Part one of a hazy and mazy philosophical dungeon crawl about progressive but haunted political theory and praxis and bottom-up process ontologies for the End Times that emerged out of conversations with The Others on Discord.

#acid-chthomunism

In the midst of the raging pandemic in the spring of 2021, I had just finished reading two of Mark Fisher's books. At the time his harsh critique of life under capitalism struck me not only as depressingly pessimistic, but as too overcredited and reified, as I witnessed this very system begin to crumble under a viral insurrection that exposed the fragile fiction of normalcy we had all taken for granted.

I shared my thoughts with my fellow weirdos in the well-guarded Discord sanctuary known as The Others, where we discussed how the materialist mindset so dominant on the Left leaves little room for the kind of transcendental experiences needed to escape a worldview obsessed with being trapped in reality.

This led to the creation of a dedicated channel to continue our conversation about the potentials of progressive occultism, post-colonial forms of spirituality, and more earthly, emancipatory rites of magic for these end times of perpetual crisis, climate change, and fading empire. As a chthonic nod to Mark Fisher's concept of 'Acid Communism', I named the channel #acid-chthomunism.

Four years on, I'm finally carving out some time to distill our collective vibe into a series of magical‑realist political essays, probably with some segways into metaphysics. Not because I've suddenly found extra hours in the day, but because the growing urgency to counter this insane mind virus of an accelerationist, AI‑driven post‑truth dystopia that has emerged from the rubble of the pandemic's rift in our timeline.

My gratitude goes out to The Others, especially Dan and Ed, for their ongoing valuable input and engagement.

Before we begin our dungeon crawl let's tie the red thread to what had started our conversations in the first place: Mark Fisher's magnum opus "Capitalist Realism" and his hope for "Acid Communism."

Capitalist Kenoma

Mark Fisher was a British cultural theorist and critic, best known for his blog k‑punk, unequaled in his poignant rhetoric and commentary on neoliberalism's hollow promises and culture under late capitalism. He was part of the infmaous CCRU¹ and gained a reputation for linking topics from rave culture to corporate bureaucracy with reflections on depression and mental health.

In his magnum opus Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative?², that was kind of a defining text for a disillusioned Millennial generation, Fisher coined the term "capitalist realism" to describe the pervasive belief that capitalism is not merely the dominant economic system but "seamlessly occupies the horizons of the thinkable". Drawing on Soviet "socialist realism"³ he articulates the ambient depression and sense of impossibility that marked the post-2008 cultural and political landscape. Fisher shows that at its core Capitalism operates by exorcising "the spectre of a world which could be free"⁴, by erasing the very conditions that might make alternatives conceivable. He also lays out in painful details how market logic reshapes everything from education, healthcare, and culture.

The call center experience distils the political phenomenology of late capitalism: the boredom and frustration punctuated by cheerily piped PR, the repeating of the same dreary details many times to different poorly trained and badly informed operatives, the building rage that must remain impotent because it can have no legitimate object, since – as is very quickly clear to the caller –there is no-one who knows, and no-one who could do anything even if they could. [...] In this experience of a system that is unresponsive, impersonal, centerless, abstract and fragmentary, you are as close as you can be to confronting the artificial stupidity of Capital in itself.

Fisher's harrowing diagnosis of a capitalist reality so totalizing that it shapes our perception and enforces conformity makes it seem like an almost metaphysical condition. It is strikingly reminiscent of how Gnostic myths describe the world as a false and flawed prison matrix ruled by an evil Demiurge⁵ and his Archons⁶. Although Fisher never explicitly invokes Gnosticism, the structural parallels struck me enough to run with this trope and dare a closer comparison.

Just as the Gnostics saw no way out of the material cosmos without salvation, the common contemporary sentiment that "there is no alternative" feels like an Archonic⁶ decree, closing off our political imagination before it can even begin. By pathologizing systemic injustice as individual failure, capitalism conceals the collective roots of our suffering, just as Archons⁶ in Manichaean⁷ or Sethian⁸ narratives insist that the soul's entrapment is inevitable.

In the realm of culture, Fisher draws attention to the collapse of genuine novelty into endless pastiche and ironic detachment. Corporate pop, blockbuster cinema, and hip start‑up aesthetics all recycle the same safe tropes, offering the illusion of choice while reinforcing a single marketable worldview.

Witness, for instance, the establishment of settled "alternative" or "independent" cultural zones, which endlessly repeat older gestures of rebellion and contestation as if for the first time. "Alternative" and "independent" don't designate something outside mainstream culture; rather, they are styles, in fact the dominant styles, within the mainstream.²

This mirrors the Gnostic notion that Archons⁶ can simulate transcendence, pseudo‑visions of freedom that ultimately serve the Demiurge's⁵ ends.

The reification of capitalism as an all‑encompassing, omnipotent, godlike force does feel Gnostic. Yet, unlike the ancient Gnostics, who developed coherent methods of spiritual liberation, thinkers such as Mark Fisher and others in the influential Freudo‑Lacanian‑Marxist lineage⁹ adopt an obsessively materialist, psychoanalytic approach to the relationship between humanity and capitalism.

This trope is also present in Guy Debord's "Spectacle"¹⁰, Hardt/Negri's¹¹ as well as Tiqqun's¹² "Empire", and Mumford¹⁴ or Latouche's¹³ "Megamachine". Despite their claims of rational and materialist theory and praxis many of their analyses seem very much like religious eschatology, minus the salvation. Here an example from Tiqqun:

Empire is the kind of domination that knows no Outside, that has gone so far as to sacrifice itself as the Same in order to rid itself of the Other. Empire excludes nothing, substantially; it only precludes that anything present itself as other, that anything escape the general equivalence. ¹⁵

Like his comrades in spirit Mark Fisher certainly put his finger into the collective wound of alienation and nostalgic longing for a lost past or unattainable future that haunts everyone who has been on similar trains of thoughts. There is a kind of romance attributed to the politization of despair and the affect of seeing things "how they really are".

