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By dying before finishing Acid Communism, Fisher freed us up not just to argue about what he really meant by Acid Communism, but also to argue ahistorically about what the best possible version of Mark Fisher would have meant by Acid Communism, and that’s a silver lining.
Leaving a mysterious gap in the most important part of an idea is a good way to haunt people, and haunted people can be very productive. What’s the left’s equivalent of Fermat’s Last Theorem?
It gets me thinking about american civil religion. We americans get indoctrinated into this really idealized version of “the founding fathers” that’s totally ahistorical (and usually less interesting than real history). It’s propaganda, but it can be positive in some ways. For instance, we can reason about what the ‘pure’ version of Thomas Jefferson might have wanted — the version of Jefferson who fully believed the things he said about philosophy, instead of the one who raped his slaves and genocided indigenes.
The ‘pure’ version of Jefferson would have useful things to say about topics like “should people be forced by circumstance into zero hour contracts” (“no, what the hell, why don’t you all own farms by now? something has gone terribly wrong, you need UBI to replace the farms”). The actual Jefferson would not have sensible things to say about these things, because the actual Jefferson was a hypocrite. By making this fake, deified version and, critically, keeping the two distinct in your mind, you can keep the real…
