another reason, which I think is really important, which is it's not just the legacy of the actual people who live through the 60s and the 70s, although they are around, they are getting older. And this is going to sound really hippish, but I actually think that the desire for freedom is a really basic human thing and you can see it trying

so hard to come out in people's day-to-day lives in Britain today and I would say that actually a collective project which speaks to that and makes the space for culture is one that is going to make that reality come through much quicker.

If you don't want a future where Macron is up against, is trying to get elected versus a fascist forever, you need acid communism. Yeah, you need to tune in to acid communism radio every week, month or day,

or how often we do this. Or acid communism. Or acid carbonism is good as well. Just acid, really. This show is brought to you by Navarra Media. To find articles, videos and more audio content like this, head to navaramedia.com. If you've particularly enjoyed this podcast,

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