Annie and Cliff join Michael Gilbert, a public health technologist and a harm reduction organizer for a conversation on how communists should relate to harm reduction efforts. They discuss the reasons why people use drugs, the role of drug availability in harm reduction, how international regulations shape the drug trade, and how that is used to justify politics such as strong borders and even invasions. They also discuss the roots of drug criminalization in the US and how that relates to public health outcomes, how harm reduction can be both self-organization of drug users and something brought from outside, the particularity of the words harm reduction, and how that reflects on the ethics of drug use. Finally, they touch on Michael’s personal experiences organizing around harm reduction, and how to go beyond just being a red charity.
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Cliff Connolly argues for a culture of sobriety within our organizations, drawing from the example of Austrian Socialism.
Soviet anti-alcohol poster
“The revolution demands concentration, increase of forces. From the masses, from individuals. It cannot tolerate orgiastic conditions… The proletariat is a rising class. It doesn’t need intoxication as a narcotic or a stimulus. Intoxication as little by sexual exaggeration as by alcohol. It must not and shall not forget, forget the shame, the filth, the savagery of capitalism. It receives the strongest urge to fight from a class situation, from the communist ideal. It needs clarity, clarity and again clarity.” -V.I. Lenin1
After a long period of stagnation and defeat, the workers’ movement in the United States has found renewed energy in the process of base building. Labor revolts in behemoths of capital like Amazon and Target provide inspiration to many in unorganized sectors, and a new wave of tenant union formations following the COVID-19 economic crash give many socialists hope for the future. More visibly, the spectacular uprising in the wake of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor’s deaths pushed the demand for police abolition into the mainstream. Whether all this dissident energy will be marshaled to victory or sunk back into the swamp remains to be seen. To ensure the best outcome, it is crucial for the working class to build cultural institutions to reinforce its political ones. In my previous essay in this series, I wrote about some of the forms these institutions could take. Now I will argue that special care should be taken in the foundation of their internal character. This should of course be democratically determined by the masses themselves, but communists should encourage the values most suited for a robust popular movement.
Whereas bourgeois culture provides temporary relief from alienation through escapist media, dimly lit bars, and readily available opioids, proletarian culture should seek to transcend alienation through community. Creating media that is genuinely social and opening up spaces for neighbors and co-workers to fraternize will be an important part of this process. Without a focus on healthy socialization, however, combatting alienation could easily take a toll on the physical and mental well-being of our organizers and community members. This is the necessity of revolutionary sobriety.
How can we accurately analyze the political and economic trends of our time, and respond to them strategically, if we can’t even think straight? How can our neighbors overcome the precariousness of proletarian life if our social spaces are designed to induce numbness rather than inspire hope? Drugs and alcohol are a distraction from serious organizing at best and a plague on our communities at worst. The reality, however, is that they do exist, and the allure of intoxication is strong. This cannot be ignored or willed away through calls for simple abstinence. The only solution is to develop strong bonds between base building cadre and members of the class, and encourage healthy living by setting a positive example. Communists should act as champions of the proletariat, and this requires a higher degree of discipline than working at an NGO or canvassing for progressive electoral candidates. Sober cadre will organize healthy communities, which will in turn produce capable comrades to further the interests of the class.
This is not a new idea; Marxists throughout history have used it to build powerful movements, while others have ignored it to their own peril. In the early twentieth century, the Austrian Social Democratic Workers’ Party didn’t restrict their organizing to bread and butter issues like housing and healthcare. They built communal facilities for socialization, and an immense system of educational and cultural organizations. These efforts were focused on building the capacity of workers to take charge of society, with sport and sobriety being watchwords of the day. The Socialist Workers’ Sports International, for instance, wrote in its core principles, “Workers’ sport must fight against alcohol, which is an enemy of socialist society”. The resulting success led to their capital becoming known as as “Red Vienna”.2
Decades later in the United States, the heroic efforts of the Black Panther Party were defeated in large part due to the massive (and FBI directed) influx of drugs into black communities. While the Panthers took significant steps to address the problem of addiction among the masses, their internal culture was far too lenient toward drug abuse. Grave consequences followed; police used drug charges to recruit members as snitches, and prominent leaders like Huey Newton and Eldridge Cleaver eventually became addicts themselves. Newton disbanded the Party after an embezzlement scandal, befriended Jim Jones, and was killed by a crack dealer in 1989. Cleaver raped multiple women, became a Mormon and joined the Republican Party before finally succumbing to his crack addiction in 1998. Perhaps these men still would have betrayed their cause even had they been sober, but the drugs certainly didn’t help. Regardless, revolutionary sobriety was necessary for a strong socialist movement to develop, and many Panthers knew it. In 1968, Shirley Williams wrote The Black Child’s Pledge to set a standard for the youth to emulate. It reads: “I pledge to develop my mind and body to the greatest extent possible. I will learn all that I can in order to give my best to my People in their struggle for liberation. I will keep myself physically fit, building a strong body free from drugs and other substances which weaken me and make me less capable of protecting myself, my family and my Black brothers and sisters”.3 We can only speculate what may have changed if the party’s leadership had followed the example their comrade Williams laid out.
We see similar mistakes being made today in a socialist milieu that is opposite to the Black Panthers in almost every meaningful way. The mostly white Hipster Left, centered in gentrified Brooklyn, has none of the Panthers’ strengths and an even worse weakness for drugs. Its followers are personally dull and practically useless. While the phenomenon is mostly confined to petit-bourgeois circles, it will pose a significant danger to serious socialist organizing if tolerated in our movement.
The monumental task we face as communists in the twenty-first century is multifaceted: we must create order out of chaos for a class with scarcely any political, economic, or social organization. The cultural component cannot be ignored, and it must properly address the failures of both past socialist attempts and present bourgeois decay. Humanity deserves a world where happiness and fulfillment are attainable through our collective labor; drugs and alcohol are no substitute for the real joys of life. Furthermore, they pose a clear and present danger to the momentum of any major political force. It is for these reasons that we will explore the merits of revolutionary sobriety.
