ACFM - ACFM Trip 50: Fifty Shades of Acid

Episode Date: March 30, 2025

The gang present a milestone 50th Trip all about acid: a drug, a genre, a political concept, a mental tool and a thought corrosive. Looking back on six years of the podcast, Nadia, Keir and Jem decide if ‘acid’ is still a useful way of thinking about left-wing politics. Find the books and music mentioned […]

A seed! This is Aspah. Hello and welcome to ACFM, the home of the weird left. I'm Jeremy Gilbert and I'm here as usual with my good friends Nadia Idol. Hello and Kea Milbin. Hello. And today you are honoured to be present for the 50th ACFM trip. It's not our 50th episode because not some like some other beloved podcast.

We have a weird numbering system because we have a main episode most months that we call the trip. And then we have these episodes that are sometimes shorter, sometimes longer than the main ones, which we think of as sort of supplemental. refer to as micro doses. So if you take them all together, we're probably getting closer to 100. Actually, it's 85 episodes. I looked at up. Mr. Stats, thank you. Yes, thank you. Thank you, Mr. Stats. I think we need a sound effect for Mr. Stats. The sound of a filing cabinet opening. Yeah, so in just another 15 episodes, you'll have to put up with us being all smug about having done a hundred of the things. But for now, yeah, we thought it was time to reflect upon the project, 50 trips in.

That's quite a lot. So, guys, what are you thinking about this now? Nadia, what are you thinking about this question of what it means to have done 50 trips and what we're going to talk about today? Because I think partly what we're going to talk about today is the sort of the meaning of this adjective acid, which is in our name, if only subtly. Yeah, sure. So as part of this investigation and reflection on 50 trips of ACFM, I went back and listened

to the first episode and I thought it would be quite cringe but I found it really emotion actually and I was thinking about sort of some of the themes that we were talking about you know like things like collective joy and the importance of like politics being fun and you know consciousness raising and it was actually a really really enjoyable listen and I was surprised about the extent at which kind of I could empathise with our sentiment when we first started it's almost like is exactly the same. It comes across as exactly the same, or very similar at least, despite the fact that we're in such a difficult and much different political moment. I mean, I think in the podcast, Keir's like, we're going to have a Corbyn-led Labour government. It was a very different

time, you know, 2019 when this podcast came out. But yeah, I was really happy to see that we've kind of fulfilled some of those key themes and felt like we've in a way contributed to, you know, culture on the left, on the acid left, which I suppose we will explore as a theme. So that's why I thought it would be a good idea to talk about that. On my part, yeah, I agree. It's really interesting to think about, just have a moment of reflection on the project, what we're trying to do, whether we've fulfilled the brief and how things have changed and how it sits now in a very different time,

how that idea of acid communism, acid corbinism, which we started the show with, how that sort of sits now. I should mention that part of the inspiration for this was a suggestion on one of the social media platforms by friend of the show, Justin Hancock, who said, oh, wouldn't it be nice to revisit this idea of acid communism, revisit the show, do a sort of like, sort of retrospective, or just sort of like a taking stock, if you want, a re-examination of some of the ideas that we started with and how they might have changed. Before we elaborate on that, let me remind you listeners that if you enjoy the show, you can,

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We'll probably ignore you, but at once every 50 episodes, we'll take some notice. I think we should play Purple Hayes by Jimmy Hendrix off the Jimmy Hendrix Experience, the album that came out in 1967. I was definitely one of those 90s teenagers that kind of fully embrace the kind of late 60s revival that happened in the late 90s, and I was well into Jimmy Hendrix at the time. This is one of the most iconic tracks. It's got that kind of fuzz-filled guitar, and, you know, lyrics and, you know, some fantastic solos.

Purple Hayes was a brand of, it was supposedly one of Oursley's Batchez of NSD. So this is Purple Hayes by Jimmy Hendrix, an absolute rock classic. Excuse me why I kiss this guy Well firstly, we decided that the general thematic's for this show. The working title, 50 Shades of Acid, would be thinking through some of these different meanings of acid as a concept, as an adjective. And we did talk about this in the very first show, Because ACFM, I know a lot of listeners don't know this, actually,

because people ask me, like what it stands for. Technically, it stands for either acid communism, FM, or acid corbinism FM. And we deliberately chose the initials rather than giving it a more specific name, so that that could be left rather ambivident. And acid communism was this term that was coined by Mark Fisher. It was derived from the usage of the phrase acid Marxism in an interview. The David Tennant, the actor David Tennant gave about a film he was making about R.D. Lang,

the Scottish radical psychiatrist, he was referred to in that interview. And I think in the biography that Tennant had read of him was as an acid Marxist. And that's one of the kind of points of illusion. That's one of the points of reference. Also, the term, the letters AC, refer to this concept of acid corbinism that was first put forward by our friend. And the show's very first producer, Matt Full, that's Full, P-H-U-L-L. And the idea of acid-corbinism was the idea that it was a really interesting challenge to think through what it might mean to bring some of the utopian ideas. ideas of the historic counterculture into mainstream social democratic politics.

And that was always a sort of idea that was informing the show. But I suppose it's worth thinking about, like, well, you know, what are our different sort of relationships to that? I mean, when we started the show, I have to say, I was very, I was sort of, I was quite anxious that it was acid corbinism rather than acid communism. Because, you know, I mean, to be clear, you know, my close friend Mark Fisher had like died, like tragically, relatively recently. And I did not want to spend my life making a podcast, which was just a sort of endless tribute to Mark, because apart from anything else, I just found it

emotionally too difficult to do that. So I remember being quite keen that, you know, to sort of stress, well, this is about acicobinism, really. Ascobin is just a sort of art school slogan. I'm about acicobinism. I've probably kind of softened on that position since then. The other thing to say was that there was a couple of Assycobinism. Corbynist events before we started the ACFM. There was one in, I think it was in 2017, at the World Transform Festival in Brighton. Then there was, I think you organised an event in that cafe.

A brilliant corners in Dalston. Yeah, I did, yeah. Yeah, well those, and those, yeah, so it came out of the world transformed. It was for the idea, apart from just being a catchphrase, Matt Fuller thought of, the first substantial project to which the idea was a challenge, was just like a discussion session, a session that they wanted to organise that the world transformed.

It was Charlie Clark phoned me up and said, Matt, we've got this idea for acid corbinism. We want to organise a session on it, it's TWT. That's part of when we start to think about, like, what is acid carbonism if it's, in comparison to acid communism. And in a way, it was that thing of, like, we wanted to think about these ideas, but think about them in a strategic and political way. and in some ways I think that's been part of the USP of ACFM is this idea of like trying to think about stuff because I mean our other tagline is home of the weird left

I think during those couple of first sessions we started exploring well there's something different here isn't there from exactly what Mark Fisher was doing and we should explore that what Mark Fisher meant by acid communism but like that I remember your critique Jeremy was acid that the communism in acid communism was like this sort of more of a platonic sort of idea you know what I mean, which didn't relate to the strategic sort of dilemmas of the time. And so it's quite a novel thing, I think, to sort of try to have, so I think part of what ACFM has tried to do is to have like a more expansive conception of politics, basically.

So talk about things people don't necessarily talk about, think about as political or they tend not to. Part of what we've done is try to talk about those sorts of things, but think about them strategically, and that was always what the Corbinism bit meant to me. Of course, that becomes harder to do. I'm glad we didn't call it Asic Corbinism FM, because that becomes harder to do after the defeat of Corbinism. And one of the other thing that was going on there, was it was the height, you know, when we first started talking about this, and as Nadia, very unkindly reminds me, you know, it looked like we could have a Corbyn-led Labour government, and it was the time of what we

might call euphoro Corbinism, you know, the, oh, Jeremy Corbyn sort of moment, basically, where something really sort of significant seemed to happen in the culture before the fight back from the right and the centre really managed to take hold, basically, and sort of cramp that Corbyn leadership, sort of cramp it politically and cramp it in its room for manoeuvre. So it felt like a time of quite expansive politics, which we thought that, you know, fitted this, desire to sort of, like, have a more expansive conception of politics and try to think about wider areas of life in terms of politics, but not just that, to think about them in terms and, well, what do you do with that then, basically? What do you do with the idea that you might

think about all sorts of areas of life politically? Well, what might you do about that? You know, how might you intervene in various ways or think differently about that? I'm sorry you thought that was unkind. I was just thinking out what we thought in 2019. You know, But I also believe that it was possible back then. I mean, I'd also want to talk about, you know, what the ACFM stands for. I think it is an interesting discussion. I mean, I also took it to potentially mean anti-capitalist at some point. I mean, I like the fact that it was ambiguous.

I mean, while we're here, just as an aside, I wondered whether, you know, FM frequency modulation actually makes us sound really 20th century, which of course we are. You know, we come from the 1900s, you know, in a sense. And like what that means for, you know, a podcast in the 21st. century, I am not sure. But just to build on what you guys were saying, I think the interesting thing for me about the, you know, again, juxtaposition of acid with Corbinism as acid with communism is, you know, what's useful there is that around the Corbin project, once you said acid Corbinism, what happened was a certain group of people coalesced around that term.

