In this sense, Fisher’s blogospheric rallying cry was to argue that we already possess everything that we need to escape the confines of capitalist realism — that ideological straitjacket that keeps us compliant and unimaginative; the external invader constricting our minds, bodies, and the self-realisation of our being today. Drugs like acid or ecstasy might loosen up the mind to a certain degree, but they neglect the other, more lucidly existential parts of human subjectivity (our capacity to reason, our political agency), leaving them to rot and atrophy. In this sense, the problem with drugs, Fisher argues, is that they “are like an escape kit without an instruction manual”. “Taking MDMA is like improving [Microsoft] Windows: no matter how much tinkering $ Bill [Gates] does, MS Windows will always be shit because it is built on top of the rickety structure of DOS”. The drugs, then, are all too temporary — “using ecstasy will always fuck up in the end because [the] Human OS [Operating System] has not been taken out and dismantled”. As fun as they may be, in the grand scheme of things, and as the old song goes, the drugs don’t work, they just make things worse…

The course took its name from an essay Fisher had previously published in 2012, exploring “the relation of desire to politics in a post-Fordist context”. Taking seriously a much ridiculed comment made by Conservative politician Louise Mensch on British television about the apparent hypocrisy of Occupy protesters in 2010 — protesters who decried capitalism whilst standing in line at Starbucks, tweeting about politics from their iPhones — Fisher argued that Mensch’s position nonetheless warrants a serious response. This was to suggest that, whilst Mensch’s cynicism was superficial, the implications of her critique remained deeply troubling. To what extent is our desire for postcapitalism always-already captured and neutralised by capitalism itself? How are we supposed to combat the “intensification of desire for consumer goods, funded by credit”? Should we even try? For Fisher, the response to this problem cannot be, as Mensch suggests, a reactionary striving for a pre-capitalist primitivism; the “libidinal attractions of consumer capitalism”, he suggests, need “to be met with a counterlibidio, not simply an anti-libidinal dampening”.

In the present, whilst there are “agents of struggle” everywhere, what is struggled for is disparate and unclear. It even seems to be the case that certain modes of political consciousness, seized by capitalism itself, have been used precisely to fragment solidarity rather than create it. As individuals squabble over who has the most privilege on Twitter, for instance, turning on each other, the true enemy — capitalism itself — is left completely off the hook. It was Fisher’s hope that these newly raised and yet fragmented forms of consciousness, proliferating under so-called “identity politics”, could still find common ground that included a previously disarticulated class consciousness — a collective consciousness that builds an articulated awareness of minority struggles in order to better grasp the totality of the system at large: capitalism. This was necessary so that the Left could produce what Fisher had once called, in his 2009 book Capitalist Realism, the “required subject — a collective subject”. Over the near-decade that followed the publication of his surprise bestseller, Fisher would further develop this concept of a collective subjectivity, coming to prefer the term “group consciousness”.

Reading aloud from Jean-François Lyotard’s viciously difficult 1974 book, Libidinal Economy, Fisher relishes the work’s most polemical passages, as Lyotard seems to prophesy the patronising gaze cast upon James Turner Street, putting the producers on blast, who “dare not say the only important thing there is to say, that one can enjoy swallowing the shit of capital, its materials, its metal bars, its polystyrene, its books, its sausage pâtés, swallowing tonnes of it till you burst”. As far as Lyotard is concerned:

the English unemployed did not become workers to survive, they — hang on tight and spit on me — enjoyed the hysterical, masochistic, whatever exhaustion it was of hanging on in the mines, in the foundries, in the factories, in hell, they enjoyed it, enjoyed the mad destruction of their organic body which was indeed imposed upon them, they enjoyed the decomposition of their personal identity, the identity that the peasant tradition had constructed for them, enjoyed the dissolution of their families and villages, and enjoyed the new monstrous anonymity of the suburbs and the pubs in the morning and evening.

The jobseeker rejects the moralised figure of the downtrodden and out of luck. It is the inverse of a figure like Daniel Blake, as seen in Ken Loach’s critically acclaimed 2016 film I, Daniel Blake. Rather than raising consciousness through sympathy, depicting, through a fiction, the abject reality of the British welfare state, Williamson instead raises consciousness through bloody-mindedness, bottling the shame of class subordination and weaponizing it. This is not to say the Sleaford Mods’ rejection of a Ken Loach image is a rejection of that form of political consciousness; it simply offers up an inverse image of proletarian subjectivity: ejected from the system and loving it. “Jobseeker” reinvigorates Lyotard’s “desire-drunk yes”, in this sense, affirming the fact that this uneasy subjugation is what makes the working class a threat to the system itself. Fuck your middle-class propriety! I’ve got desires to pursue…

It was with this in mind that accelerationism — a term coined by Benjamin Noys in his 2010 critique of post-May 1968 Continental philosophy, The Persistence of the Negative — was later seized upon by Mark Fisher and, perversely, affirmed. Noys’ book was, by and large, a critique of how Continental philosophy was obsessed with affirming the negative. Fisher, in deftly trollish fashion, then affirmed Noys’ negative critique. In hindsight, this may have been a mistake on Fisher’s part but, for better or for worse, the name stuck, straddling a bizarre confluence of competing positions.