E. Bor, text reads: “WE WILL OVERCOME!” with “ALCOHOLISM” on the snake, 1985.
The Science of Substance Abuse
The hegemonic narrative about substance abuse goes something like this: an individual starts using drugs, the drugs make them feel good, so they do more drugs, and after a certain threshold of use is reached the individual becomes physically addicted to the chemical hooks within the drugs. At this point, they are an addict who requires either treatment in a rehab center or psychological torture in a prison cell depending on who you ask. Both of these approaches to solving the problem rely on the assumption that addiction is caused by drugs. This assumption not only prevents us from treating substance abuse, it also narrows the problem to encompass only those who develop a “physical” or “chemical” dependency on drugs. Completely left out of the equation are the millions of people who rely on alcohol, opioids, and other psychoactive substances to complete regular tasks such as going to work or spending time with family. This fatal narrative is based on a series of experiments from the mid-twentieth century in which laboratory rats were placed alone in an empty cage and given access to two water bottles- one infused with morphine, the other plain water. In almost every case, the rat would prefer the morphine water and die from an overdose within a couple of weeks. These experiments were sensationalized by the media and received by the public as definitive proof that addiction is caused by drugs. Neoliberal politicians used this hysteria to increase police budgets and expand the prison system in an effort to “get the drugs off the streets”.
Now we must ask the obvious question- why would a lonely rat in an empty cage not make use of the only source of happiness in its environment? Why would human beings living in economic poverty, political disenfranchisement, and social alienation not do the same? Here we find an alternative narrative that frames substance abuse as a collective issue rather than an individual one. In the late 1970’s, Canadian psychologist Bruce Alexander hypothesized that drug addiction is caused primarily by living conditions rather than the chemical properties of the drugs themselves. To test this, he and his colleagues began a new series of experiments on lab rats centered around a large housing colony they dubbed ‘Rat Park’. Rat Park was 200 times larger than a standard lab rat cage and contained 16–20 rats of both sexes at any given time, as well as food, toys, and space for mating. Four groups were tested: one who lived in isolated cages for the 80-day duration of the experiment, one who lived in Rat Park, one who were weaned in cages and then transferred to Rat Park after 65 days, and one who were weaned in Rat Park and then transferred to cages after 65 days. Each group was given access to regular tap water and sweetened morphine water. As expected, the caged rats overwhelmingly preferred the morphine while the community of Rat Park overwhelmingly preferred the plain water. Alexander noted that when he added Naloxone (which negates the effects of opioids) to the morphine water, the rats of Rat Park began to drink it, presumably for the sweeter taste.4
The Rat Park experiments received little media attention and subsequently lost their funding within a few years. Although initially ignored, they quietly demolished the foundation of ‘common sense’ about substance abuse. Addiction is the product of alienation rather than drugs, and the presence of drugs in a healthy social environment does not breed substance abuse. Further experiments broadened the horizons for this new strain of thought. In 2008, a study by Marcello Solinas and his colleagues sought to find out whether enriched environments can be used to curb substance abuse. The scientists first injected mice in standard laboratory environments with cocaine until they had developed addiction-related behaviors and then transferred them to an enriched environment similar to Rat Park. After 30 days, they found that environmental enrichment eliminated both behavioral sensitization and conditioned place preference to cocaine in the experimental group of mice. The results with the control group were perhaps even more insightful:
“Whereas environmental enrichment eliminates addiction-related behaviors, 30 days of social isolation, a negative environmental condition for social animals such as rodents, led to an exacerbation of behavioral sensitization…In addition, because social isolation is a form of chronic stress, these results also suggest that environmental enrichment may act as a functional opposite of stress.”5
A follow-up study by Solinas and colleagues published in 2009 attempted to prove that enriched environment was not only effective treatment for substance abuse, but also powerful preventative medicine. An experimental group of mice were raised in an enriched environment, and a control group was raised in standard laboratory conditions. Upon reaching adulthood, both groups were placed in standard environments and subjected to trials of cocaine injections for the duration of the experiment. The mice raised in the enriched environment showed signs that the rewarding effects of cocaine were blunted compared to the control group. This protection against the abuse-related effects of cocaine was caused by a reduced activation of striatal neurons and dramatic changes in the neuronal adaptations normally associated with the drug’s use. In short, the results proved the study’s hypothesis that positive experiences in childhood and adolescence decrease an individual’s sensitivity to drugs and vulnerability to addiction.6
These studies are by no means exhaustive, but they demonstrate that the hegemonic narrative about substance abuse is extremely flawed. Rather than reifying this account, communists should commit to developing a scientific analysis of our communities’ drug problems to find a solution. Few sources emphasize the social dimension of medicine better than Dr. Ernesto ‘Che’ Guevara’s speech to the Cuban militia in 1960:
“The task of educating and feeding youngsters, the task of educating the army, the task of distributing the lands of the former absentee landlords to those who laboured every day upon that same land without receiving its benefits, are accomplishments of social medicine. The principle upon which the fight against disease should be based is the creation of a robust body; but not the creation of a robust body by the artistic work of a doctor upon a weak organism; rather, the creation of a robust body with the work of the whole collectivity, upon the entire social collectivity.”7
Now we must leave the laboratory conditions behind and look to our surroundings for opportunities to emulate the Cubans’ success in combating social ills.
Healthy Masses
Substance dependence in all its forms is a symptom of the alienation inherent to the capitalist mode of production. Students lean on adderall as an academic crutch, rural workers use painkillers as a substitute for dying community bonds, and millions rely on alcohol to relieve the crushing stress of being alone in the wilderness of the “free” market. The United States consumes over 80% of the world’s opioids despite making up less than 5% of the global population. Stagnant wages, the financial crisis cycle, scarce social programs, and the decline of manufacturing towns all combine to drain the lifeblood of civil society. A country that once brimmed with social clubs, community sports leagues, and neighborhood outings now has little to offer anyone outside the churches and universities (in many cases, even these lack the resources to bring their constituents together). As the social bonds between neighbors wither, more people than ever before are turning to drugs and alcohol as a coping mechanism. Capitalists- from big pharmaceutical shareholders to petite bourgeois liquor store owners- are happy to supply the poison.