And that's, I think, in a way, how we found each other. It was people who understood that culture as a terrain of struggle was something incredibly important. and to put pressure on the Corbyn project to take seriously, you know, as we discussed in the first episode, you know, culture, making, like, in a very material sense, making space for people to have, not just artistic, but, you know, all different forms of, like, expression in life and, you know, the importance of those spaces in creating the kind of world that we want to see and understanding that that is central to what politics is about, as well as all of the other things, right? And I feel like as soon as that was asserted, you know, that around the term acid carbonism, that's how we all found each other. Like, you know, Kia and I had been running consciousness raising workshops in, you know, the UK and in Berlin at the time and we'd be thinking about some of this stuff, you know, but I'd not worked with you directly, Jeremy, but we kind of all kind of found each other.

And there became this kind of wider crew who were interested in acid carbonism, you know, and its potential. And also what's interesting there is that a term like acid corbinism would, by default, repel exactly the kind of people that we didn't want to work with in the first place. So I think it had like an interesting, that that terminology was kind of like had an interesting effect on the different factions within the, you know, labor affiliated or labor membership, you know, in the Corbin project. Yeah, it's interesting to think in terms of that phrase anti-capitalism, actually.

That's another phrase that historically I've really wanted to sort of repurpose in order to orient it towards a more strategic politics and it's often associated it. Because often when people describe politics as anti-capitalist, then it's assumed that what that means is you're necessarily aiming at the complete abolition of capitalist social relations in the foreseeable future. And one of my sort of political and analytical missions really throughout my adult life actually has been to try to. convince just sort of moderate social democrats that ultimately you can't even make any progress with fairly minimal social democratic reforms unless you understand that capitalism is antagonistic to those reforms and even if you're not looking to totally abolish capitalism you are having to actually resist it just to get those reforms so I think yeah there is an it's really interesting to me that to think about that I mean that is a sort of thread like connecting the

political perspective that informs a lot of our approaches to things on the show, which relates to the things you were both saying, that we are basically kind of revolutionary at the level of theory insofar as we are, you know, we're interested in very radical strands of theory and a complete critique of capitalism and its evil nature. But we're also interested in operationalising those ideas in political and historical context where, you know, the complete abolition of capital social relations is not on the immediate agenda. And so I think that is a pretty consistent perspective for us. That itself, of course, what I'm just describing, that's not like an unusual perspective

these days. That's a pretty, that's like the normal position of the kind of, especially the kind of post Corbyn, both Bernie, sort of transatlantic, millennial left. You know what Michael Walker calls class struggle, social democracy. But it was a really unusual perspective, like it's for 10 years ago, to be honest. And in my experience, it's incredibly unusual. Like, it really, I really found it hard to find hardly anyone who seemed to sort of agree with it a lot of the time. Don't want to sort of spoil the structure of the show, but it might just be interesting to know that, you know, the acid communism that we're referring to Mark Fisher.

You know, Mark was writing a book called Acid Communism on Post-Capitalist Desire was the subtitle of the book. He'd ever finished that book. He wrote some fragments that later got wrapped. together with lots of blog posts, et cetera, and published after Marx's death as acid communism, a big book, but it wasn't the book he was writing here and wrote a few fragments of the introduction, etc. But we've sort of forgotten about that. The subtitle on post-capitalist desire, post-capitalism was as a phrase which has probably gone out of fashion a little bit and was much more current, you know, in 2015, 2016, 2017, etc. So that sort of project, that sort of idea of

acid communism would be that what you're searching for are the areas of life where people's desires rub up against the limits of capital, or capitalism. So where the desires to move beyond capitalism generated today and part of what Mark Fisher does in the bits of the acid communism book that he wrote is to go back and look at where post-capitalist desire was being generated in the 1960s. And it was part of this project to reassess the 1960s. And it was part of this project to reassess the 1960s. Me, Mark, and Jim, roughly the same age, you know,

and it's something you always, you often say, Jeremy, which is that, you know, when, you know, growing up in the 1980s, there was a, you know, in fact, when growing up in the 1980s, there was still the remnants of the 1970s counterculture there. And in fact, a much stronger link

between, like, left activism and what you might call weird culture, I think. But part of that, that was to sort of reject the 60s and the 60s in the 70s as, you know, utopian. That was the post-punk sort of ideal. It was embarrassing. It was to be embarrassed by the hippies.

Wherever you were on the cultural continuum, from like an anarcho punk to a goff, to a sort of indie person, wherever you were, to a sort of Marxist cheek, you know, member of the CPGB or whatever. Like wherever you were, you had to be embarrassed by the hippies.

Yeah. And in part that was like an effect of the year zero. mode of punk in its like 1976, 1976, 1977 iteration, which was like the complete rejection of what had just gone before, despite the fact it was basically a continuation of what had just gone before

in actual fact. Yeah, so that, anyway, I just wanted to raise that because as we were talking about anti-capitalism, that definition of anti-capitalism you gave gem was, you know, it sort of fits to it, so a sort of post-capitalist the seeking out of post-capitalist desire. But I think we should come on to

thinking about the phrase acid communism a little bit later after we've sort of gone through and thought about what the term acid has meant. We should play a song by the anarcho-punk band Thatcher on Acid, a classic of the blank on acid genre from the 1980s. So Thatcher and Acid, they form in 1983 in Somerset. Their sound is really a sound of a sort of festival band of that time. So it's like punk, anarcho-punk, but with like psychedelic rocks of gong sort of influences. When they start as well, the Thatcher and Acid bit, they're quite a pistakey sort of band,

even though they're part of that earnest anarcho-punk sort of scene. I still know one of the guys in it, Ben Corrigan, who played guitar in Thatcher and Acid, and now plays in a band called Hard Skin with Big Sean, who are sort of like a pistake skinhead oi band. Anyway, I think we should play this song sitting from their 1990 album, Frank. I listened to it today and I was trying to think of a song we could play and it

really reminds me of a sort of really particular sound from that like 1990 from particular scene which is like a bit it's like punk but it's got like horns on it it's got like a pop sensibility anyway see if you like it The inspiration for the show, for me, partly, was that it's nadier more than anyone actually of us, often uses this phrase acid, like this is an acid way of thinking, this is an acid way of doing stuff, like just a sort of adjective that has really emerged out of our, usage of the term or just it emerged out of the the way we do the podcast basically where this comes from like my usage of the term you're right it comes through the practice of you know this

these conversations and this podcast but the general kind of term which was or the general phrase that I think about when I use the term acid is the one that we know we were me and keir were we're talking about in in the consciousness raising workshops which is this idea that if we accept that capitalism is a project of consciousness deflation, what does a project of consciousness inflation look like? So I'm thinking of asset as a term, a kind of catch-all for both disruptive and like effervescent and joyful. So that's what I'm thinking about, as in there's a disruptive element to it. But it's also, but there's also kind of like very much kind of mind expanding and a, I guess, like a joyful prism of which to view things. And it has to be, and there's

an unexpectedness to it, as you also don't know what's round the corner, which I think is also a function of, you know, discourse is a function of having a kind of live conversation between three people who have some kind of history, but also, you know, there are new ideas which are created in the space, which is part of, you know, the practice of collectivity. We don't all, in entirely come with like our rehearsed lines. Maybe Mr. Stats does, but not the three of us anyway. And that creates something kind of new with new potential, you know, for the construction of ideas. So that's what I tend to to mean. I think that's behind what I mean when I say that's really acid. I want to add to what you said that for me as an adjective, it implies anti-individualism

and also egalitarianism and also a kind of improvisational practice of some kind. And it's interesting to think about why it would mean all those things. Also a world in colour as well, like a technicolor, a technicolor world, you know, a technicolor experience. Yes. Well, and utopian. That was the word, the word I was looking for was utopian. It's sort of all those things. So obviously the term, you know, derives from the slang term for LSD 25, the psychedelic chemical that was discovered in the 1940s by Albert Hoffman sort of becomes popular with some psychological researchers and in some very small sort of bohemian and mystical circles in the 1950s I don't think people are referring to it as acid until I don't know actually I don't know

we should I should have checked this before we did this show to find out what was the first recorded usage of acid to refer to LSD but I'm thinking it might be as early as 63 it might be a little bit later. But the reason for that slang usage of the term is because LSD is short for a lysurgic acid diethylamy. Acid, like, as an adjective, starts to get applied to other things, quite shortly after that, insofar as they're associated with LSD or LSD culture. So obviously the first usage of that is probably the idea of acid rock. And acid rock is referring to a kind of musical culture, has its epicenter in the Bay Area around San Francisco, the kind of the home of world psychedelic culture to a certain extent.

