Reflections on Acid Communism; Fisher, NRx
Notes about the CCRU, their inspirations, and contemporary NRx.
Georges Bataille coined the term “solar anus” once upon a time in the 1920’s. As a quick overview, the solar anus is an allegory for the waste product of civilization. Just as the sun is the source of energy for all life, Bataille proposes that civilization is the equivalent of the sun being too close to Earth. The energy produced by it gets vented off and roasts life to a smoking husk. Not unlike the reaction at Chernobyl in the 1980’s. Of course, the men running the atomic power plant that is, civilization, must not admit to guilt or failure. Both to protect their position and their egos.
Meltdown
Given the current state of world affairs, the West looks a lot like Chernobyl, as Curtis Yarvin so aptly put it. The moment where the powers that be struggle to maintain the illusions that keep our society functioning “properly”. It would be fair to say that the nuclear power plant that is the West is melting down.
How are we melting down one asks? GDP is up, everyone’s got money from welfare programs, and nobody in the world can keep up with production. People are going back to school, buying houses, etc. People are staking a lot during this meltdown period in the hopes of improving their lot after the fact. Which is exactly what happens in a nuclear meltdown. A huge mass of energy is created before exploding and annihilating everything around it.
We live in a global economy now however. In the modern day, Chernobyl is a global power plant, it is not just the West. Because Chernobyl is global economics now, not a symbol of a struggle between two ideologies, communism and capitalism. Global civilizations are now melting down and it is becoming sort of an endurance test. The longer you can stretch out the meltdown period, the better off you will be.
Fundamentally, the solar anus represents two main products of civilization. Decadence and warfare. In the absence of warfare to vent off waste products and energy, society turns to decadence which we see in the form of, the construction of the Cathedral. We see it in the form of sexual liberation and feminism. We see it in the form of forever wars in Afghanistan and abroad, sending people (waste capital identified by markets) to die to support the decadence.
We can afford these decadent, moralistic luxuries because of the meltdown. When Rome melted down, they adopted Christianity and the empire split into two. However, these historic events in the modern day and before don’t immediately look like a meltdown because everybody’s riding on the orgiastic economic energy which we can now produce so much of, that we now live in a state of Atomic Decadence.
Acid Communism and the Solar Anus
Before the tragic death of the late Mark Fisher, he wrote a small introduction to what he called Acid Communism. For Fisher, the first step out of capitalism (which was melting down before he passed) was to imagine a future without it. How is this accomplished? Not literally with the use of drugs, Fisher was sort of anti-drug, it depends on interpretation and that’s out of the scope of these notes. Acid Communism is first and foremost about thinking outside of the box and outside of the realm of what we currently know. About exorcising the demons of the narcissistic boomers that raised even more narcissistic millennials. This power structure has lingered in the closets of western governments for generations.
Infamous and controversial psychiatrist, Sigmund Freud, has become known for his prescription of drugs to the mentally ill. Perhaps we could say Freud was a bit of an Acid Communist of his own. Given that one cannot get every patient to think outside of the box and develop themselves further, a chemical push can go a long way. Or at the very least, just make the waste products of civilization comfortable while it melts down and finds a use for the fuel.
So here we are once again. In the fallout of the last meltdown experienced during the late 60’s which peaked at the fall of the Soviet Union. Before that the last world meltdown peaked in 1945, with the fall of the Third Reich.
The thing about global meltdowns is that the energy gets directed around the site of a meltdown, which becomes a singularity, too volatile and chaotic for outside energy to enter directly and still survive. The Soviet Union actually capitalized more on the meltdown of Germany than the West, and ever since the West has been trying to avoid losing ground in said meltdowns.
Not only that but our energy distribution is better than ever, much better than in the 60’s and 90’s. Meaning that energy arrives around the world faster. When the USSR fell, much of Eastern Europe was immediately flipped onto American style capitalism. There are no more Yugoslavias there, no Vietnam-esque examples of small-scale socialism. There were interventions near the surrounding area of the meltdown site. NATO cleanup forces were spotted in Yugoslavia, containing the violent and matter-shredding fallout of the death of Soviet Communism.
The Race to the Bathroom
It’s fair to say at this point that Fukuyama was dead wrong about there being an end to history. Both Russia and the USA had atomic weapons in the 90’s when the USSR collapsed and conflict still happened. Not directly on Russian soil, but Russia’s civilization melted down, balkanized, and split. To the point where the West is now encroaching into Ukraine, the original site of the Chernobyl meltdown how poetic.
So now that we know what the solar anus of global civilization is doing. It’s getting ready to take a big fat shit, but we don’t know where the bathroom is. One possibility is to get Lucifer the CEO to dump it into space, which is about as bad an idea for humanity at the moment as mass prescription of SSRIs.