As communists, we are committed to emancipating humanity from the horrors of class warfare. While multi-billion dollar conglomerates are outsourcing entire industries, gutting welfare programs, and raking in profits from the ensuing misery, 158,000 people are dying every year from drug and alcohol abuse. As always, the proletariat bears the brunt of this assault. We cannot stand idly by while these atrocities decimate our class. Revolution cannot be made by masses racked with illness; this social disease must be treated at the social level.
The isolation of addiction can only be overcome through community and interdependence. In order to handle substance abuse among the workers who form our bases of support, civil society must be resuscitated with the vigor of communism. Red sports leagues, gym clubs, youth groups, scholarly circles, hobby meet-ups, artistic collaborations, health check-ins, and similar associations will afford the opportunity of togetherness to all. The conditions which drive people to chemical dependence (financial issues, mental health crises, etc) are much easier to conquer with a tight support network. This culture of mutual care will cement the class bonds necessary for our struggle, and keep comrades engaged between periods of intense political activity.
Perhaps the easiest way for organizers to gather their collaborators outside of formal meetings is to establish “Dues Night” as a regular social event. It serves the dual purpose of collecting resources for common use and forming ties between comrades who might otherwise never get to know each other. This space would give everyone a chance to share good food, swap stories, make plans to see that movie Twitter won’t shut up about, and generally walk away feeling closer to the people they depend on to achieve victory. No matter what form these social institutions take, they should generally require the active participation of all involved. Playing basketball will always be more engaging than watching a documentary, for instance, and will create tighter circles of friendship.
It is in these communal spaces that we have the best chance to encourage healthy living among those we intend to build a new world with. By setting a positive example of sobriety, physical fitness, and intellectual study, we put ourselves in a position to improve the lives of everyone around us. Much of our identity is determined by who we surround ourselves with, so it follows that being surrounded with outstanding comrades will raise one’s life to its highest potential. We cannot expect everyone to follow our lead, and we certainly cannot try to force our habits on others. That said, there is power in setting the course to a better future, and many will be inspired to emulate the habits of those they see organizing the leaders of tomorrow. While nobody is perfect, communists should strive to be true paragons of working-class militancy. Achieving that goal could very well spell the difference between willfully empowered and politically crippled masses. The social body of the proletariat is intentionally wracked with drug-induced illness by our class enemies, and this can only be reversed with intention by the champions of our class.
Sober Cadres
Being a revolutionary necessitates being out of step with the norms of bourgeois society. Making the commitment to fight for a communist future makes us alien in many ways to the vast majority of our peers, just as joining a military or a missionary group would. These commitments require a high degree of discipline to fulfill, and individuals who completely subordinate their personal interests to a higher cause are rare. Those who do cannot expect to enjoy all the material comforts of an ordinary life, but they often find a higher level of fulfillment. The temporary “joys” of the capitalist superstructure are hollow and often fully detrimental to the individual’s long-term health and happiness. As the hydralike stress of precarious proletarian existence piles up, it can be tempting to find relief in the most convenient places- binge TV, pill mills, liquor bottles, junk food, and other empty promises of consumer culture. When we make these poor decisions, we should avoid blaming ourselves and instead ask who these decisions serve- ourselves, or the multi-billion dollar corporations that our class enemies built around them?
Changing the world is an immense task; clear heads and healthy bodies are needed. This point is aptly illustrated in Julius Deutsch’s contribution to the Czechoslovakian workers’ temperance journal Der Weckruf circa 1936: “As a soldier for socialism and a fighter for freedom and peace, the worker athlete requires first and foremost the inner strength necessary to persist in the difficult struggles of our time. Clarity and sobriety, discipline and levelheadedness, holy enthusiasm and a will to make sacrifices: these are the qualities that form the socialist struggle. Does it need any proof that such qualities can only prosper in minds not clouded by alcohol?”8
Ho Chi Minh, Vo Nguyen Giap, and cadre members in study.
Serious work requires a serious approach, and a level of professionalism is required for revolutionary organizers to get the job done. Not the vapid professionalism of HR departments and cubicle farms, but a new professionalism unique to the working class. Comrades should treat themselves and each other with respect, not out of fear for some taskmaster’s reprisal, but out of a common desire to accomplish the tasks of the day. Meetings should start on time. Dues should be collected on a regular schedule. Individuals falling behind on their work should be checked on and assisted if the need arises. Core members of organizing projects should spend their free time in activities that will restore their energy and build their capabilities, not drain and erode them. These habits will prove to be major advantages in our fight against alcoholic police officers, coked-out real estate developers, and disorganized business owners.
Any collective project, whether a revolutionary labor union or a church’s food pantry, will expect a higher degree of involvement from its core organizers than from its regular members. Not everyone has the time or the technical skills needed to bottom-line such endeavors, and those who do have a responsibility to step up to the plate. These small groups, or cadre, are the powerhouse of the class. Taking direction from the masses they live and labor with, cadre members should focus their lives on facilitating the self-emancipation of the proletariat. In doing so, they must hold themselves to a standard worthy of the valiant people they serve. Building on the victories and sacrifices of the past, today we see indigenous struggles for socialism across South America, labor resistance to Amazon throughout the global north, Black leadership in the fight for police and prison abolition in the United States, and more. Honoring the sacrifices of those involved means exercising discipline in our personal lives to become the best organizers we can possibly be.
Sobriety is only one requirement among many in this respect, but a critical one. It’s possible to drink a night away, wake up the next morning, collect oneself, and tackle important problems with the help of a competent team. But it’s not feasible to perform at one’s best in that situation, nor does it come with the satisfaction and confidence of a fully collected life. Why be the weakest link in a chain of dedicated organizers in exchange for fleeting relief from an otherwise unfulfilled existence? Only those who accept the misery of life under capitalism as permanent turn to drugs and alcohol to mitigate their feelings of hopelessness. Revolutionaries refuse to admit defeat in the face of alienation, and spit on the snake oil remedies offered to them by the bourgeoisie. That said, no one can be a revolutionary alone, and many who commit to the work of communism will come to our movement carrying the burdens of addiction and ill-health. Overcoming these afflictions will be a protracted process, and we should do everything possible to support our partners undertaking this important work.
