Acid Marxism

> *"There is no such joy in the tavern as upon the road thereto, said the Mennonite."*
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### **Introduction**

Acid Marxism exists as an application of 19th and 20th century Orthodox Marxist thought to the broader impacts of 21st century socioeconomic conditions. This updated landscape is marked by a Postmodern monoculture radiating out from the metropole, intensifying capital concentration, and increasing frontier violence as a reorientation of imperial power accelerates. To the extent that Acid Marxism attempts to arrange a dialectical synthesis between these conditions and Marxist teleology, it attempts to answer a question posed by social critics such as Jacques Derrida and Michel Foucault. "Is there a Marxism for Postmodernity?"

### **Orthodox Marxism**

Acid Marxism rests upon orthodox Marxist intellectual concepts and analysis. Like Orthodox Marxism, Acid Marxism offers itself as a strategy for revolution from within the metropole. It acknowledges the fundamental teleological nature of marxist analysis and proposes its responses towards the questions asked by Postmodern conditions informing our social relations, Capitalist Realism in the face of the working class' comprehensive defeat by the bourgeoisie in the later half of the 20th century, and state violence creeping inward toward the metropole, along these lines.

### **Material Analysis**

Through critical understandings of Lacanian Psychoanalysis and a Materialist understanding of the origins of consciousness as the basis for human society, Acid Marxism traces the spiritual relationship of different social classes around the metropole to the land and the means of production through the periodic collapses of premodern European feudal society and up to the shifting of global hegemony from the United States to China at the beginning of the 21st century. It points to early rebellions of christian religious sects such as the Anabaptists as attempting to reorient their experience of the physical world with their understanding of the spiritual world, and connects them to other failed attempts at "Immanentizing the Eschaton", such as Robespierre's desire to bring about civic liberalism's perfect world. It uses these understandings to map out moments and places in history where spiritual revolutions start and which demographics will be pulled towards spiritual revolution and universal brotherhood or counterrevolution and formalized market relationships. Through an analysis of history's spiritual demography, Acid Marxism paves the way for its materialist analysis to inform its spiritual prescriptions.

### **Spiritual Analysis**

Acid Marxism postulates that social classes are able to relate their position within the global supply chain to an understanding of the degree to which they benefit from the exploitation of the labor of those positioned further down the chain. As a result of this awareness, Individuals who consider themselves to be worthy of benefiting from this exploitation exhibit spiritual malaise and neuroses as they navigate a world that deviates in shape and form from an idealized world of spiritual communion with divinity, nature, and the experience of life as such (See: Gnosticism). Acid Marxism calls out these neuroses as the fundamental experiences of Postmodernity, pointing out that Jean Baudrillard's prognosis of Postmodernity as ecstacy is only accurate insofar as one is able to ignore the suffering and exploitation of those in lower social classes. In this sense, the cultural production of Postmodern society is tuned towards producing a sort of spiritual white noise that has the effect of taking people out of their bodies and immediate communities and locating their subjectivities instead in virtual spaces and milieus where the process of identity creation replaces the spiritual experience of communion with the other. Acid Marxism recognizes this as an injunction by postmodernity to locate the Godhead not externally but internally. By asking for individual subjectivities to reach toward a godhead in their own mind, Postmodernity instantiates the human condition in a peculiar way. If spiritual communion ends with the death of ones physical body, then those humans can react towards death only with terror. The goal of Postmodern Marxism becomes a Spiritual Revolution away from liberal subjectivities and their postmodern injunction to elevate the self to the Godhead, and towards a new subjectivity that recognizes the human condition as one of living within a community of other physical beings, spiritually connected to eachother through material interdependence in production and local ecology. As a method to achieve this spiritual revolution, Acid Marxism suggests that Postmodern subjectivities attemp to reset their spiritual relationships through temporary sublimation of the ego.

### Ego Death

Acid Marxism postulates Ego Death as a solution to the malaise and neuroses inflicted upon liberal subjectivities. By allowing the fragile postmodern Godhead, constructed through consumer choice, to die while the physical body lives, Acid Marxism looks to make the individual simultaneously aware that the violence outside the metropole is done on their behalf, and that this violence can be stopped if a critical threshold of individuals living under postmodern conditions are willing to make this happen.

### **Conclusions**

> *"I know what I'm going to do. Log off and start grilling."*
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The spiritual implications of reattaching ones subjectivity to the external world involves an immersion in to existing community structures, as well as activities and pastimes that remind the individual of the fundamental materiality of existence. As an answer to the perennial question of "What is to be done?", Acid Marxism responds by telling its listeners to reconstitute their identity through hobbies and pastimes that connect them to the physical world. The expansion of ones spirit is then able to come about through recurrent encounters with other subjectivities during the process of identity formation. By recommitting the realm of divinity to these aspects of community and shared passion, the individual becomes able to contextualize physical death not as annihilation but as permanent sublimation of the ego in to the community it has participated in building. To the extent that this community is recognized to be the universal fraternity of Life on Earth, is the extent to which the project of Acid Marxism is able to be realized.

### **Further Reading**

The concepts that orient Acid Marxism have been developed by authors such as Fredric Jameson, Mark Fisher, and Matthew Christman.

1. ↑ 1.0 1.1 Christman, M. (Host). (2021, September 2). *And I Looked as He Ordered the FourthMeal...*[Audio podcast]. Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QcTL1NPXaeE.