When Mark Fisher died, he'd started work on a book called Acid Communism. The phrase 'Acid Communism' did not designate some imagined political programme, but a general, diffuse, utopian and democratic sensibility that had been shared by participants in the counterculture, the New Left, and the democratic working-class mobilisations of the the late 1960s and early 1970s. The unfinished introduction to this book appears in the large collection of Mark's previously unpublished writings.
For most of his career, Mark had actually been dismissive of the legacies of the counterculture and 1968, seeing them as mere foreshadowings of the self-indulgent culture of advanced capitalism. The idea that this shared 'acid communist' sensibility had been a real thing, that it had been genuinely radical, that it had been defeated by neoliberal forces, rather than merely anticipating and contributing to the hegemony of neoliberalism, and that we ought to try to honour and revive its radical legacy in some way, was one that he came to quite late. To be honest, I think he mainly got that idea from working with me and with the Plan C libertarian communist affinity group.
If he'd developed the idea theoretically, then I think he'd probably have come to realise that if any conceptual current really deserved the name 'acid communism', then it was the tradition that included some of the Italian 'autonomist' thinkers in conjunction with figures like the French theorist, psychologist and activist, Félix Guattari. But he never got that far.But that's certainly how both I, and my friends who are members of Plan C, think about it.
Partly inspired by some of these ideas, in 2017 activist Matt Phull and some of the organisers of The World Transformed came up with the idea that 'Acid Corbynism' might be a good - deliberately amusing - name for the kind of libertarian-socialist, radically democratic, culturally experimental, avowedly utopian politics that was emerging at the imaginative fringes of the pro-Corbyn movement in the Labour Party. They saw this potential 'Acid Corbynist' politics as potentially inspired by ideas coming out of places like Mark's work, Plan C's experiments with collective self-organisation, my theoretical writing, the deep psychedelic dance party tradition that I have been heavily involved with promoting in the UK, etc. etc.
Well, various projects have emanated from this idea and continue to do so; most notably a regular podcast hosted by Novara Media. The list of these projects, and a lot more detailed explanatory writing, can be found HERE.