Most people on the left already identify addiction as a physical ailment and treat it as such, but it’s important to remember that the urge to numb oneself in the first place is a symptom of the social disease inherent to capitalist culture. Taking this attitude towards drug use will enable us to build strong cadres without shunning new comrades eager to join the cause who happen to suffer from momentary urges, lingering habits, or serious dependency. There is no drug on earth stronger than an empowered community. Those who combine their struggle against addiction with the fight for socialism can be valuable allies, and should be encouraged to join our ranks. Their commitment to the cause in both their organizing work and their personal lives will serve as a shining example for others.
There are many disciplines beyond sobriety that communists should uphold. Equally important for our physical and mental health is daily exercise and a balanced diet. These positive habits will help us work and feel our best, and blaze the trail for our friends and neighbors to join in. Our comrade CLR Gainz was right to point out that in order to take the reigns of society, the proletariat needs not just metaphorical but physical strength. As they said in their most recent article: “Strength training is not only a significant means of becoming healthier but, by reorganizing the composition of bodies to make them less fat to more muscle, also represents the physical manifestation of a disciplined person.”9 This area of self-development is especially neglected among those in the North American left, which should be remedied as soon as possible.
A dynamic reading regimen, much more common than workout routines in our ranks, is imperative as well. Without a thorough study, we cannot understand the world around us, much less change it. Reading is only the first step in learning, however. Our grasp of complex topics becomes even tighter when we explore them through writing, and tighter still when we share our knowledge with others in person and engage in Socratic dialogue. Inquiry of history, political theory, science, and other fields is enhanced through collective effort just as much as practical organizing. Our individual studies should be undertaken for the express purpose of teaching and learning from our comrades. In sharing knowledge, we develop deeper bonds and broader wit.
John Reed’s account of the October Revolution has the words “revolutionary discipline” on everyone’s lips, from Lenin, to the sailors, to the red guards, to the commissars leading the charge on the Winter Palace. It was the slogan which kept everything running smoothly that night; passes were checked, prisoners were treated decently, and imperial finery was expropriated by the people of Petrograd rather than looted by individuals. In the end, little to no blood was spilled until the reactionary Junkers took up arms against the people of Moscow. That the proletariat could take hold of all political, economic, and social power in Russia’s urban centers in such an orderly fashion is remarkable. The Bolsheviks built the internal culture of self-regulation that produced these admirable feats, and we must follow their example today. This discipline guides organizers to make the best decisions in moments when prolonged study is not possible, and the coworkers, neighbors, and comrades who follow them all benefit.
Historic Success: Austrian Marxists
“I don’t consider the fight against alcoholism necessary because it harms the health of the individual, but because it harms the workers’ movement by demoralizing, corrupting, and bourgeoisifying many good workers who could be great representatives of the workers’ movement otherwise. Anyone has the right to harm his own health if he considers the indulgence in certain pleasures worth it; but nobody has the right to encourage indulging in pleasures that hamper the development of the workers’ movement by rendering thousands of good comrades incapable of doing their duty” -Otto Bauer
The short-lived Austrian socialist movement was one of the most deeply rooted of the 20th century. From its landslide electoral victory in 1919 until its tragic defeat by fascist forces in 1934, the Austro-Marxists transformed their capital city of Vienna into a workers’ paradise. They combined the typical benefits of a welfare state with an expansive system of socialized cultural institutions, all built on the foundation of a mass labor movement. With far more favorable conditions than the Bolsheviks (who were in the midst of a destructive civil war), the Austrians built what may have been the most advanced proletarian municipality in human history. Basic subsistence needs were met, union membership guaranteed, public transportation provided, comfortable housing furnished, universal health care and education maintained by the state, and all of this was protected by a network of workers’ militias. That the militia leaders eventually made poor strategic decisions that ceded ground to the fascists does not change the robust character of the rank and file.
Photo of the Austrian Workers’ League for Sport and Body Culture
It was precisely for this reason that SDAP (Social Democratic Party of Austria) valued sobriety and forged close bonds with the temperance movement. A worker plagued with a debilitating illness cannot contribute to the common defense. While an alcoholic may be able to perform the bare minimum tasks required of them at work, they are less useful on the frontline of a street brawl with fascists. Moreover, a drinking worker does not have the clear head required for strategic thinking and adds little to meetings while causing interruptions and dragging out deliberations. This was as true in the early twentieth century as it is today, although we now have even larger problems with the opioid crisis digging its claws ever deeper into our class.
The Austro-Marxists understood that bolstering the social health of the proletariat was a prerequisite for continuing militancy, and embarked on a bold push towards that end. While addressing the underlying economic causes of ill health with social programs, they also organized cultural institutions to promote sport and sobriety. The Workers’ League for Sport and Body Culture in Austria (ASKÖ) and the Workers’ Temperance League (AAB) both attracted mass participation, improved the health of the Austrian working class, and provided strong recruits to the socialist militias under the Republican Schutzbund.
Thousands of worker-athletes taking to the streets to fight for socialism is a sight hard to imagine for some of us today, but our history shows it to be possible. By committing to the welfare of the social body, and recognizing substance abuse as its antithesis, the SDAP built a powerful legacy. We would do well to learn from their positive example.
Contemporary Mistakes: The Hipster Left
When most people think of socialist heroes, we imagine the brave organizing of Rosa Luxemburg, the militant internationalism of Che Guevara, or the lifelong dedication of Alexandra Kollontai. Unfortunately, there is a small minority who believe that tomorrow’s red champions will be the libertine intellectuals writing poetry and smoking angel dust in the gentrified hell that is Brooklyn, NYC. There we find a strange clique of upper middle-class art types who flit between orgies, Whole Foods, and DSA meetings, genuinely believing themselves to be socialists. Personalities such as Rachel Rabbit White, Katherine Krueger, and the Chapo Trap House boys dominate the scene, each encouraging their cohorts to further deranged and privileged behavior. For an example of this debauchery masquerading as political struggle, we will examine Kaitlin Phillips’ aptly named profile of the scene The ‘Hooker Laureate’ of the Dirtbag Left.10
Reading through the article, it’s hard not to cringe when remembering that these people claim to fight for working-class liberation. In a borough that was once filled with drugs as a pretext for police harassment of the mostly black community, the new (mostly white) residents have the gall to equate buying PCP for their parties with community care. We find this party filled with the likes of ‘nitrate anarchists’, ‘sex cult’ enthusiasts, Oyster (you know, the girl from the ‘human-centipede four-way’), and one of Rachel’s friends who gave us this gem: “‘We’re going to overthrow capitalism. Although the form to sign up is kind of complicated.’ Someone else nods, ‘I’m a dumb Marxist bitch.’” The fact that these people represent themselves to the world as having common cause with those of us on the front lines of labor and tenant struggles is infuriating. Their activities discredit the movement despite their distance from any real organizing, mainly due to the long reach their money buys them on the internet.