And, you know, it refers to people like the Grateful Dead, quicksilver messenger service, various other bands, more or less. And, you know, in the UK, you'd be talking about it in very early Pink Floyd, people like that. But I think it's sort of interesting to think about what it's referring to there because there's always a kind of ambiguity, actually, even then when referring to acid rock, in terms of, is acid rock supposed to be music

that's like actually good to listen to when you're on acid? Or is it supposed to me music that somehow represents the LSD experience to the non-chemically altered listener? That's a good question. I think it's the latter, isn't it? Well, I think mostly, yeah. I would say, if you're talking about, say, The Grateful Dead, certainly in their live shows,

it's the former. It's this kind of improvisatory jam music. It's supposed to be good to dance to on acid in a big crowd. But indeed, very little of that ever gets released on record. And in the case of Pink Floyd, for example, in Britain, it's not that at all. I mean, apart from the sort of tragic singer Sid Barrett, the mythology about Sid Barrett is he went mad taking acid. It's not true. He went mad. He had severe mental health issues and he took loads of obituate. Like, Asse didn't play that much of a role in it, I don't think. But they didn't really take Assy much and they made this really kind of avant-garde music on their first few albums that was kind of, I mean, it was really more influenced by certain strands of European avant-garde composition

than it was influenced by sort of psychedelic culture. But it had lots of weird sound effects and lots of kind of phasing and stuff. So it produced a kind of disorienting effect in the listener. historically we probably have to position like that acid rock emerging out of out of like consciously experimenting with like rock music and other sorts of other forms of like heightening the LSD experience in things such as the acid trips etc the acid tests sorry yes and in fact one of the early Pink Floyd performances was like a British iteration of that where was that where they had a was it the UFO you think they would play Pink Floyd would play sort of grateful dead

long, instrumental jams at the UFO club, which was a kind of psychedelic rock club in London, into the 607, around sort of 1967. Interstellar overdrive, isn't it? That's the... Yeah, that's exactly it, yeah. The interstellar overdrive is the only track they ever released that sounded like those, that live isn't.

Within kind of at hardcore psychedelic culture in the state, actually, even by that time, there was a real division over attitudes to what kind of aesthetic practice should accompany the, the psychedelic experience because there was a pretty well-established set of sort of aesthetic practices to go along with like taking LSD like up to the late 60s and mostly what they involved is you know they involved creating an extremely calm environment the idea was you did it in a room you did it at home you did it with like maybe a couple of other people maybe just one person looking after somebody who's tripping and the kind of music people would listen to going back to the sort of mid-50s you'd listen to Bach and you'd listen to

Indian rogars or some like very gentle jazz and you can see there all the ingredients of what would become kind of new age and ambient music and you know the kind of ingredients that go into like the really healthy I would say sort of neo new age scene coming out of places like international anthem records today so you can trace that back to the idea of LSD as a kind of therapeutic thing in the 50s and then there's this idea which comes to be really associated with Ken Keezy and the Merry Pranksters, which are a group of kind of LSD proselytizers and activists in the late 60s, with whom the Grateful Dead do become sort of associated. And their idea is quite different. Their idea is that, you know, LSD is about getting out of your head and the point

of the aesthetic experiences that should go with it is to, is to fuck with your head. So you create these kind of multi-sensory experiences, you have loads of weird sound effects, you really to try to sort of create a sort of disorienting effect for the listener. And that became associated with the sort of West Coast acid scene in the late 60s. But people who'd come out of the East Coast scene, which was actually older, which involved people like Timothy Learby, they were very critical of it, actually. And they saw it as a very kind of dark. They saw it as just calculated to give people a bad time,

especially if they'd taken too much or inexperienced. And to me, it often seems like that, That's what gives rise to this kind of aesthetic of the head fuck, which is really, it's not really for people who are actually tripping. It's for people who aren't and who want some sort of vague approximation of what it might be like to be doing that, which is what I think is going on with like the Pink Floyd albums,

you know, the early 70s. It's modernist head fund music. It's not really. It's not psychedelic in the sense people would have recognized in the 50s and early 60s or people doing like New Age Californian music later on would recognize either. Can we stay with this idea of getting out of your head for a minute and how it relates to like the acid concept? So like I think we've talked about this before where we were talking about specifically, you know, like there's the politics of like getting out, you know,

of getting out of your head and not being stuck in your own head and like how that relates to neurosis, etc. So are we saying, you know, historically like that that was also part of the project that it wasn't just about getting wasted? Because I think like there's different. terminology that's banded around this stuff. It's about like that there is a kind of political project of seeing beyond one's own like internal processes. Yeah, there is, but there are a real disagreement as to how you should do that and what the kind of state, what getting out of your head should be like. I mean, I'd say there's this sort of tradition which you can actually trace back, you can trace back to Arthur Rambo, the French symbolist poet, eating loads of hash

in Paris. This is like, you know, the effects of sort of eating that massively overdosing on edibles or something. And then writing about how great it is to be deranged. Rambo famously talks about the derangement of the senses as like an aesthetic objective. And that is how you get out of your head. And on the other hand, there's this kind of mystical idea that what it means to get out, that the experience of getting out of your head should be peaceful and blissful. It should be an experience of release, an experience of release, which is also like a loss of tension. You know, it's the pursuit of samadhi or nirvana. stakes like that and those ideas that they're always sort of intention with each other they're not

just intent with each other within psychedelic culture i mean in say in 20th century art music and like coming out of the orchestral composition tradition you know there's the tension between the kind of atonality of schernberg and then and then the minimalist music people like lamont young to terry reidy later in the 60s who of course are influenced by Indian mysticism and experiments with mescaline and lSD actually so so i think there's all i think the question of what does it mean to get out of your head? Does getting out of your heads mean necessarily mean going a bit mad? Or does it mean achieving a state of kind of extreme calm and bliss? And of course, that's also tied up with what people thought LSD was for in the 50s. In the 1950s, like before

all this, within the kind of psychological experimental psychology communities, there were these really different uses of LSD. There's this group of researchers. And they think initially that what LSD gives you is a model experience of psychosis. They think the reason to take LSD as a researcher is, you will experience what a paranoid schizophrenic experience is if you take LSD. And of course, basically, that goes out the window. Well, I mean, right from the start, that's not what everybody thinks, because Hoffman, like the very first time he accidentally takes LSD in the 1940s, end up having a really good time. And he writes about how it's actually, you know, I was kind of, I felt like I was going

mad, but I was also experiencing ecstasy and mystical bliss. And then basically, all these attempts to make people experience, you know, psychosis temporarily in the lab, like turning, like, far too often people just end up having a really good time. And so they kind of drop this idea. And then other groups of researchers from quite early on in some time in the 50s, they're trying to use it to cure alcoholism. And their whole line is, yeah, it gives you this experience of mystical bliss, which like takes you out of yourself to the point where, you know, out of the experience of being drunk, like can't even touch this. So you just lose interest in it. That's part of the reason why it's, they have this seem to have,

this really good curate with alcohol. So there's always this tension between the idea of getting out of your head via some kind of pursuit of madness and this kind of mystical idea that actually you're going to sort of discover yourself or you're going to release yourself from yourself and experience a kind of superior kind of sanity almost. How does that interface with like the context about whether this is, you know, the examples that you just gave Jeremy are about like in a lab situation, you know, but like out in the world. world, you know, the political context and like people's social relations are going to make a huge difference to how someone experiences a drug like that, for sure, isn't there? So there must

be, you know, all sorts of like contextual information, which is really helpful here about like, you know, what's a bad trip and what's a good trip and like, you know, what's happening in people's lives, not just from a kind of like dependency and alcoholism or like whatever perspective, but also like, you know, what is also their perception of society at the time, you know. Yeah, I think I think that's right. I mean, with related to things I was just talking about, for example, the, like the counter argument of people like the Merry Pranksters against the kind of East Coast kind of, you know, Brahmin class trippers who didn't approve their kind of wild crazy sort of festivals. The counter argument was that, well, like people like Timothy Leary in that

in the early 60s, they were only interested in NSD as an elite practice. But they literally thought their political project was going to be to like get John F. Kennedy to take acid. Like get world leaders to take acid and that was and they would just decide to end war and and you know end poverty probably not end capitalism that they weren't really interested in that and then the argument of the pranksters was what they were doing was democratic and collective that they were that what they were they were trying to find ways in which you could have like hundreds of people doing this together at the same time in a way that would be really about indeed sort of collective joy in its most basic sense so so that was really that was really important to that but then of course

When we talk about different experiences in different social contexts, I mean, you know, my, you know, my first experience of a culture in which people took LSD was in the 1980s on living on a council estate in West Lancashire. And in those days, LSD was really widely available. It was really cheap. And people just took it as an alternative to sniffing glue. You know, it was just experienced as a, it was the fact that it was just a massive headfut was the thing that people got out of it. And like people that, you know, I knew lads you were, it just kind of crazy, really. I mentioned on the very first show that there was this sort of street law, this sort of street knowledge about acid, that, well, you should be careful with it. You should try it. It was good to do it in nature. And it would show you things about the world and the nature of social reality.

