Acid Communism

A short zine collecting an introduction to the concept by Matt Colquhoun that appeared in 'krisis journal for contemporary philosophy Issue 2, 2018: Marx from the Margins' and the unfinished introduction to the unfinished book on Acid Communism that Mark Fisher was working on before his death in 2017. "In this way ‘Acid’ is desire, as corrosive and denaturalising multiplicity, flowing through the multiplicities of communism itself to create alinguistic feedback loops; an ideological accelerator through which the new and previously unknown might be found in the politics we mistakenly think we already know, reinstantiating a politics to come." —Matt Colquhoun

A comprehensive collection of the writings of Mark Fisher (1968-2017), whose work defined critical writing for a generation. This comprehensive collection brings together the work of acclaimed blogger, writer, political activist and lecturer Mark Fisher (aka k-punk). Covering the period 2004 - 2016, the collection will include some of the best writings from his seminal blog k-punk; a selection of his brilliantly insightful film, television and music reviews; his key writings on politics, activism, precarity, hauntology, mental health and popular modernism for numerous websites and magazines; his final unfinished introduction to his planned work on "Acid Communism"; and a number of important interviews from the last decade. Edited by Darren Ambrose and with a foreword by Simon Reynolds.

A collection of transcripts from Mark Fisher's final series of lectures at Goldsmiths, University of London, in late 2016. Edited with an introduction by Matt Colquhoun, this collection of lecture notes and transcriptions reveals acclaimed writer and blogger Mark Fisher in his element -- the classroom -- outlining a project that Fisher's death left so bittersweetly unfinished. Beginning with that most fundamental of questions -- "Do we really want what we say we want?" -- Fisher explores the relationship between desire and capitalism, and wonders what new forms of desire we might still excavate from the past, present, and future. From the emergence and failure of the counterculture in the 1970s to the continued development of his left-accelerationist line of thinking, this volume charts a tragically interrupted course for thinking about the raising of a new kind of consciousness, and the cultural and political implications of doing so. For Fisher, this process of consciousness raising was always, fundamentally, psychedelic -- just not in the way that we might think...

Egress is the first book to consider the legacy and work of the writer, cultural critic and cult academic Mark Fisher. Narrated in orbit of his death as experienced by a community of friends and students in 2017, it analyses Fisher’s philosophical trajectory, from his days as a PhD student at the University of Warwick to the development of his unfinished book on Acid Communism. Taking the word “egress” as its starting point—a word used by Fisher in his book The Weird and the Eerie to describe an escape from present circumstances as experiences by the characters in countless examples of weird fiction—Egress consider the politics of death and community in a way that is indebted to Fisher’s own forms of cultural criticism, ruminating on personal experience in the hope of making it productively impersonal.

In the Socialist Utopia of the People's Republic of Britain a routine criminal investigation spirals out of control with world-shattering consequences. The Cold War ended thirty years ago, the Communists have won in Europe and the world has settled into two blocks divided by a silicon curtain, The Partition. The tranquil backwater of the People's Republic of Britain is due to host an international sporting event, the Games, and celebrate the twenty-fifth anniversary of the country becoming a republic. When the organiser of the Games dies suddenly and his office is broken into, Barrow, the retired security operative enlisted to investigate, is drawn into a conspiracy that has implications not only for him and his team of young and inexperienced assistants, but for their entire way of life. How is the American research student Julia Verona implicated? Is some kind of attack being planned? Who is really in command of the operation? Is there a double agent within the PRBs security apparatus? What is the significance of the reclusive novelist Vernon Crane? Fusing the trappings of a literary thriller with experimental style, Eminent Domain explores the art, culture, politics, personalities, conflicts, loves and losses of a range of boldly realised characters in a Utopian world radically different to our own but recognizably the way that things, at one time, might have been. A kaleidoscopic satire of our present moment, Eminent Domain is both a dark thriller and a radical neo-modernist experiment that probes at the limits of Utopia, a formally dazzling reimagining of the political novel in which lives, worlds and even realities collide to devastating effect.

An analysis of the ways in which capitalism has presented itself as the only realistic political-economic system.

A noted British cultural critic takes on some of the strangest works of art from the 20th century and dissects our fascination with the unsettling in popular music, film, and writing What exactly are the Weird and the Eerie? Two closely related but distinct modes, and each possesses its own distinct properties. Both have often been associated with Horror, but this genre alone does not fully encapsulate the pull of the outside and the unknown. In several essays, Mark Fisher argues that a proper understanding of the human condition requires examination of transitory concepts such as the Weird and the Eerie. Featuring discussion of the works of: H. P. Lovecraft, H. G. Wells, M.R. James, Christopher Priest, Joan Lindsay, Nigel Kneale, Daphne Du Maurier, Alan Garner and Margaret Atwood, and films by Stanley Kubrick, Jonathan Glazer and Christopher Nolan.