Communists oriented towards concrete struggle should work to stifle the spread of these philistines’ ideas. It is no great sacrifice to exchange the ketamine plates and poetry readings of Brooklyn hipsters for union meetings and picket lines. Anyone claiming the red banner as their own should remember the words of the founding mother of Bolshevism, Nadezhda Krupskaya: “We should try to link our personal lives with the cause for which we struggle, with the cause of building communism…This is not asceticism. On the contrary, the fact of this merging, the fact that the common cause of all working people becomes a personal matter, makes personal life richer.”11 Disciplining one’s private life to the needs of one’s community heralds both fulfillment and efficacy, without forfeiting joy.
The coming communist dawn
A Sober, Socialist Future
The ultimate test of a person’s character is not found in their philosophical leanings, but in their class allegiance. It lives in the realm of practice, not theory. What sets communists apart from the rest of the left in practice is our commitment to actions that build the capacities of our class. No sacrifice in the name of this historic mission is too great, no discipline too much to ask. I appeal to this spirit of dedication within all my comrades when I advocate for strong, sober cadres of organizers to lead our push towards world revolution. Billions of our people suffer while trillions of dollars are made from their misery; each bottle of pills putting a paycheck in the capitalists’ pocket and a worker’s body in the grave. We must marshall our class to rebuild civil society from the ground up, providing hope and community where alienation was once the rule. Without taking responsibility for the mental and physical well-being of ourselves and our neighbors, we cannot hope to radically re-organize society before climate change does it for us.
The Austrian Marxists’ legacy gives us a blueprint for future struggle. By prioritizing the health of our communities, we can turn them into powerful fighting forces for socialism. The best available scientific evidence demonstrates that physical and mental well-being are both improved by sober living, active exercise, and communal bonds. While tragic mistakes led to many Austrian Marxists being butchered by the fascists, we can ensure their work was not in vain by carrying it on today. We cannot allow elements like the Hipster Left to expand their influence from socialites and internet dwellers to the broader movement. Although they have no concrete connection to the working class, their wealth affords them serious reach and the corroding effects of this should not be underestimated. Their encouragement of moral abandon and drug use would further devastate neighborhoods already immobilized and divided, effectively carrying on the work of the FBI’s Cointelpro initiatives. In contrast, our mission is to heal and unify our communities. This is how we will build political legitimacy and ultimately establish a democratic mandate for socialism.
It should be clear that a disciplined mind and body are of utmost importance for anyone worthy of calling themselves a communist. There is no savior coming from heaven or earth to aid the working class in its struggle for emancipation. We must take the reigns of power to build a future free from climate catastrophe, exploitation, and oppression. We strive towards a future where humanity can find joy in its daily endeavors rather than separating life into periods of alienated labor and drug-induced numbness. With clarity as the watchword of the day, determined comrades building thriving communities will pave the road to a better world.
Contrary to certain advocates of “Acid Communism”, P.H. Higgins argues that a turn towards counter-culture, consciousness-raising, and psychedelic drugs are not a means to building a better left.
“Political thinking that starts from the concept of the establishment is likely to lead nowhere. For, because it leaves the true centres of power unnoticed and unexamined, it can offer no general picture of the possibilities of our society, of the changes that are necessary, of the way in which the substance of human life could be transformed and enriched through political action.”
– Alasdair MacIntyre, “The Straw Man of the Age”
“Capitalist Realism” — the term, most notably used by Mark Fisher in his 2009 book of the same name, has become the buzzword of the post-Occupy left; it is the catchy diagnosis for a world without hope, and the obstacle any leftist movement must overcome. After Fisher took his own life in 2017, capitalist realism seemed to have become more all-encompassing than ever: Trump was president of the United States, Brexit was swallowing up British politics, climate crisis was going unaddressed, and now it appeared the prophet of a new revolutionary interest had been consumed by despair. However, a glimmer of hope seemed to appear, one last gift from Fisher, in the form of an unfinished introduction to a book titled Acid Communism. In this short text lay Fisher’s very own attempt to overcome the very impediment he had previously described. In September of 2017, Jeremy Gilbert elaborated on his encounters with Fisher and his own role in forming the foundation of Acid Communism, describing it as an attempt to formulate “a radically different conception of freedom to the one which we have inherited from the bourgeois liberal tradition… which understands freedom and agency as things which can only be exercised relationally, in the spaces between bodies, as modes of interaction. It would be the creation, constitution and cultivation of collective creativity.”1 Since the publication of Fisher’s unfinished manuscript in the K-Punk collection, the notion of Acid Communism has continued to garner interest. In their latest issue, Commune magazine has published two ecstatic pieces on the possibilities of Acid Communism by Sarah Jaffe and Emma Stamm. While Jaffe’s piece mostly operates as a tribute and retrospective on Fisher, Stamm’s article proclaims Acid Communism to be a new foundation for a leftist utopian vision based on “the politicization of tripping and trippy art.” Though Stamm’s piece proclaims the necessity of social consciousness, structural changes, and opposition to capitalism, it simultaneously reveals the failure of trendy leftist theorizing to conceive of concrete demands or actively study the societal relations of contemporary global capitalism.2 Using the articles of Gilbert and Stamm as models for Acid Communism, we will identify three major areas where the popular usage of Fisher’s concept fails to make clear its usefulness to leftist politics today:
An excessive focus on drug-use, mysticism, and disorientation as a break from ideology rather than social engagement through discussion of political ends.
A broad claim that Acid Communism upholds a leftist heritage, without partaking in a real examination of the history, tactics, and failures of that heritage; the latter critique forming a more significant and constructive part of a communist social consciousness.
Following from the first and second points: a stance of popular autonomism which lends itself towards liberal reformism and lacks the working-class militant interest of previous traditions it claims to be a part of. A kind of “festival-ism.”