But that street law kind of was a way of trying to sort of modify what was a habitual practice for quite a lot of people I knew were a little bit older than me. These were just kind of scally. who like went you know went down the cop at the weekend and like to get pissed and like to smoke cheap hash and they would just and sometimes they would just take like massive doses of LSD just for the sake of getting totally fucked up for days at a time so and again you know it was quite difficult to find any other way of doing it if you were living on a in a sort of concrete jungle housing at stake in you know in Thatcher's britain in the 1980s like it took quite a lot of effort sort of get yourself out into some other context just like materially and

physically where you might just comfortably relax and chill out and experience it in some other way. Yeah, and in the 80s, well, the cloakly experience was you took it and then you laughed for several hours and then you laid still for ages and stared at a tent and thought, stared at the roof of a tent or your house or whatever and thought, how long is this fucking going to go on for, basically? But like in the sort of culture, what I'm trying to get to is that there was this this phrase in the 80s, probably into the early 90s as well

as like, oh, it's something which is a bit mad is like something on acid. Yeah. Bad mad or good mad. Probably good mad actually. But I think that's a really good question. At the time,

I had a sort of imminent critique of that culture, having grown up in it, that there was just sort of, people were so sort of bored a lot of the time and so frustrated that a lot of people just didn't make any distinction between good, mad and bad,

people would sniff glue, people would do poppers. I remember me and my like close circle of friends, like we got really into acid in like the early 90s. And we got into, we got into it partly because we, I'd read this, I'd read Jay Steven's book Storming Heaven

and it talks about how people had been doing it in like the early 60s in these elite settings. And we started trying to replicate that and finding that actually we were having a really amazing time. Like it was really pleasant and like, no one had a bad trip if you didn't like drink loads of cider and go to a goth club. if you just like to stay at home and listen to some nice music like the race at which people had a shitty time massively declined so

but and but our sort of critique of the culture we were in was that people just didn't even make a distinction that like just getting fucked up was a was a thing in itself and nobody even asked is this good fucked up or bad fucked up and i mean that was something about the level of alienation we were all experiencing i mean you know now my historical lens on that now was we were a cohort of people who were semi-aware of the fact that we were living in the ruins of social democracy, you know, six years after the defeat of the minor strike. And it was just, you really did just want to kind of obliterate yourself and your surroundings to some extent a lot of the time. The context of that as well was the range of drugs on offer were quite poor. I mean,

like it was acid, magic mushrooms or speed, basically. Yeah, it was. And you'd often do them together, of course. Yeah, quite often. But yeah, so you can imagine what relief it was when Excessy came along, and I thought, oh, actually, there's some nice drugs. No, it was. That's true. It was. Like, MDMA was like, because no one could afford, no one could afford actual coke or anything. No, Coke was like some mystical drug that nobody'd ever fucking seen in real life.

But yeah, that idea, it's like it's something on acid just meant it's something that's kind of fucked up. And, um, and of course, it's around that time that within, like, American psychedelic culture, like people try to get rid of the word. psychedelic, and they try to replace it with the word entheogen. What? And entheogen is a word for LSD or mushrooms, and it means God within. It means God within. And it's the idea of psychedelic, which originally itself psychedelic means mind revealing. But the idea is that basically psychedelic had become too associated with like weirdness and

fucked up nurse. And you could think about psychic TV and temple of psychic use. and the way they came out of like the very, very dark like industrial music scene and then they really embraced like Acid House as a form really early on and they did embrace sort of psychedelics but it was still that it was

there was this sense that it was all a bit dark and all a bit about getting fucked up for the sake of it or about fucked upness as the state you were trying to achieve rather than some sort of cosmic bliss because the pursuit of cosmic bliss was to associated with hippies and that was embarrassing and that was just there's also this sense that was

escapeism i mean i remember feeling really guilty the first time i ever really enjoyed like just taking nSD like on a nice day like at home and listening to like new age music and um i'm thinking i'm this is so decadent like my punk super ego was sort of torturing me saying oh this is like this is unbelievably decadent you like you bourgeois you know you should at least be listening to Albert Eiler or something, you know, some like heavy avant-garde jazz, like at least. Like, how can you just be listening to this, like, Wyndham Hill stuff, you're appalling hippie? Those kind of sentiments did proceed from a fairly reasonable assessment that in some sense, that sort of highly privileged Californian psychedelic culture had to become implicated in something

that was emerging that wasn't necessarily our friend. And as we now know, that was in fact true. that was in fact correct. They had better weather, guys. They had better weather. That's going to affect, it's going to affect now your trip, you know, seriously. No, no, no, it does. No, no, no, it does. I remember, no, absolutely does.

No, the first time I ever went to Northern California, I thought, oh, now, I see, of course everybody here got really into fucking acid. Of course everyone did. Like, it's really nice, it's really, like, nice, clement weather, like, three courses of the year. And, like, you walk out into the street, and there's, like, sunshine and hills. Of course you're going to get into chipping here. You try doing it in West Lancashire in the 1980s. You see how good a time you have.

If you really want to hear a more contemporary iteration and a very extreme iteration in musical form of the idea of acid as a concept. kind of head fuck, then you should probably listen to some music by Japanese noise rock band, although sometimes referred to as psychedelic noise rock band, the Bordoms. This is the Bordoms, acid police. Perhaps we should Perhaps we should move on to

Acid House basically, seen as we brought it up Acid House comes out is a variant of the emerging dance music style of house music from Chicago in the mid-80s. There are endless debate over the genesis of the term, but the accepted understanding of the origin of the term is that the phrase Acid House did indeed refer to the fact that the sound of Acid House was obviously kind of trippy. It was hypnotic, it was extremely abstract. The sound was associated with

the use of the Ronan 3A3 bass synthesizer to produce this famous kind of squelch sound, which bears quite an obvious sonic resemblance to the kind of flange effect, which the Beatles really popularized in the late 60s, when they were trying to produce. kind of deliberately psychedelic sound effects. And also, it's also often claimed that the reason it was referred to as acid house was because there was a belief that some of the clubs that it was played at, there was acid put in the water so everybody would get high. I'm sure that isn't true.

It definitely is true that LSD was just a really popular drug on the gay dominated dancing that included clubs like The Warehouse in Chicago. but I remember being told actually by older sort of queer friends like in the early 90s that had been acid had just been a really popular drug to dance on at the kind of clubs in London in the 80s people going out listening to kind of early electronic music or Depeche Mode stuff like that

that yeah acid was really kind of popular on that scene so the term acid house becomes associated with this specific kind of house music coming out of these predominantly black predominantly queer dance clubs in Chicago go, it's historically important because it is such an abstract sound. It marks a really important moment in the history of popular electronic dance music because compared to sort of traditional house, even compared to techno, it doesn't revolve around vocals, it doesn't even revolve around

the very sort of compelling melodic lines of the Detroit techno of people like Juan Atkins and Derek May. It revolves around just the kind of hypnotic texture of these Rowan 3a3 bass since squelches. This is the seminal definitive example of classic acid house. This is Future, P-H-U-T-U-R-E, the working name of Nathaniel Pierre Jones, otherwise known as DJ-P-R-P. On the classic Chicago label Tracks, T-R-A-X, this is from the Acid House, sorry, the classic Acid Tracks EP. This is the track 12 and a half minutes long. We're only going to hear a bit bit. This is Acid Tracks. Acidhouse music music quite quickly became more popular in Britain than it was in the state and it became

associated with the very first iterations of the British rave scene. He was going to say, an ecstasy, and actually not acid as primarily, at least in the late 80s and early 90s, right? Well, that's right. Well, I mean, if you go into the kind of micro-history of the popularisation of those things in Britain, like a lot of things kind of happen very quickly and they get sort of folded into each other. So the aesthetic of acid house that is like the famous aesthetic by the end of the 80s, early

90s is very much one associated with the rave culture, kind of, you know, acid smiley, which is actually the acid smiley is actually about MDMA. It's not about acid. Well, it is really sort of complicated because, so Acid House is the name for the style of music, and then Acid House become, that that style of music becomes associated with the wider emerging rave scene, where really most of the music they're playing a lot of the time isn't even Acid House. It's like New York, it's garage, it's Chicago House, it's technical, know, it's kind of balleric music. So it's a bit wider. But the first really successful, like events that people are putting on in that scene in Britain, outside like really localised

club scenes, like Mossside and Manchester, are these big so-called acid house raves that are put on by people, some of whom will go on to become like Tory party activists in later life, for example. And they're really keen to disown the idea that the phrase Acid House has anything to do with LSD because they're worried that if it has any such association, then their events will get shut down. So there's this idea like promoted in the British music press around 8788 that Acid House can't possibly be by LSD. You're naive and stupid if you think these cool like black dance producers have any interest in psychedelic culture. And the claim was made that the phrase referred to the idea of an acid burn.