Fisher arguably usurped the term to demonstrate that Noys’ seemingly benevolent position, looking down on this entanglement of negations and affirmations, was a fallacy. Whereas Noys attempted to untangle the mess, Fisher affirmed all sides, as if Noys’ project was itself a reification of the negative — extending the very problematic it hoped to critique. Fisher was nonetheless attuned to the ways that this negative feedback loop of affirmations and negations was the primary cause of the hauntological “stuckness” of the twenty-first century. Indeed, the online discourse surrounding accelerationism had emerged explicitly from the financial crash of 2007/08, following which the Left and its protest movements seemed wholly incapable of effectuating real change. Whereas Noys was concerned about the extent to which a philosophical negativity had persisted, Fisher was concerned about how this negativity was now politically in crisis. Its presence was not a concern, but its impotence was. His accelerationist writings sought to establish a practical strategy for how this crisis might be overcome.

For Lukács, this is to say that human history is distinct from natural history. Our history is ideologically affected by our position in the present; geological history — foregoing presently contentious debates around the so-called “anthropocene” — is not. The events of human history — our wars, our elections, our culture — are not fossils embedded within the earth’s geological strata — although capitalism certainly implores us to think this is the case. On the contrary, history is not that which lies behind us in the past but rather that which occurs here with us in the present. History is the story of our own becoming, and in order to maintain that position, history must engage in its own process of becoming as well. Lukács writes: “It is only in history, in the historical process, in the uninterrupted outpouring of what is qualitatively new that the requisite paradigmatic order can be found in the realm of things.” History only happens, he argues, when things change. And who has the true capacity to change things? Only the proletariat. History, he writes — that is, true history — is “the history of the unceasing overthrow of the objective forms that shape the life of man”; history is “the product (albeit the unconscious one) of man’s own activity … the succession of those processes in which the forms taken by this activity and the relations of man to himself (to nature, to other men) are overthrown.”

In late 2017, for instance, “Acid Communism” was taken up in the UK by a soft left contingent directly linked to the Labour Party, who attempted to further embolden a resurgent democratic socialism by combining it with an entwined rave-hippie nostalgia, even going so far as to call for a re-engagement with those aspects of hippiedom that Fisher was most suspicious of. Later renamed “Acid Corbynism” to ground it more firmly in its contemporary moment, this movement did remain loyal to many of Fisher’s concerns, such as the need to raise a newly collective consciousness, but it also retained many of the qualities that Fisher saw as detrimental to any resurgent countercultural cause. This movement also failed to take into account that central problematic within all of his writings: the crisis of the negative. This is to say that collective joy is a superficial salve for an individualised melancholy if neither is capable of producing the new. We must find a way to intervene in both, in their entwined totality, that is capable of moving us forwards. By disregarding this tensile core of Fisher’s dialectically psychedelic project, any posthumous “Acid Communism” is doomed to be little more than a “folk politics” — and, if the contents of the first five lectures of this course are anything to go by, Fisher had much more in store for his readers than that.

So, there’s a lineage, isn’t there, I think, from those first two commercials into the Louise Mensch position. There’s a narrative behind it, which is a story about desire. These protesters have the products of advanced capitalism, therefore… it’s not only that they’re hypocrites, it’s that they don’t really want what they say they want. They don’t really want a wealth beyond capitalism. What they want is all of the fruits of capitalism — and ultimately that’s why capitalism will win. They may claim, ethically, that they want to live in a different world but libidinally, at the level of desire, they are committed to living within the current capitalist world.

OK. So, what are the advantages of the concept of postcapitalism? — and just initially I think it’s worth thinking about this — why use the term “postcapitalism” rather than “communism”, “socialism”, etc.? Well, first of all, it’s not tainted by association with past failed and oppressive projects. The term “postcapitalism” has a kind of neutrality that is not there with “communism”, “socialism”. Although this is partly generational, I think: the word “communism” has lots of negative associations for people of my age and older.

It implies victory — that’s the other thing, isn’t it? If you’re talking about postcapitalism, it implies that there’s something beyond capitalism. It also implies direction, doesn’t it? If it’s postcapitalism, it’s a victory and a victory that will come through capitalism. It’s not just opposed to capitalism — it is what will happen when capitalism has ended. It starts from where we are. It’s not some entirely separate space — I think that’s implied, right? The concept of postcapitalism is something developed out of capitalism. It develops from capitalism and moves beyond capitalism. Therefore, we’re not required to imagine a sheer alterity, a pure outside. That’s one of the emphases of postcapitalism. We can begin with, work with, the pleasures of capitalism, as well as its oppressions. So, we’re not necessarily trapped in this Louise Mensch world where if we have iPhones, we can’t want postcapitalism. Although I don’t think we’d want iPhones in postcapitalism…