SOCIAL CONSCIOUSNESS AND BRAIN CHEMISTRY
Despite the provocative title, Fisher’s fragmented piece mentions very little about psychedelic drug use (something that Jeremy Gilbert seems very much aware of).3 In his description of acid communism, Fisher writes, “The concept of acid communism is a provocation and a promise. It is a joke of sorts, but one with a very serious purpose. It points to something that, at one point, seemed inevitable, but which now appears impossible: the convergence of class consciousness, socialist-feminist consciousness-raising, and psychedelic consciousness, the fusion of new social movements with a communist project, an unprecedented aestheticization of everyday life.”4 Perhaps the vague notion of “psychedelic consciousness” could be seen as a call for this drug-haze-as-revolution, though Fisher’s descriptions of “psychedelic consciousness” seem more tied to the expressions in music, popular social movements, and a contested space of what Raymond Williams called the “means of communication as means of production.” Stamm and Gilbert, however, both emphasize the role of drug-induced experiences specifically, with Stamm even writing about their experiences at a bourgeois function for the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies. The focus on drugs as a means of escaping the effects of depression and anxiety specifically may have some resonance with Fisher’s concerns — his writings on depression and its effects are some of the most poignant pieces in his collected writings. However, one might also remember how skeptical Fisher was of medication as a method of treating the cause (rather than the symptoms) of depression without simultaneously changing social relations and the economic conditions that limited individual flourishing and healing.
If we are fighting to eliminate drug laws, perhaps we should consider the way that such laws often attack the working class and people of color while propagating a system of prison labor and global police measures (not to mention the contemporary immigrant crisis). In 2017 alone there were 1,632,921 drug-related arrests in the United States, with well over half of the arrests being for possession and nearly 600,000 arrests for marijuana possession alone.5 While there has been research showing how drugs like marijuana and psychedelics can potentially alleviate mental and social illnesses, taking clinical trials and then immediately projecting them into a method of politicization is dangerous. If Fisher’s concern for mental health was primarily about a lack of social opportunities and the individualization of social failure, then we should also be looking at less glamorous methods of assisting both cognitive health and social being. This means looking at the restrictions of the legal system, the techniques management utilizes to maintain workplace domination, the structure of the working day, and the growth of precarious and time-consuming gig economies through platforms like Uber. If we are concerned with systemic attacks on social well-being, we should begin with these social relations rather than seeking to provoke individual consciousness with psychedelics, yoga, or rituals.
Gilbert has stated that he’s “not saying everyone should take psychedelic drugs (which are illegal in most countries), or take up yoga, or anything else in particular.” Fair enough, but the only account of revolutionary consciousness given by Gilbert is a sudden refusal of “neoliberal and bourgeois values generally.”6 Even if we are assured that this new refusal will occur through social and communal action, the focus on consciousness as a kind of revelation will always turn back to the individual. To focus on consciousness in this way, even in the name of de-individualizing neoliberal identities, is to take the role of an “ideologue” like Feuerbach or Stirner rather than that of a political revolutionary.
HERITAGE AND HISTORY OF THE NEW LEFT
Stamm writes:
“The Acid Communist movement has helped me view my politics as part of a historical lineage, not a misappropriation of serious Leftism…Gilbert and Fisher both explored the viability of incorporating old-school ‘consciousness-raising’ events in a psychedelic framework. First developed by socialist feminists in the 1970s, consciousness-raising encourages participants to share stories about struggles normally conceived as private and shameful. The idea is that when people tune in to others’ narratives of hardship – which may include accounts of mental illness, social isolation and poverty – such problems revealed as not an exception, but the norm.”
These remarks about the insights of consciousness-raising, intended to connect Acid Communism to the history of real socialist activity, reveal a failure to interrogate that history. The principles of “consciousness-raising” that Acid Communism takes inspiration from are connected to Maoist practices of “speaking bitterness” whereby peasants could be radicalized into attacking their landlords and seizing the grounds which they worked. As Maoism became viewed as a newer, more radical alternative to the official line of Comintern politics in the ’60s, the principles of “speaking bitterness” were adapted into the softer form of consciousness-raising. But what could conscious raising accomplish in the Western urban context? Whether or not a peasant revolution could maintain socialism through a prolonged period of industrialization, there is no doubt that the immediate action of peasants in a developing nation in the midst of civil war is more likely to succeed than cells of oppressed groups in urbanized countries like the United States, Britain, France, or indeed the vast majority of the contemporary world. Mike Macnair of the Communist Party of Great Britain has commented before on the failures of consciousness-raising and its fracturing of Leftist discourse and organization: “While consciousness-raising for workers may often be a waste of time, for women, blacks and gays and lesbians it is a different story. They are hardly in a position to overthrow the exploiter, and their oppression is more diffuse. There is more atomisation. Consciousness-raising may produce radicalisation — but not the ability to move from here to immediately decisive action. The result is as often as not forms of demoralisation.”7Macnair’s criticisms are not the same as Fisher’s invocation of the infamous “vampire castle”; the issue here is not twitter infighting and virtue signaling, but an actual question of organization. Macnair’s criticism of consciousness-raising is that these methods of trying to expand the discussion of oppression on the left (itself a worthy goal) were implemented without considering plans for decisive action, producing atomization and organizational splintering that could hinder effective strategies and discussions. The left doesn’t have to be composed of friends who agree on everything (anyone who takes more than a glance at the history of the First, Second, or Third International should be well aware of this), but if we do not create methods within our own movement to deal with our disagreements, debate strategy, and come to standards for membership and political action, we will not have a movement at all.