An acid burn was slang for a sample in music, which was like it was total nonsense. It was complete nonsense. Although, yeah, I do sort of understand it, you know, having been someone who's promoted dance events over the years, I do understand the slightly panicked desire to assert to journalists that your use of phrases like acid and psychedelic has nothing whatsoever to do with drugs. So your venue doesn't get shot down, understandably. The other way to think about that is that, like, something was happening, and I remember like a real, there was a, not quite a battle, but like, it sort of, perhaps it was a battle

to sort of define what was going on. And so people did talk about the second summer of love as a, you know, in 88, etc., as a direct reference to, to the 60s, etc. And yeah, you're right, you know, like psychic TV release and right. I remember I had a record where they sampled that yummy, yummy, yummy, yummy, I've got love in my tummy. Their intervention really was, we want to link this back to the 60s and like that, that's why we call it acid, etc. And then the smiley face and all this sort of stuff, you know, there was, there was something there where people were trying to say, well, what is this, what's going on and what's the culture around it? And then the commodification of it.

I've said this story before on ACFM, I think. you know, obviously I'm slightly younger than you guys, but like in the early 90s, you know, when I was like 11, 12, 13, I and my friends, you know, visiting England in the summer from Egypt, we were all wearing dummies round our necks and we didn't know why. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, we were all wearing, because it was a fashion, it was a fashion thing. Like, we were wearing Asset, Smilies and like dummies at 11, 12, 13, 14, we thought we were really cool. We had no idea what this was related to. You could buy them on the high street. A lot of listeners are probably wondering what the hell you were talking about, why that was a thing.

I mean, it was a thing because for a lot of people, the experience of both sort of psychedelics and ecstasy, actually, was partly kind of regressive, like people felt kind of childlike in a kind of carefree way and often a somewhat sort of de-sexualized way, like compared to how they felt on stimulant drugs or alcohol or have you. So there was this fashion of kind of really baggy sort of sexless clothes and people would suck dummy. And there were these candy dummies became popular, partly because having something to suck. Stops you grinding, yeah. Yeah, chewing and chewing, because you would kind of grind and grind your teeth. And partly because it was just,

it was just sort of comforting. And there was this kind of joke, there were lots of sort of jokey references to sort of the childhood culture of that cohort. There were lots of dance records that sampled, like kids TV themes from the 70s and stuff. And of course, and of course a lot of that,

a lot of it actually was more, it was people taking acid more than ecstasy. because the actual MDMA was really expensive. The marathon dancing thing was really about speed, in my opinion. It was really about speed. And I mean, now somebody's been around the club scene and kind of running nights, like up to this day, ever since this time. I would say, if you're talking about dancing for 12 hours as a practice,

that's entirely about amphetamins. And that begins with Northern Seoul in the early 70s. And it carries on through the period of early Acid House and Rave, when a lot of the time people really can't get or can't afford ecstasy. And even if they're buying something they think is ecstasy, it's probably cut heavily with speed, or a lot of the time they're just taking speed. And then around the turn of the century, MDMA has become much more widely available than much cheaper.

That specific history of ecstasy, I think is really interesting because obviously now, like young people now, when they think about the 90s, they think people in Keir's age, like raves in the early 90s were all high on like some sort of magical old school ecstasy. It was like better than the Xity you can get today. and none of that is true. And also, it was quite a small-scale thing. Like, when I was at university, most people weren't going out raving.

Like, the period when it really became, like, a mass phenomenon was actually, it was the end of the 90s. But, like, Ibita became a huge thing. And these massive clubs like Cream in Liverpool became, like, really, like, drivers of the local economy. Like, that was the real sort of moment of ecstasy. That was the moment when acid really stopped being part of mainstream dance culture

and just kind of got siphoned off into science. trance as like a specialist culture. That is an interesting question about how big Acid House actually was in the sort of like late 80s, etc. It was tiny. It was, but like it was, it had some of the sense of that sort of like cultural revolution thing. Because you reminded me about like the baggy clothes, etc. There was, like it had a big impact on fashion. People who were like really dressing up to go clubbing, you know, one week would be in like baggy t-shirts and baggy trousers and flares the next week.

A little bit like punk, do you know what I mean? where it's not quite a year zero thing, but, like, things really happen really, really quickly, basically. Change happens really, really quickly. It had a big impact, and I think I've talked about this on the show before. Like, I really had the experience of a whole bunch of, like, the local hard lads, like from my, from my school and my neighbourhood, like, changing their personalities, like, massively, like, quite self-consciously and explicitly changing their sexual politics.

And they put it all down to ecstasy. They put it all down to the fact that they experienced a kind of bliss on the dance floor. which made them not want to be, they wanted not to have a kind of predatory sexual relationship with women. They wanted to have kind of emotional intimacy. They wanted to be, you know,

have a kind of emotional intimacy with their mates, and they sort of rejected the culture of kind of beer and speed and violence. And as I often say, substance, what it was really massive for was like straight white men. It was less massive,

like in some ways for women and for gay people who've already been into dancing. And not getting into fights and pubs. Exactly, I was going to say, like that not being part of your friends. Friday night, necessarily. No, exactly.

This is not Molly FM, it is ACFM. So maybe we should maybe get back onto the assets. Well, let's just say, I'll just say one thing to bring it back to acid is actually, if you look at statistical usage of LSD, there's a real spike around people who are basically like university age, even whether at a university or early 20s at that time in the early 90s. Because there was a huge amount of LSD around that scene because it was cheap and widely available compared to A. And there were all kinds of scenes

like the ambient music scene which did kind of proceed from people having these experiences. Like that's sort of the point that acid really was actually part of that scene. Well, we could play, we call it Acid by Demob from 1988. Really at the height of like the Acid House moral panic.

One of the things you haven't talked about perhaps so far is there was a real moral panic built up around Acid House. And in fact, you know, lots of exposés and panics and, you know, that reports in the press, etc. Yeah. It was partly because it was initially reported by the tabloid, just as the cool new trend, because the moment seemed to be so culturally boring.

And then, like, within a few weeks, it became apparent that evidently a cultural or musical trend with the word acid, and it had something to do with drugs. And so then there was a massive panic. Well, classically, demob denied it had anything to do with drugs. But it still got banned from the BBC playlist, which is that the list. of records that would be played on rotation

on Radio 1. The story about DEMO, where you call it Acid, is there was some, one of the big London Acid House clubs, not Shume, I think it was Spectrum, Paul Okunvold's Club, supposedly there was a famous dealer who would just walk around the dance floor

shouting, Acid! Acid! And that's where they got, supposedly that's where they got the Acid cry from. The musical phenomenon Only for the headstrong Makes you want to dance Move on your feet

Who's going to trans Keeps you on your feet We call it ass Asc The other musical style of the 80s The other musical style of the 80s To which the prefix acid gets associated is Acid Jazz, where people like Giles Peterson coming out of the West London rare groove scene

designate the particular kind of jazz funk, which they like to play at their clubs, as Acid Jazz. Now, there's a couple of things to say about this. One is that the story around Acid Jazz is that basically the name was adopted as a sort of joke by people on that scene, and it was adopted as a joke partly as a way of sneering at Acid House, to which they regarded themselves as musically and socially superior. And there's also the fact that it was really, I always thought that it was a really weird, it was very weird. If you were going to use the phrase acid jazz, like why would you refer to this often quite, you know, this very kind of manored jazz funk? Like there definitely was psychedelic jazz

in the early 70s in particular. And it was the electric Miles Davis and the spiritual jazz of Alice Coltrane that was like psychedelic jazz. But again, that stuff was so denigrated and so marginal and so little valued in the 1980s that you could just completely ignore. You could ignore the existence of Miles Davis's Bitches Brew and Alice Coltrane's journeys in such in and Andrew just designate some sort of rare groove records as acid jazz. Let's hear a bit of classic acid jazz. This is one of the tracks, I think, that was compiled on Giles Peterson's original Acid Jazz Volume 1 compilation that also came out in 1988, although the track is from 1972. This is The Better Half, Funk Inc.

Well, it is a really great piece of funky jazz funk, actually, with a really cool kind of Hammond Organ sort of solo. I have to say, you know, it is really good. And although my understanding is that people on the acid jazz, so-called scene at that time we're not usually taking psychedelics. I definitely have been to clubs in New York and London in my life where people would, where people would have really danced to this on psychedelics and I really enjoyed it. So that is a really nice piece of acid jazz. I mean, in terms of broader drug culture, acid isn't a big part of the story in the 1990s. The big stories in the 1990s are, as we said, the popularization of ecstasy. And also,

I mean, if you were doing a history of broader psychedelic culture, you would have to say the popularization of psilocybin cultivation, first in the States and then later, as people start to develop techniques for the cultivation of mushrooms, which don't require the kind of lab grade conditions that earlier techniques had required. And it's, and it's, so Terence McKenna, the great psychedelic guru of the period, promote DMT, although you cannot get DMT at all in like in the UK in the 90s unless you happen to be friends with like Mr. Sea of the Shaman or something. And he promotes mushrooms. And the idea that actually mushrooms are sort of spiritually superior to LSD becomes very widely sort of circulated. So acid isn't really a big deal

for a lot of people over the course of the 90s. I mean, Maybe it still isn't really. The point of the show today isn't a whole kind of cultural history of acid. It's just a cult. It's a genealogy of different ways in which acid has been used as an adjective. And I think the point we're making really in terms of the genealogy from the 60s through to the 80s is that there's always this sort of, there's a set of meanings associated with it, which are partly to do with the pursuit of utopian mystical bliss. And they're partly to do with getting fucked up. And they're partly to do with getting out of your head. And they're partly to do with freedom. and they're partly to do with changeability and there's a whole kind of continuum of possible meanings. But then I don't think, I don't have any really obvious kind of examples until we get to acid Marxism and acid communism.