The solar anus is going to evacuate itself in one of two places, China or America. Both of them are lookin like a toilet bowl right now flushing towards a singularity. Russia’s off the hook for now, frankly their economy isn’t what it used to be and they are also more resilient to such things because they just came out of a meltdown, they’re not done recovering yet and have also adapted to the fallout.
China would have us believe they are doing well but times is hard and global production is down. The Chinese census reports that their population is in decline as well and they have already begun rationing food. In addition to this, China’s population is much higher than America’s which means they produce more energy, faster, and also must vent off massive levels of energy which comes in the form of it’s huge manufacturing sector, powering both itself and the globe. It could entirely be possible that the Jingping’s eyes are bigger than his stomach, just as Hitler’s were once upon a time.
China had it’s own SJW-equivalent movement back in the day in the form of the Cultural Revolution, which Mao ultimately ended up crushing completely when he didn’t need the majority of it to control his political opponents. The cultural revolution was primarily directed by his wife, Jiang Qing and was a product of the success of Mao’s revolution. Which he had done such a good job at, that he drove China to the point of decadence. Which it has managed, poorly, ever since. In his old age he was “caught lacking” as the kids say now and he let his revolution slide. Communism it would seem rides on the energy of the relatively youthful. Maybe don’t keep leaders in power if they’re 70+, unless they’re in spectacularly good health. Perhaps Trotsky was onto something about the concept of permanent revolution.
Not so in the West, at least not yet. These two sites for getting shit on have some options though. The first and most obvious and most well utilized throughout history is warfare. When you are in the midst of a meltdown and the decadence fuel that is, Federal Reserve money printers runs out of imagination fuel for the MMT nerds. Or the gold supply dies or your entire population owes debt to predatory banks such as in the 1930’s, one prepares to send thousands upon thousands of men and women and today, even a retro product of the solar anus, trans people, which are now being pushed to enter the military. Perhaps under the guise of LGBT+ support, or perhaps because they are the most expendable. A new generation of shock troops ready and willing to die to prove the value of the LGBT community in the wake of the dilating solar anus. When’s the last time we saw that in the West before the days of Weimar Germany?
In our race to the bathroom between the US and China, whoever shits first loses. Whichever nation collapses and melts down will become the subject of international intervention, their sphere of influence will be reduced greatly just as Germany’s and Russia’s was. The domestic population will be economically devastated and exploited by the remaining power, which will turn it’s remaining meltdown energy towards the opponent and crank the energy up to full fucking blast while they do it, in order to get the maximum amount of cathartic venting at the expense of the Other.
However the target nation will not disappear. Neither China or America are going anywhere in this meltdown. After all, Russia survived theirs. Germany survived theirs. Even the United Kingdom survived theirs. Like the elephant’s foot in Pripyat, they shall remain. A ghastly reminder of the fuel that brought the annihilation.
If Acid Communism is to progress as an idea or even a dream, it will only do so after the globe experiences the next cathartic meltdown.
The “Red Plenty”and Crypto-Abundance
Vietnam may serve as an example of how resources can potentially be used to avoid the development of a solar anus. An anecdotal report from a Vietnamese Youtuber on Twitter highlights the modest costs of life in rural Vietnam. There is no decadent offer. $700 for an education, and a free plot of land with which to grow rice that is 500 meters squared. Meanwhile, the Chinese “red plenty” looks a lot like the scheme in the Third Reich, but with no Lebensraum at least that the Chinese have told anybody about. Perhaps that is intent with the alleged Uigher genocide. Regardless, the strategies to vent off the excess energy produced by the solar anus effect remains an option worth considering. Vietnamese models of economics may serve as a basis for future development of the meltdown survivor.
In the West, it seems that venting method comes in the form of space exploration and cryptocurrency investments. Given that millennials and zoomers are so downtrodden and economically screwed, they are losing ground to even engage in the material world anymore. Virtual artwork in the form of NFTs. Virtual currencies, virtual finance systems, virtual farming of goods to sell to other players of games to simulate and “adult” experience exchanging goods and services. The atomizing world of neoliberalism is so soul crushing that it extends into cyberspace.
The deterritorialization of Capital really does know no bounds and it is continuing it’s creep into the world of metaphysics. Exactly as Fisher was concerned about. The internalizing of the abusive concepts of Capital invade the mind itself. If the West makes it out of the meltdown in one piece, it would be best to avoid the complete virtualization of economics, as the next step would logically be finding a way to virtualize life itself; lulling the roasted husks back to sleep in the wake of exposure to the nuclear-hot energy of the solar anus.