The skeptical stance of metacognitively observing "the big picture" can be an quite seductive aesthetic but it would be negligent to ignore fact that it is also a symptom of depression. There is a danger in the reification of estrangement both individual and collective because it mutates into a demonic thoughtform that pulls its host into a downward spiral. In Gnostic cosmology as in Capitalist Realism the imagined and lived doom and gloom narratives become more and more real.

It is tragically ironic because it was the CCRU¹ itself that introduced the term "hyperstition"¹⁶, showing how fictional narratives infiltrate and reshape actual reality: invented names, stories, or rumors become treated as if they were real, and in doing so exert tangible influence.

Ultimately Fisher's work "Capitalist Realism" seeks to reveal the systemic flaws of capitalism, and it does so in very eloquent and captivating ways, but it also operates as catalyst of the hyperstition it seeks to counteract: by mythologizing capitalism it naturalizes and reinforces its grip on our collective imagination.

Towards Pleroma

To follow our thread, let's take Capitalist Realism a bit further and continue to map its central thesis onto the Archonic⁶ prison structure from Gnostic myth. This confronts us with the question of how to actually attain liberation and gnosis¹⁷.

In Capitalist Realism Fisher establishes a secular version of Gnosis¹⁷: collective critique and experimentation, building communal practices to dissolve the capitalist frame and reviving forgotten languages of solidarity and care.²

Where Gnosticism offers the promise of salvation through mystical insight and the guidance of a revealer like Sophia¹⁸ or Christ, Fisher posits a hyperstitional meme: despite reservations about the wording he dubs it "Acid Communism."⁴

If we are no longer to define ourselves negatively, by our opposition to Capital, what will be the name of our positive project? I don't believe that the old signifier communism can be revived for this purpose. It is now irretrievably tainted by terrible associations, forever tied to the nightmares of the 20th century. At the moment, our desire is nameless – but it is real. Our desire is for the future – for an escape from the impasses of the flatlands of Capital's endless repetitions – and it comes from the future – from the very future in which new perceptions, desires, cognitions are once again possible. As yet, we can grasp this future only in glimmers. But it is for us to construct this future, even as – at another level – it is already constructing us: a new kind of collective agent, a new possibility of speaking in the first person plural. At some point in this process, the name for our new desire will appear and we will recognize it.¹⁹

It's heartbreaking that Fisher's own lost battle with depression prevented him from fully bringing this idea to life before his premature passing in 2017. Judging from his late fragments⁴, drafts, and lectures²⁰ it becomes clear that his vision was to recover a revolutionary potential from the countercultural experiments of the 1960s and 1970s, an era fundamentally characterized by collective joy, communal experiences, and a belief in the possibility of radical social transformation.

For Fisher, the acid in Acid Communism is not merely a nod to psychedelics, but a shorthand for any experience or cultural form that dissolves the barriers imposed by commodified individualism and points toward a more fully social existence.

In his brilliant commentary²¹ on Acid Communism Dr Gregory Marks writes:

Acid Communism unites weird experience with collective becoming, to shatter the old forms of perception and cognition and bring about something other. We cannot expect to go through this process unchanged. The collective desire of Acid Communism transforms the very sense of time and space upon which our atomised and alienated selves are predicated. Yet there is a joy in dissolving into this new mass becoming, which destroys the categories that previously bound us.²¹

Even when "the weird" is brought into the conversation it is striking how oddly "unhaunted" Acid Communism is. It really feels like there is a longing for some transformative high strangeness while being stuck in a materialist mindset where the only way to conceptualize the numinous is through the psychedelic lense. I know because I've been there myself most of my life.

The part in his book where Fisher comes closest to the notion of metaphysical gnosis is when he invokes Lacan:

For Lacan, the Real is what any "reality" must suppress; indeed, reality constitutes itself through just this repression. The Real is an unrepresentable X, a traumatic void that can only be glimpsed in the fractures and inconsistencies in the field of apparent reality. So one strategy against capitalist realism could involve invoking the Real(s) underlying the reality that capitalism presents to us.²

Based on Lacan's Real²² and also Kant's notion of the Noumenon²³ the CCRU¹ established the term "Outside" in many of their works to describe the unknowable ontic reality beyond what human intellect can grasp with its psychophysiological and epistemological faculties of knowledge.

In Gnostic cosmology the incomplete and false material world is usually referred to as the 'kenoma'²⁵, while the complete and true world of abundance from which we are separated is called 'pleroma'²⁴.

The enigmatic lure and hopeful ambiguity of Acid Communism as a hyperstitional thoughtform is a powerful magical tool. I do like the emotions and the ideas the term evokes and I love its experimental approach to "consciousness raising"²⁶ as a tool to map out the Capitalist Kenoma from the inside in order to imagine a Pleromatic Outside.

But I have doubts about its proposed implementation...

An Acid Communist Praxis as imagined by Fisher and his adherents might admittedly have had a small chance of pushing towards Pleroma in the era before the pandemic.

As might have the idea of just ridiculing the paranoid neo‑Gnosticism of Capitalist Realism as pessimistic hyperbole like we did during the pandemic.

But times have changed dramatically...

...stay tuned for the next part, in which we will pull the red thread beyond the neoliberal kenoma, through pandemic shock, digital acceleration, and hypostitional collapse toward the pull of the Outside Attractor.