Some people have used this idea of acid communism and talked about like, try to riff off the idea of acid as a corrosive thing, basically, something that eats away at the illusions of the world, cutting away the fetishisms of capital, etc. which is another way in which actually you could frame that idea of the different ways people have used acid as in LSD, you know, are you seeking disorientation, etc.? Are you seeking sort of like greater lucidity, something like that?

I do remember meeting one or two people on that, the sort of post-punk squat scene in the late 80s, very early 90s. I think a bit implements by people like Templar psychic youth. And their deal was the way you should take acid is you take a big dose of acid and then walk around the city, they're confronted. reality, listening to the noise of the cars. Like, you shouldn't be off in the woods, like listening to the birds. What exactly they thought one was going to get out of this? I'm not sure. But maybe, I mean, maybe that was, I never really pressed them on it, but maybe this is the implicit argument. It should be a stringent, you know, acid is a stringent. It should be in a stringent way of like burning away, burning the ideology out of your brain. That is definitely

how some people have wanted to interpret Marx's use of the phrase, actually, like how Mark officious use of the phrase acid communism, that there is an interpretation which says, sometimes quite explicitly, that we're a bunch of hippie wankers on this show, that Mark wasn't talking about, like, utopian, you know, spiritual socialism. What he was talking about was acid in the sense of, yes, the stringent, like, counter-ideological realism, that which burns away, like, burns ideology out of your brain and consciousness. And communism understood not as some airy-fairy pursuit of collective democracy and freedom, but merely as the movement which abolishes the present state of things,

no matter what form that may take. And that is one take on what it might be meant by the phrase acid communism, which I think, you know, I think one has to accord some respect to, even if we don't necessarily share it. Sure, I mean, but I thought that one of the central effects of asset, I mean, maybe this is not the case, you know, But what is said, at least what's written about the effects of acid, is like this realization that everything is interconnected. And that, to me, like, I'm trying to see the kind of acid as corrosive, you know, unless it's corroding, you know, ideology, you know, and then you can see the light.

Like, I feel like I necessarily am going to fall on the side of, like, the hippier side of things. because I guess I associate that kind of like harshness with alcohol rather than like with psychedelics. Well, I mean, one way, if I remember, I haven't listened, I haven't listened back to the first ever show, but I remember I went on about fetishism, not in, not wearing leather clothes, but as in, you know, the sort of Marxist's conception of the fetish, as in these sort of like imaginary constructs or these constructs that we create and then think they create us in some sort of way, which is like how we might imagine God, You know, God emerges from human imagination, but then we turn it into a fetish which seems to, in fact, create human beings, et cetera, and therefore we can't, it seems to be beyond our ability to change them, that sort of conception.

And so you can see, you know, the corrosive effects of, like, burning away the illusory fetishisms of this late capitalist society, 21st century capitalist society, something like that. I think it also may be useful, actually, just to go back to the way that, the way Mark was using acid in acid communism. I'd just do a little rehearsal of that argument because his idea was this idea that he was interested in mechanisms of consciousness inflation to overcome the consciousness deflation he'd thought that neoliberalism and capitalism from the 1980s onwards had taken. And so, you know, as we already mentioned, like he went through three different ideas of the kinds of consciousness inflation that were current in the 1970s in particular. He was interested in.

The first one is when we sort of mentioned. that me and Nadia took up and tried to do some workshop experiments around, which is the consciousness-raising experiments of second-wave feminism, basically. The ever one he talked about was like the heightened class consciousness of the 1970s compared to now, the idea that there are different classes who may in principle be antagonistic towards them. I think like that, and some sort of idea of class consciousness or idea of classes come back since sort of like 2015, 16, 17, when Mark would have been writing this stuff. But then the third, he wanted to add to that, he wanted to add this idea of psychedelic culture as consciousness inflation.

And like what he was referring to was the idea that acid reveals the sort of plasticity of thought, that things we think are solid and eternal and beyond humankind is actually, you know, are actually changeable and mutable and historically caused, that sort of idea of psychedelics, I think. that's the acid in acid communism for Mark Fisher to some degree. We've had some sort of fidelity to that, but I think we've gone a bit further than that. So one of the ways we've talked about, like, acid and what the weird and the weird left is and what the acid in acid communism or carbonism is,

is this sort of openness to the complexity of the world, or even further than that, actually, it's like ways in which we can inculcate openness to the complexity of world. And then I think it's that thing. You were just mentioning Nadia about perhaps what LSD does to you is reveal that everything is connected. Like the realization of the complexity of the world or the realization that everything is connected does not necessarily lead to left-wing politics. No, but it opens the door to solidarity. It opens the door to solidarity. You might not walk through that door, but it does open that door. Yeah, it can do. I mean, because we've got to take into account the weird writer, the sort of cosmic right, etc. But we can get to that a bit later.

But I think there's something there right about. So, like, openness to the complexity of the world is in some sort of tension with the need to reduce that complexity to in order to orient yourself in the world in order to be able to act. So like just saying, oh, wow, everything's connected, that's not necessarily, doesn't get you very far. Like, you know, we can think about Marxism is a way in which you can orientate yourself in the world because it's a way of like filtering that complexity of the world and saying, well, look, these are the important bits. These are the bits that are structuring and determining the other bits, right? So there's a tension there between, you know, this desire to be open to the complexity of the world

and then the desire to sort of almost simplify the world in order to be able to act in the world. And like Marxism is a tool for that. And I was thinking about when people first get into left politics and Marxism, in fact, that might actually be one of the attractive affects of Marxism, is that it helps you orientate yourself. When people first get into Marxism, they quite often are attracted to a more simplified sort of economicistic sort of versions of Marxism. As you're around on the left, et cetera, et cetera, the more simplified sort of vulgar Marxism, it actually gets you a long way and be able to understand the world. But it's actually quite a drawback in terms of like

acting in the world because it's quite far from how the world actually is, then you get attracted to more complex versions of Marxism or like, you know, attempts to sort of resolve openness to complexity of the world and the ability to act in a world where people have tried to think through those sorts of politics with people like DeLis and Guatari, et cetera, those sorts of like touchstones that theoretically speaking at ACFM has sort of gone back to over the years. and I've always thought that like the sort of theoretical touchstones for ACFM quite often are sort of like Dillers and Guattari mixed with Gramsky perhaps perhaps throwing a bit of Negri, I don't know, autonomism or whatever.

There's a tension there that I see, you know what I mean, that tension between the desire to complexify the world because the world is complex and the desire to simplify the world because you need to act. Yeah, that's an interesting frame. I mean, what I was thinking about when I listened to the first episode was whether there is naturally and whether it's a good tension between, you know, historical materialism and like, you know, I would consider myself a materialist and that being like very central to my Marxian kind of politics and like this kind of acid plasticity of, you know, understanding the world and like the mind and like potentials and like how I can reconcile those things without falling into, you know, complete postmodernism where nothing means anything, you know, and that kind of, that was also something that I was thinking about and wondering like how I wish. on how much acid can help or hinder kind of that perspective? I mean, for me, I've always been committed to the view

that historical materialism is not like deterministic. The point of the historical materialist project is to demonstrate that the world is changeable, basically, because it changes over time. And that's the basic way in which a critical perspective tries to resist ideology, is by refuting ideologies, basic claim that things can only ever be as they are now and probably always have been

in some fundamental way. So even though at the same time, you know, what a sort of historical materialist perspective, and dare I say, an acid perspective tries to get away from. It's an individualistic understanding of what it means to have agency in the world. Really, ultimately, it is about trying to get away from a dichotomy between understanding, you know, the world socially and deterministically or individualistically and voluntarily. So like all of those perspectives are wrong. It's wrong to be a kind of voluntarist who thinks like you just make your own fate or a kind of individualist who thinks you make your own fate individually. And it's wrong

to be a complete determinist who thinks like nobody has any agency ever. Yeah. And the nature of agency is itself like mysterious and unpredictable. But but its mysteriousness and unpredictability shouldn't lead us as it does to sort of conservative thinking. just to dismiss the very possibility of progress and political agency and change. So all of that is quite complicated, but all of that, that is the perspective we've really sort of developed on the show, I think, in many different iterations. And that is, for me, that is sort of what is meant by, acid communism as a philosophical

and analytical position. And I sort of, I agree with Keir about the reference points, actually. I mean, it's sort of, I mean, in a way, I think what we've done, what we've done with the notion of acid communism is we have to have. sort of he completely ignored Mark Fisher's specific conceptual reference points where he wrote about it, which was basically, it was like Marcusa, really, and a couple of other things. And we have simply answered the question. Like, if you had a pretty comprehensive knowledge of, like, Western Marxism and radical

theory in the 20th century, like, what would you assume the reference points would be for something that called itself acid communism? And I just think, well, firstly, it would be figuratively of Guittari, like number one, is like the number one candidate, then Negri, because of his kind of associations with Qutari, then Deleuze, because of his associated with Qatari, then probably, indeed, I mean, Gramsci, is probably more relevant to turning it into acid-corbanism in a way.