Stamm continues: “Across the US, the reform of drug policy is a popular cause among libertarians and certain factions of the alt-right…When I pressed Jeremy Gilbert on this, he responded that contemporary hippies who embrace libertarianism fail to grasp the political history of their subculture. The New Agers of the mid-20th century, he claimed, were never in favor of capitalist principles.” This answer appears rather historically inaccurate. The contemporary right-libertarian claims to counterculture have historical ties that cannot be construed as merely a misunderstanding or late appropriation. One need only think of famous libertarian Robert A. Heinlein’s simultaneous admiration for drug use and free love in Stranger in a Strange Land and his positive portrayal of militarization and nationalist bravura in Starship Troopers. And what of Tom Wolfe, author of The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, who supported George W. Bush? Paleoconservative Paul Gottfried was a student of Herbert Marcuse and has claimed to uphold the lineage of critical methodology from his former professor.8 There is a dangerous notion here that conservative and reactionary politics is simply passive. As though there were a simple dichotomy between progress on the one hand, and resistance to progress on the other. There are two kinds of progress advancing at the same time – one is the left’s strategy, the other the right. Both political wings produce new operations, goals, and projects in response to each other. The right-wing libertarianism that’s become popular in America is not simply sitting idly by, tricking those who haven’t learned their history. It is a political project that has its own history which connects to ’60s counterculture and has developed strategies through that history. We on the left cannot simply claim to take back all the history of the ’60s as though it has been merely distorted or foiled.
Gilbert insists “I’m not romanticizing the counterculture of the 1960s — but I think its ‘problems’ and ‘failures’ have become so well known and so well-documented that it has become easy to forget both that it had some significant positive effects, and that its failures were not just intrinsic to it, but a result of its political defeat by the New Right and its allies.”9 But we aren’t given an explanation of what the strategies or conditions were that allowed the New Right to overtake the New Left, nor are we given much concrete analysis of what the actual activities of the New Left were besides consciousness-raising, rallies, and the existence of some kind of vague utopian imagination. It is not objectionable to find positive examples of concrete action in the leftist movements of the ’60s, but doing so requires greater historical conviction. The notion that one can simply invert the “drop out” culture of the ’60s into “rise up” seems a gross misunderstanding of the contexts that brought Communists like Marcuse to the New Left in the first place. We cannot forget that much of the western consciousness-raising was done in a situation where the USSR, China, and Cuba had revolutionized while the already industrial and proletarianized west had failed to do so. The interest in consciousness raised by Lukacs, Gramsci, and the Frankfurt School occurred at a moment where authoritarian reaction was already absorbing liberal governments and crushing left-wing opposition. The later interest in consciousness with the New Left was brought about while unions, civil rights activism, and anti-war protests were already in motion. And, again, actual socialist countries (regardless of their usefulness as a contemporary model for socialism) existed and were fighting capitalism and supplying material support to movements around the world. It is hard to say that our contemporary position is much like either of these periods. Yes, there appears to be a new (and often violent) resurgence of reaction. There also seems to be a growth of interest in socialism and a return to discussion about Marxism. This is not necessarily unusual: reaction always grows in response to the appearance of potential for left movements. Persuading people to join in a political position is obviously part of politics, but what is our politics specifically? What are our positions? What is our movement, our organization? An interest in real utopianism and new futures relies just as much on these questions as it does on consciousness as-such.
Black Panther Eldridge Cleaver with LSD Guru Timothy Leary in Algeria
FESTIVALISM
“While Adorno upheld creativity as a space of revolutionary otherness,” writes Stann, “Fisher said, he did not provide any tangible visions for the politics that art might inform.“ Ironically, it seems the same could be said of this new wave of appropriating the concept of Acid Communism. To continue quoting Stann:
Radical politics, [Gilbert] said, are always utopian, and utopian intentions are wasted without a manifest blueprint for change. Psychedelic art, with its message of love and transcendence, delivers. ‘It’s not going to be for everybody,’ he clarified. But he indicated that its recognizable styles — whirling geometric patterns, fractals, and musical intricacy — offer an ‘aesthetics of complexity’ which contrast with the dull reductiveness of capitalist realism. ‘Not many people allow themselves the full extent of their complexity,’ he said, quoting composer Arthur Russell. With its multidimensional intricacies, both the art and the drugs might throw the banality of contemporary popular media into high relief.
But what vision of Utopia is here? If one were to look at another, relatively overlooked Frankfurt School figure, Ernst Bloch, one would see a much deeper and serious engagement with the notion of utopia whereby the concept of utopia throughout history is the imaginative capacity of people to think of a world without class divisions. Bloch’s project of utopian imagination, like Adorno’s interest in consciousness, was grounded in the rise of fascism, and later his professorship in East Germany. While Bloch appreciated the interest in the myths and stories of the past, he always insisted on the necessity of grounding action in the possibilities and structures of the present: “The friend of true enlightenment will hardly withhold his delight at and gratitude for such prefigurations and their instruction. But the activity of the intellect involving the processes of amending, augmenting, and illuminating the world from the basis of the world always starts out from a scientifically achieved awareness that retains a certain given context.”10Acid Communism generally claims to be upholding the history of the left, the principle of utopia, radical action, communism, but the actual visions of the future are put aside in favor of the activities which are integrated into the aesthetics of “whirling geometric fractals.” Jeremy Gilbert makes the astute observation that “we inhabit a culture whose institutions, laws, economies and social practices have for centuries been organised around the opposite idea, attributing individual responsibility to every action, treating private property as the foundation on which society is built, teaching us that private emotion is the seat of authentic experience. Under these circumstances, learning to function in such a way that the knowledge that nobody is really an in-dividual (i.e. indivisible, independent of social relations) becomes more than just abstract theory, is immensely challenging” only to follow up with a turn to ‘the whole countercultural panoply of raves, drugs, yoga, chi-kung, Zen etc.” and some “set of practices and ideas which are at one and the same time mystical and materialist — a materialist mysticism which acknowledges the complex potentialities of human embodied existence, without tying that recognition to any set of supernatural or theistic beliefs.”11 This is not a utopian vision, but a substitution.
It is true that interest in the festival and its role in social bonding has a significant part in leftist thought. The topic of social kinship and engagement through festivals and gifts is an important topic of inquiry in sociology and anthropology appearing as far back as Marcel Mauss’s The Gift and Franz Baermann Steiner’s Taboo. The French Marxist Henri Lefebvre, inspiration to the Situationists, took the ecstatic descriptions of festival in Rabelais’ Gargantua and Pantagruel as an early form of communal, revolutionary activity whose elements could be found in the crevices of contemporary life. Concern for meaning, practice, friendship, and fulfillment in everyday life has been an important part of turning individuals to the left and is particularly important for those who are subject to domination and exclusion in the public sphere due to their identity and/or ability. It is not unreasonable to believe that a new communist movement requires a legitimate concern for and analysis of the practices of everyday life, considering the wide variety of everyday experiences that many communities can have within the same spaces. However, even if a new social life is necessary, and even if a mass left movement would benefit from its own methods of socializing, recreation, and enjoyment, it is one thing to say this should grow out of a unity of worker’s movement and communist political platform, quite another to proclaim this is itself the political action of communism in the present.
