Acid Anarchism in the UK
Acid Anarchism in the UK
The brief flourishing of a radical LSD subculture
The notion of a ‘psychedelic anarchism’ was alluded to by Dr Osiris Gonzalez Romero at the Philosophy and Psychedelic Studies conference in Exeter, UK, this past June. A murmur of appreciation rippled through the audience, but what precisely this idea practically means is less clear.
Arguably the disruption of the Default Mode Network in the brain by psychedelics could be seen as analogues to a form of cognitive anarchism. Yet, so far as anarchism exists as a political tradition, there is some concrete historical relationship with psychedelia, which might cast some light on how we might be able to understand a psychedelic anarchism.
What I’m going to describe in this article is the brief flowering of ‘acid anarchism’ in Britain in the early 1970s. Focused on the extraordinary figure of William ‘Ubi’ Dwyer (1933-2001) and the folk at Anarchy magazine, the story reveals not so much a burgeoning intellectual tradition, but the culturally evolving shape of psychedelics, authority and its opponents.
ENTER AN ANARCHIST
Irishman Bill Dwyer first became involved in the anarchist scene after he emigrated to Australia in the mid-1950s. While spending time in The Cellar with the Sydney Anarchist Group he also discovered acid. The venue rapidly transformed from political meeting place to psychedelic hangout; one in which Dwyer was evangelical about LSD’s anarchic potential.
Following Timothy Leary, the idea that psychedelics might decondition individuals was a popular one among acidheads. It promised to be a tool for ushering in the ‘New Consciousness’—a moral and political revolution transforming a tired, conservative society. The fact that possession of LSD was made illegal during the 1960s reinforced this idea, pushing users into the realm of outlaws, and politicizing acid culture.
The plight of marrying of anarchism and psychedelics in this legal state reveals the murky, morally fraught water in which authority shifts, relocating individual act and beliefs.
According to historian Andy Roberts, for instance, Dwyer was buying his acid straight from the police in Sydney—they were the ones who largely controlled the local LSD trade! When he changed supplier, therefore, he was arrested, imprisoned, and finally deported. This, as we shall see, is a repeated pattern—one in which the policing of LSD use served as a way of simultaneously maintaining authority and keeping radical political beliefs in check.
Undeterred by his earlier arrest, however, Dwyer went to London and got right back to selling LSD and mixing in British anarchist circles. Unsurprisingly, it was not long until he was once again arrested for possession with intent to supply. He wrote a letter to International Times (January 1972) soliciting signatures of support and asking for witnesses to testify about the drug’s beneficial effects. It was this episode that triggered acid anarchism’s brief flourishing.
In the letter, Dwyer claimed that in court he would argue that LSD was a ‘holy sacrament’ that cleansed people of the repressions driven into them by a moralistic, authoritarian society. Defending himself from the accusation of profiteering, he argued that his commune-living proved otherwise, that he lived a life of equality. He saw the acid experience as a mutually-reinforced act of religious and political freedom.
The kind of mutual-aid communitarianism that Dwyer advocated was akin to the sort of alternative lifestyle proposed by the more hardcore hippies. However, as we shall see, it did not necessarily fit well with many of the more po-faced revolutionary anarchists—many of whom believed that psychedelics were simply an example of bourgeois decadence. Regardless, Dwyer began gathering Britain’s anarchists and acidheads together.
ACID SYMPOSIUM
The ‘Acid Symposium’ at Conway Hall, organized by Dwyer and Anarchy magazine, brought together about 500 ‘heads’ on the 28 April 1971. The event aimed at promoting positive awareness of LSD and cannabis, developing the British counterculture with communes and cooperatives, and working out a ‘Head Liberation Front’. It suited Dwyer to politically arm the hippies, and no doubt trip out the anarchists too.
Underground press magazine Ink, ‘The Other Newspaper’, reported on the symposium (8 May 1971), and it was perfect mayhem. The event began civilized enough. Dwyer compared anti-drug propaganda with medical evidence, waxing lyrical about Aldous Huxley and Leary, but then, according to Ink’s reporter, ‘anarchy acid-style’ took over.
‘They’re denying us our religion,’ one audience member shouted, and others began joining in, with one person bellowing who in the hall hadn’t taken acid? One woman yelled out that she hadn’t, and the reporter noted some middle-aged men remaining conspicuously quiet. Perhaps some straight radicals or undercover cops?
In the midst shouting, Paul Pawlowski, a ‘Polish campaigner for polyandry’, started handing out leaflets and, taking centre stage, invited everyone to an orgy. The founder of a Hellenic Group, the London Church of Aphrodite, Pawlowski was there inviting folk to their inaugural ceremony on the 30 April. One of Brighton’s alternative magazines, Atilla, described his leaflet as the event’s ‘highlight’, but then the Brighton contingent did arrive quite late…
A busload of them, tripping hard on LSD, suddenly appeared while Pawlowski spoke. As the anarchist weekly, Freedom, exasperatingly put it in their report:
Entering the hall in a state of advanced exhilaration, with their minds blown, they stood right in the centre rendering by their buffoonery discussion in the latter part of the meeting virtually impossible.
