Psychedelics and the Left

By now it should be well established that capitalism no longer permeates just the economic relationship, but the way we understand ourselves. Capitalism is a mediator for our unconscious as it is for trade. To escape capitalism, or at least see beyond capitalism, we must begin to escape our psyche. The 1960’s, via counter-culture, saw a rise in the New Left, and as the popularity of leftism began to rise, a formal distrust of the cultural appartusses that held culture together began to rise as well. At the center of this was psychedelics. The left today can learn something from the experimental usage of psychedelics from the 1960’s. As our unconscious is set up fundamentally with the rules instilled in us via capitalism, a deconstruction of the psyches processes is a necessity to see beyond ideological spectres. To see beyond capitalism, to see beyond our understanding of the world, we must bypass our reality principle and enter a reality that exists psychologically beyond commodities, capitalistic sublimation, and capitalist desire. The usage of psychedelics surpass the ideological constraints of the reality principle, and if one is to escape capital one must escape the psychosocial posturing embedded within it. An analysis of 1960’s counter-culture, in conjunction with the rise of the New Left and events like May ’68 offer light on a legitimate escape from (at the very least) the psychological and ideological warfare. By opening realities past capitalism and its hegemonic grip of culture, society, industry, arts etc. we are exposed to a new form of unconscious structuring beyond all principles regimented by capitalism. This is fundamental to any direct action movement seeking to lose the chains of capitalist dependency. Even, in a hypothetical, a revolution were to overthrow the bourgeois state (and even ideology) the construction of the superego is constrained by what is culturally normal, hence a period of regret and guilt in that we feel would be transgressing the fundamental values ordained into our ego-ideal. This is why after the overthrow or loss of governments that controlled social norms and customs, a period of nostalgia can be found in many of the populations (USSR and its satellite states, Germany etc) unless the government failed to enforce its ideal customs on the populace. But the capitalist power dynamic is a fundamentally different organization. It is not one supreme ruler that is cast aside, rather it would be an overruling of class. This, in fact, is a differentiator Engels makes about the nature of slavery and wage-slavery. We are not the slaves of one specific ruler, but the subject to the rule of one overarching class. But this era of guilt can be overridden by the usage of psychedelics in and as a form of direct action itself. To progress past the psychosocial constructs of consumerism and capitalist ideology, we can not just wish it away as it is already embedded within our reality principle and superego, we must explicitly circumvent and deconstruct our own images of reality.