While autonomist movements emerging in the United States (the Johnson-Forest tendency), Italy (“operaismo”), and France (Socialisme ou Barbarie) ultimately failed in producing movements capable of seizing and holding power, their interest in uncovering the desires of the workers is something the contemporary left can make use of, but the festivalism of Acid Communism isn’t willing to conceive of itself operating on the shop floor when it would prefer a dance floor. Counterculturalism that originates outside of the interests of the proletariat — who are composed of numerous social and cultural backgrounds — is liable to alienate them and appear farcical or frivolous. A leftist culture originates from the social grounds and desires of the proletariat; it is not viable to simply choose an image that stands in opposition to an image of “the establishment.” We would do well to consider yet another New Left veteran, the ethicist and ex-Trotskyist Alasdair MacIntyre, who wrote of the New Left:
Their thinking is imprisoned by two contradictions which prevent growth in socialist thought beyond a certain point. The first of these concerns the relation between a capitalist economy and the variety of social institutions within such an economy. The second concerns the problem of socialist organization… the New Left wants to stress both the all-pervasive corrupting influence of capitalism and the possibility of transforming institutions within capitalism…the trouble with this demand for building in the ‘here and now’ is its ambiguity. If this is offered as an alternative to building a working-class movement then it is doomed to frustration and failure. If on the other hand it is, as it could be, a way into the class struggle then it is important and full of possibility. For clearly, trying to create forms of community or culture which are opposed to the values of capitalism will at once bring one into social conflict.12
The focus on consciousness as some mystical quality to be played with, combined with the failure to appropriately study the history of the New Left and instead fetishize its appearances and figures, have returned us to this organizational problem. If there is potential in Acid Communism, it must explicitly see itself as a part of class struggle, not merely an opposition to social alienation and privatization. The revolutionary desires of the working class are already developed through the limitations of capitalism. Surely the working class already knows that it hates long hours, living by wages, the commodification of everyday values, and the precarity of the economy and job market. The point isn’t to make them suddenly realize they’re unhappy and want something different; the point is to give the working-class opportunities to express and act on the desires and needs that they already have through political and social revolution. Gilbert claims “the very notion of ‘class politics’ is simply oxymoronic,”13and in doing so he does nothing to ground Acid Communism in the demystification of material relations. Instead, he skirts the issue by treating class struggle as something self-evident, something that just happens when enough individual interests simply align. If Acid Communism isn’t ready to ready itself as a proponent of real class conflict as opposed to merely recreation, then it will not be a revolutionary asset.
The 1971 May Day protests against the war in Vietnam.
A RETURN TO STRATEGY
The issue here is strategy, not the proposition that Acid Communism is a strategy or should be one, but contextualizing the ideas presented by Acid Communism as a potential part of a strategy:
Is Acid Communism a rhetorical position? A center from which to produce aesthetics, discussions, and appeals in order to bolster a movement? If so, we need to start thinking in terms of a movement, which means Acid Communism must develop political positions and not simply demand an “end to capitalism” without considering what comes afterwards. How, exactly, the left should present itself given the long shadow of its history remains an open question. Anyone who has dealt with persons from (or who trace their descent to) the Ukraine, Cuba, Cambodia, or Peru (among many other countries with complicated, and sometimes terrible, relationships with state communist parties and vanguards) must acknowledge that historical defensiveness must be dealt with pragmatically and with respect to the failures of our own historical movements. We cannot always assume that those who are afraid of the associations of communism are acting in bad faith or are unreasonably exaggerating.
Is Acid Communism a research project in the strategies and activities of the New Left and late Western Marxisms of the ’60s? If so, it should not merely represent itself as a part of a “heritage” but take an active stance in rigorously debating, researching, and criticizing the movements of the ’60s even as it affirms their vision and potential. Politics is not simply invoking a culture and past optimism that is passed down through music, fashion, and a vague notion of altered consciousness in cognitive experiments.
Is Acid Communism about new ways to engage with social consciousness? If so, what are we producing consciousness of? Again, realizing capitalism is simply bad or harmful isn’t enough. Encouraging a real reflection on desire as a need, and desire as a part of a social sphere, is a step forward — but this alone does not guarantee a revolutionary project or even a revolutionary worldview. The failures of the sudden insurrectionary moments of the ’60s should be our starting point here: the sudden, mass realization of desires and utopian possibilities is not enough without an attempt to organize and plan. Social bases are important, they are not the end. We need to have a base of people who can recognize what they want from and for the future, we also need a position that can mediate those desires and think about the structure of a world that can listen to and attend to those desires through social action that is not currently possible.
It may be true that the concepts embedded in Acid Communism “could be a component of a dynamic, experimental Leftism that is as interested in creativity as it is in critique,” but whatever insights Fisher’s final manuscript might have contained, it will be of little use if it is overshadowed by idealized approaches to politics. If Acid Communism is going to be a component of leftist politics it must also be willing to identify its role in a greater strategy with end goals and demands, not merely claim to be an exercise in building some kind of vision — a circular project without a social movement already interested in mobilizing around such visions. Social community, mental wellbeing, and understanding of the real social desires and needs of individuals (desires and needs that are informed by race, gender, sexuality, and numerous other social identities as well as class) are all important issues for a left movement to address, but the lack of any real discussion of the social, material causes of these problems will always lead back to capitalist realism. A utopian vision of the future won’t simply come from some existential shift in individual consciousness. Global networks and communications, dark factories, universal healthcare, urban restructuring, public transportation, global redistribution of resources, a reduced workweek — these are all better foundations for a utopian future than so many festivals and trips will ever be. This utopian possibility will only matter if we conceive of these possibilities as a battleground for class struggle to be fought be a real, organized movement. If Acid Communism cannot conceive of itself within these terms, then it is sure to be a bad trip.