And then more broadly, actually, I would say, was something that's come through, like for my contributions on the show in a way, I wasn't really expecting when we started, as I'm often coming back to a sort of Spinozen conception of self-hood and affect. And that's one reason, there's one reason, not the only reason why I've been doing this seminar series as part of Culture Power Politics, which is a, I don't know, it's a project and it's sort of a podcast. You can look it up,

listeners, if you don't know about it. Just Google Culture Power Politics. I've been doing this series of seminars with Andy Goffey and Jason Reed and a bunch of speakers from around the world about the history of Spinozist Marxism, because Spinoza is one of the original thinkers in the Western philosophical tradition of a non-dualistic philosophy. So he's one of the original people to say it's wrong to try to separate the body from the mind, that the body and the mind are basically all the same substance, and they affect each other all the time. And today, that's like a really obvious thing to say, like modern psychology and modern science totally accept this as a norm, and that's one reason why loads of neuroscientists, were not

in loads, but some have got really interested in Spinoza. And he says it in a kind of language, which is very dated, but it's of its time, it's from the 17th century. But it's an idea, which was really radical and subversive for centuries and I think a kind of mind-body dualism is still built into a certain kind of common sense of a lot of culture and getting away from that mind-body dualism

again that is one of the things that's something we've done quite a bit on the show like with the episode about the gut and when we've talked about exercise for example sleep like it's a big thing in forming our perspective this idea that you can't separate out kind of subjective experience from

social experience from corporeal and bodily experience. Sort of philosophically, we've sort of drawn on resources which seem to be useful for thinking in those terms. And so we have developed an acid communism of our own as a theoretical and analytical perspective, at least. In a way, actually, the closest point of proximity to, you know, Marx's version of it, as he set out in that one piece of writing, is the importance of women's liberation

to our thinking about it. Because the importance of a particular kind of feminism, which traces itself to the the utopian and connectivist, solidaristic, democratic radicalism of women's liberation. That remains really important to us, I think, doesn't it? That was where me and Nadia came in, wasn't it, basically? Like some of the background to this that people might already know was that me and Nadia were in a political group called Plan C

when we first started doing this show, actually, who were experimenting with re-examining the consciousness-raising techniques of the second wave feminist movement in particular, which is that you get together and you sort of like you try to discuss your experiences and then to sort of like draw some more structural conclusions from that, etc. And we did a series of workshops where we were trying to work out how you could, yeah, we'd do this workshop where we'd sort of ask people these questions which related to sort of post-capitalist desires.

And then we'd sort of reveal halfway through that a lot of those references we were asking you to think about, where the references that perhaps Mark Fisher was thinking about, which are where people look for post-capitalist desire in the 1970s, and then we ask people, where should you look for post-capitalist desire now, et cetera? I know you've been doing even more of these consciousness-raising sessions now, haven't you recently? Yeah, for sure. I mean, I think the challenge specifically is with what we were doing here

and what I'm still trying to do now, I mean, carrying on through that work, is like how do you translate that practice from, you know, 60s, 70s, 80s feminism into a space where it's kind of like one-off events where people might live and work in the same area and to kind of hook that consciousness raising on a theme and it not necessarily being with a group of people who live in the same neighbourhood and are just talking about the experience of their own lives.

I think to a certain extent we've been successful, you know, like a project that I want to find funding for is to kind of collect all of the different consciousness-raising experiments that are taking place all around the. world and around Britain and the stuff that we've done and to have some kind of space where that information like an archive where we're depositing that information because I think it's also like theoretically interesting to like understand like how does that practice translate you know in the 21st century and I can also what are the limits of that practice kind of specifically

but but coming back to like the term asset I think it is it continues to be very useful here around this idea of consciousness inflation you know I'm coming back to it it's we talk about in the beginning of the show but like that is kind of terminology which I hold as part of that consciousness raising practice like it makes sense to be thinking in an acid way you know do you want to say a bit more about the about the consciousness raising you've been recently and how it's gone because I know it's something people have asked us to revisit I mean I know Kia's been doing stuff as well but the most recent um workshops that I've been running have been with Bath Spy University. So, like, I've been working with a colleague over

there, Rupert, who's amazing, who's got some funding for us to run these workshops. And we've done two of them, one in Bath and one in Bristol. And really what we're trying to do is to kind of uncover, like, where are the tensions and what are the needs in terms of communities being able to build power for action? So we've done, like, whole day long workshops. Like, we work through problems and, you know, tensions and like try and, I guess one of the ultimate Uber aims of the workshop is to make people feel like they are less alone in both their demands and their experiences, I think. And I think so far in terms of the feedback that we've had from those workshops. And in fact, I mean, I'm sure Keir can attest for this, like almost every

single iteration of these workshops that we've done, even though the group that attends, they're self-selecting. People are deciding to come to these workshops. Some of them consider themselves, you know, Uber activists and some don't. But they all have kind of a stake in their local area, the ones that I've done recently, like previously with me and Kia, it might have been slightly different. But almost every single workshop, there will be a percentage of people who would say, like, wow, I didn't think anybody else felt the same way. And it's that kind of expression that we've had from at least a percentage of people in every single workshop, which has basically said to me, okay, there's something here in the methodology

of, you know, facilitating workshops in this way, which creates this mood in the room where people feel less alone and they feel less alone in their thoughts and ideas and beliefs. And that in itself has power. Like that produces political power in the community. I think there's something in the methodology of bringing in the kind of those consciousness raising, question, asking way of organising things and some of that kind of slowness and reflective spaces where the workshops

or the event is not actually trying to achieve something by the end and I think there's something that's got real value in that. So I hope that that works as a summary. But all of that is like building on like Kia said, like starting some of that stuff

within Plan C, but then like taking it out and trying different models where it's been put possible to do experiment. So if anybody wants to fund any of this stuff, get in touch with us because, you know, we're happy to run more of this stuff, but we need the funding for it. It just reminds me, actually, all three of us did a sort of consciousness raising session at a night that producer Matt runs called Circle Dance, which is quite an amazing

experience if you get a chance to go along to those. And that was really interesting as well doing it, preceding a sort of almost, well, like a gig and club night. I just mentioned as well we've seen as we're talking about the prefix acid that I experimented well me and a friend Tom Williams Shirley Mush experimented with acid football sessions and it were just a straight take of like it's this idea that perhaps we should widen the scope of politics and like tried to discuss politically all different aspects of our lives and so the acid football sessions were where we'd run a sort of consciousness raising session it was a football theme struggle session, wasn't it? It was, yeah. But yeah, but it would be about, like, the

experience of football fandom and then seeing what we had in common, except, seen what the, experiences were, and then followed by a game of football. And the way they tended to go was everybody would be really sort of like caring, et cetera, and attentive during the consciousness racing session, and then the football would be full-blooded, studs up, destroying the effects. We sort of took that idea, and then we did some podcast called Pro-Revolution soccer, which we did on Navarra, and now Tom and Juliette Jakes have taken out, they're continuing with these Pro Revolution Soccer podcast, which are about the experience of being a football fan, et cetera, I'm trying to relate that to capitalism and

left-wing politics, etc, and you should give that a listen if you're that way inclined. I'd really recommend them as well. Yes, shout out to Pro Revolution Soccer. A musical genre from the 90s, which was given the name a name associated with psychedelics, even though it wasn't really psychedelic. It was the Bristol derived genre of trip hop. I mean, really, it's kind of funny.

It was called trip hop because it was just a funny pun to rhyme with hip-hop when it was basically it was stoner music. Like it wasn't about psychedelics. It was about people's smoking kind of heavy weed and listening to a sort of hip-hop beat-driven music with a bit of a dub influence on it. as well, very Bristol.

