Weird Marxism

Metaphysics, Cryptids, Drugs, and the Occult in Marxist Thought

If you’ve read my book Fear Before the Fall, then you know that I grew up obsessed with the occult, horror, and grotesque. It seems like, to a certain extent, horror and punk rock go hand in hand, with entities like Troma Entertainment that explicitly combine the two cultural expressions. Nothing embodies that marriage better than Kiefer Sutherland’s punk character David from Lost Boys, a sort of vampiric rendition of Billy Idol. Over the past decade, horror has become increasingly popular, and it is certainly the preferred genre of most people I closely associate with. The irony of our time is that most horror fans are painfully aware that the penchant for horror is a symptom of a larger cultural shift toward a certain kind of escapism. I recognized this when I wrote Fear Before the Fall, and I conceded that horror typically emerges as a dominant genre in moments of acute socio-economic and cultural distress (see the 1910s and 20s below, and the 1940s). Then I quickly realized that the popularity of horror has not really disappeared or diminished since its ascendancy in the 1970s. 

This is not my chart, and it is important to point out that it shows releases over the years with different axis ranges. Take it for what you will, but it still demonstrates the increasing popularity of horror and sci-fi.

Horror is just one manifestation of an overall generational frustration with capitalism. The millennial affinity for astrology occupies the same space, where practitioners and believers, desperate to understand the complexity of life and consciousness, desperately seek to identify patterns in being and habits. Yet, astrology, like the occult more broadly, deals with metaphysics and abstractions, and is thus commonly dismissed by orthodox Marxists, who seek to understand our affinity for horror, or our turn toward astrology, as a reflection of economic impoverishment, social alienation, and capitalist cultural hegemony. Marx saw abstract philosophy and metaphysics as impoverished forms of thought that merely distracted the petty bourgeoisie and working class from the world-historical struggle for the material means of production. Still, science fiction, drugs, and cryptids are some of the most useful tools we have for imagining possible worlds, and with the increasing turn toward automation, billionaire voyages into space, the popularization of astrology, and the legalization of certain drugs we as Marxists must engage with the weird world of the abstract. We need a weird Marxism.