Acid-Communism: The Struggle for Free Time
“Acid Communism is (shared) free time and nothing else.” -Xenogothic.
If I were to boil down what I think “true” communism or “Left accelerationism” is, It would just be the production of “free-time” or, as stated by Xenogothic, the production of “shared free time.” Georges Bataille’s Accursed Share is the non-recuperable part of any economy. It is that which is destined to waste. In this sense, the struggle for free time or leisure is the pursuit of expenditure.
Capitalism itself has managed to produce an excess amount of time for a large portion of people. Compared to the economic models that preceded it, capitalism as an economic mode of production in a historical sense has ultimately liberated a tremendous amount of people from the peasantry’s life. This “emancipation” is often praised by a wide variety of accelerationist groups from both the left and right variants. On the one hand, left-accelerationists see the technological improvements in technologies like washing machines, such as a revolutionary item in labor time. Less time can be spent on washing clothes and more “leisure time” or “time” in general for other non-productive activities is produced.
The process of reterritorialization is quick to instantaneously capture the emancipatory or liberatory aspects of deterritorializing forces of capitalism in the form of “productive necessity” or utility. There is no time wasted under capitalism because there is no time to waste. Free time is always being occupied by the feeling or the anxiety of staying busy or updated with what is going on in cyberspace. We are constantly fixated on this cyber temporality in the words of Mark Fisher. As entrepreneurial-capitalist subjects, we are always fixated on how we can promote ourselves, what the next big job opportunity is; this fills us with a deep sense of alienation and detachment from our peers, always seeing them as potential competitors instead.
In the moments where there would be time for leisure or expenditure, we are already sucked into the capitalist network of “productive necessity.” When we are scrolling needlessly through youtube or Twitter, we are bombarded with ads. Our algorithmic curated timelines are churning out content to get us to spend more and more time fixated on these platforms to be bombarded with advertisements. In this sense, even moments that would be considered “wasted” are ultimately used as mechanisms of capture for capital growth. The labor extracted is our production of information, and the information conglomerates collect that information for free; while we willingly give this information to them for our own enjoyment.
Knowledge in the form of an informational commodity indispensable to productive power is already, and will continue to be, a major-perhaps the major- stake in the world wide. It is conceivable the nation state will one day fight for control of information, just as they battled over territory, and afterwards for control of access to and exploitation of raw materials and cheap labor. A new field opened for industrial and commercial strategies on the one hand and political and military strategies. -Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition
In this sense information, itself is a commodity. It is often more valuable than even raw materials. There is nothing lost in terms of value or that which isn’t already subsumed by this productive logic. This means counterproductive forces are already accounted for as instrumental components of information production and capital accrument. Thus, what does Acid communism have to do with any of this?
Acid Communism is the incomplete last work to go unpublished by the late Mark Fisher. This work connected the possibility of newness similar to an elevated state of “psychedelic consciousness” or consciousness-raising. In short, Acid Communism is a call to a mode of thinking which advocates for Temporal Consciousness-raising, as opposed to Class Consciousness, or better yet, it might be making the claim that class consciousness itself under technological acceleration must be understood as a struggle of intersecting groups at various temporal topological strata or “classes.” This coming together to claim shared time is ultimately a class struggle.
If capitalism was able to emancipate a large portion of people due to an explosion in technological advancements and the overabundance of resources, Acid Communism advocates for a post-capitalist society or world in which everyone can share more free time. Free Time not just for those who feed us the interpassive dogshit that is scrolling on social media or binge-watching Netflix, but for everyone.
To quote a passage directly quoted in Acid Communism,
“[T]he closer the real possibility of liberating the individual from the constraints once justified by scarcity and immaturity, the greater the need for maintaining and streamlining these constraints lest the established order of domination dissolve. Civilisation has to protect itself against the spectre of a world which could be free. […] In exchange for the commodities that enrich their lives […] individuals sell not only their labour but also their free time. […] People dwell in apartment concentrations — and have private automobiles with which they can no longer escape into a different world. They have huge refrigerators stuffed with frozen foods. They have dozens of newspapers and magazines which espouse the same ideals. They have innumerable choices, innumerable gadgets which are all of the same sort and keep them occupied and divert their attention from the real issue — which is the awareness that they could both work less and determine their own needs and satisfactions.”
— Herbert Marcuse, Eros and Civlisation 2