These days, one of the less well-known of the trip-hop artist, at the time, often thought of as being definitive of the genre. This would be by Tricky, this is the track Overcome from his 1995 album, Maxim K. Right album. You're not exactly lovers. You're a couple of, especially when your body's doubled,

duplicate, and then you wait for the next cue. Come a couple. It might be a way into talking about the differences between when we started this, show and now basically the big political changes. One of the things that have changed during that time, Jim, is the resolute defeat of the Corbyn moment, basically. And then the sort of political disorientation that took place around that, which is interesting actually, because yeah, if we wanted to sort of periodize this, we would say that there was a centrist restoration with both Stama's counter-revolution and then the defeat of Bernie Sanders in the US, etc. Biden

etc these sorts of things but like if we want to periodize it we'd say that that centrist resolution has just come off the rails basically it's sort of collapsed as in Biden lost the election to Trump the Starma government seems to have auto-defeated itself and become a failed administration within a couple of months of taking office yes I always thought that they'd fail I just didn't realize they would fail this quickly and so enthusiastically fail themselves anyway And then just when we were chatting about other stuff, actually, Jem, you raised this idea that perhaps there's a bit of a mood shift, actually, perhaps like, things are not good. Let's be honest about it.

Things are fucking terrible, you know, there really is a rise of something that you can recognize as some sort of variant of fascism or pre-fascism and we've done shows and this, obviously, with Trump, etc. But there does seem to be a sort of clarificatory sort of thing that goes along with that. The mood that followed that centrist restoration was much. much more of a deadening sort of sensation, which seems perhaps to be lifting now. I'm not quite sure. But anyway, it's interesting to think about our sort of project, the ACFM project,

and the idea that it might be more than the podcast again, that we might try to do in, you know, IRL sort of consciousness raising groups or perhaps some other way. And I do agree in some sort of way. Me and Nadia were doing these consciousness raising group. We tried it in different areas, et cetera. And for a while we were trying to think through how we might scale. this up a little bit and we sort of that has dropped off of the horizon so is the moment there is

acid corbinism back baby yeah these comments you're making are all coming out of discussions we've been having about partly about a few episodes we might do this year and partly about the question of like what's what's changed and what hasn't changed over the past five years and I mean there was a sense that I had actually really I mean let's I'm going to be completely sort of frank and we were discussing both this episode and also something to discuss future episodes and when we first started discussing this episode my worry was all I would have to say is really nothing's changed actually in the past three years or things changed between in the very early days of the podcast and then really after the moment of COVID and the star right restoration

and the emergence of the cosmic right which we discussed at the time but basically things have just sort of been on rails since then. It's just been more of that. But then just really just like literally yesterday, like I was saying to the others that I thought, well, actually now, it feels like the end of that Starma Wright Restoration, indeed, means that somehow we're experiencing a whole other load of feelings,

including just the abject terror about the literal probability of fascism, like in places like Britain and the States and like elsewhere in Europe, but also it now looks very unlikely that something like a recognisable left isn't going to re-emerge again in Britain over the next year or so, even though I strongly suspect it's going to be distributed between at least three different sites, which will be still the Labour Party, no matter what people think. Also, the kind of formation around Jeremy Corbyn and the kind of his networks and also the Green Party. There's such a kind of vacuum being left and such a sense of urgency being produced by the rise of the far right. I think there is

going to be a movement. Part of our problem with doing anything like consciousness raising to a certain extent since the defeat of Corbinism was that we didn't really have a movement to attach it to. And that is, I mean, one of the things about women's liberation is women's liberation,

consciousness raising practices were associated with this specific movement, the movement of women's liberation. And when Corbinism was a movement and we could attach what we were doing to Corbinism. And to a certain extent, I think a lot of what we've been doing,

and I think to some extent what, like Nardi's consciousness raising practices have been doing. A lot of what we've done on the podcast, really, has been about just sort of surviving the past four years to a certain extent. Because indeed, as you said, that we have just, we've experienced what was always going to be a relatively short term, but was always going to be very depressing, the kind of the grey reign of, you know, the technocrats, like clinging to power, having defeated the left in the form of, you know, Sanders and Corbyn on either side

of Vietnam. Grey Labour, as Alex Niven puts it. Yes, it's a very good phrase, grey labour. It's great phrase. Maybe we all need to think about how we are relating to an emergent movement rather than just being the surviving residues of one. And we did make this joke to each other the other day. Assy Corbynism might be bat, but I mean, there's no question that Jeremy Corbyn is going to be a central figure

within this broad, and I suspect quite distributed and diffuse formation of a kind of re-emergent left in Britain. Whether people like that or not, I mean, mostly I do like it because he's a really good guy. But in a way, though, once Jeremy Corbyn is liberated from the strictors of the Labour Party, the concept of acid Corbinism, as we would conceive it, just becomes a tautology. Yes, yes, I was going to say that, yeah. Because there is no, there is no, in our quite casual and general use of the phrase acid,

there is no non-acid Corbinism. Like, Corbinism, the politics of Corbinism is just, is, you know, it's anti-war, it's anti-imperialist, it's democratic, It's against the technocratic state and against the far right. So Jeremy himself, you know, doesn't need any lessons from us on how to be, you know, emotionally literate. As pro-allotment, which I am big on as a grower. Yeah, I'm big on the growing massive vegetables. I mean, the other side of that is if we think about centristism as like this attempt to re-establish some sort of technocratic order,

to some degree to banish sort of like the effective elements of politics, affect rather than effective. the wider conception of politics we've been talking about, you know, what has been defeated is that conception that we could return to the technocratic politics where the adults are in the room and that's enough, basically. That's what's been comprehensively defeated over the last, well, I don't know, six months, perhaps, even something like that, basically. And if you think about what's won,

it is a politics which puts affect and feelings and rage and resentment, at the heart of politics to a large degree, you cannot defeat that with technocracy. You have to defeat it by different sorts of techniques and technologies which can produce different sorts of affects, basically. Well, this is a good point. Of course, one of the things that was motivating the whole idea of the show from the start

was a set of debate not just around the emergence of the kind of weird right and the alt-right and both right-wing and liberal technocratic appropriations of psychedelia and weird culture. was also the strong push from some quarters for a normy left, you know, the idea that the left has to look boring, has to be culturally boring, if it's going to appeal to ordinary people. Such a stupid idea. It's such a stupid idea. I just don't understand that that argument is just, like, it's so weird that people would actually think that in the current political terrain that

we'd have, that would win votes. Like, it's really weird. Well, you're right, but I think it's interesting. I think we do have a unique perspective on this stuff, actually, because right now, that idea is also associated in a lot of people's minds with, for example, of the rejection of liberal, of moralistic liberal identity politics. I'm delighted to say that in this month of February, in the year of Our Lord of 2025, it has been discovered that liberal identity politics might not be always particularly helpful to a thing called the left. But I think that's a good point, because ours stick is, yeah, we've always been against liberal identity politics and in favour of solidarity, but we are also against people who say that you should just, like, reject cosmopolitanism, for example,

as inherently the property of the cultural elites, that instead we should celebrate the vernacular cosmopolitanism, which has been part of left and working class culture since, you know, for hundreds of years. I mean, over the years, we've tried to historicise this, haven't we?

Like, you can even make a really crude sort of like historical thing like at it's worst right that normie socialism there's actually been actual articles which are advocating more or less a return to the 1950s right i we need to build up rebuild up manufacturing sector in the UK in the US in order to have the big mass workplace factories so that workers are strong it's almost word for word a particular article I've got in mind and like that is a fucking crazy nostalgic like that is not historical materialism, that's like, you know, we want to invent a time machine. It's absolutely crazy. But behind that is a rejection of like identity politics, but associating it with the stuff that

happened in the 60s and 70s, the movements of the 60s and 70s. And when we went back to argue that, we said, look, liberal identity politics, that is what arises after the defeat of those movements. And in fact, if you go back to those movements, as we try to have with these consciousness raising groups, they had a very different perspective on. on this stuff. And I had much bigger, much wider, more solidaristic political perspectives, basically. Yeah, for sure. But I also think, like, I'm really interested in, like, all of these kind of, like, nostalgia discourses. What is it that's created this real pull for nostalgia? And I think, you know, going back to, you know, Mark Fisher's ideas here, but also, you know, much more complex directions,

which we have developed ourselves here, this idea of like the cancelled future, where people are literally unable to see how things could be different and better, the only direction that they're able to look at is back, right? Where they have like these false reference points for like a history that never existed, but which does have a certain, you know, cultural images in their minds,

which is why I think actually our answer to it, and this goes back to the cultural question, and it goes back to some of the things that we spoke about on the first episode about like fun politics is that it's not good enough to come up with these technocratic kind of solutions for what you want the future to be like. We have to actually be building those cultural institutions now that both give people an opportunity to relate to other people in a kind of solidaristic sense, but also that are basically trying to say, yes, culture is important and we want to seek those alternatives now.

and we want to give ourselves some kind of respite from like how shit the world has become because every this kind of like our realities have become more narrow and shut and closed down and what a kind of asset politics is trying to do is to kind of blow up that space and kind of to have the space of possibility because without that like you know what's the point of anything Wow, that's too far out.