Dwyer tried to get the event back on point, but some folk started leaving, so he sensibly suggested they all went to the pub.
As attendees made their way to Holborn station though, twenty police officers descended on them, searching for ‘dangerous drugs’. One officer, frustrated that they had found nothing, lost his cool and smashed an individual’s head, knocking him to the ground. The police intimidation continued two days later when Pawlowski’s inaugural ceremony was also (unsuccessfully) raided—and you’ve likely realized the common theme.
By policing the counterculture through drug laws, establishment morality and political authority could be reasserted. This is precisely why Dwyer believed the intersection of psychedelics and anarchism lay in cognitive liberty—it is a point where the freedom to have a psychedelic experience is indivisible from the freedom of (political) belief. By legally severing the former, the latter could be policed in a supposedly free country.
While Conway Hall was arguably not an auspicious beginning for an acid anarchism movement in the UK (equally it might have been!), the symposium did initially generate some good will from the seasoned anarchists. The aforementioned Freedom report, for instance, picks up a Dwyer argument about their newly shared problem with authority:
With the daily police harassment of heads, who themselves are naturally anarchistic, we have the very lively issue of suppression of basic rights to champion. Quite apart from the fact that the gentleness, spirit of mutual aid and co-operation that characterizes this new counter-culture should appeal to all who are interested in freedom and the evolution of social ethics to goodwill and peace.
It wasn’t all peace and love in the anarchist circles though.
THE ACID ISSUE
The new team at Anarchy (having recently taken over from the renowned British anarchist Colin Ward) published, in conjunction with the symposium, the ‘The Acid Issue’ (Second Series, #3). Dwyer took the lead, but crucially there was also a fair bit of skepticism about the anarchism and acid overlap. Just because acid users were outside the law didn’t mean they shared a revolutionary zeal.
In a series of critical bullet points under the heading ‘LSD and Revolution’, five writers made it clear that they regarded the drug with suspicion—contempt even. Just because possessing LSD was illegal, they argued, did not make it revolutionary, using the crass comparison of child killers. As materialists, however, they saw no value in the revolutionary potential of LSD’s New Consciousness, for them it was a cognitive distraction.
It was an inherent division in anarchist beliefs. Tempered by Marxist arguments, the revolutionaries were no fans of the British tradition of Owenite cooperatives that Dwyer and the hippies clearly stood in. They saw it as form of utopianism, believing their own approach was real progress; a rational, organized revolution.
In the article ‘A New Consciousness & its Polemics’, John O’Connor continued interrogating the question of authority for acidheads:
A characteristic of acid fairyland that revolutionaries find encouraging is a noticeable sensitivity to any form of authority among its inhabitants, Policeman loom onto the horizon like malignant alien beings and even a ticket collector can assume the proportions of a formidable barrier to freedom.
Yet, he believed, it was a long way from a hardened, revolutionary awareness that pointedly tackles the authority of the state. The ‘acid metaphysician’ may say that meek aversion to authority is a temporary state, useful in waking people up but, he argued, it could easily lead to a long-term weakness and an inability to confront authoritarianism.
Summing up the problem of their approach, he wrote:
Somebody slumped against the wall muttering Love, Revolution & Beauty, soon becomes a rival in funniness to the old drunkard who amazes everybody by getting to his feet and giving a speech on God, Queen & Country.
Some of their suspicions were of course justified. As Andy Roberts noted of the period in Albion Dreaming, ‘The LSD counter-culture was becoming commodified and sold back to young people by cynical capitalists.’ The radical wing of the counterculture saw this as proof of LSD’s bourgeois decadence. They also saw attempts to legalize drug use as normalization within everyday culture and society, not a challenge to the nature of authority itself.
However, if acid anarchism meant anything, it was in trying to recognize the way authority mediated people cognitively. ‘LSD is no escape from reality’ wrote Dwyer. ‘As an intensifier of experience LSD brings one into more direct confrontation with the world.’ Unlike the materialists, Dwyer believed the psychedelic experience was an insurrection, not into acid fairyland, but deep into our living relationship with the everyday world.
It is of course true to say that LSD does not lead anyone in a uniform political direction. However, it does acutely reflect and mediate the zeitgeist in which it is taken. Britain in the 1960s was mired in a disastrous housing crisis (which still persists). Is it any wonder that when those trippers confronted the world they envisioned alternative forms of living? Indeed, Dwyer himself went on to be a major figure in the squatting and free festival movement.
Ultimately, his acid anarchism resolved in cognitive liberty precisely because he saw it as a confrontation with the world, not through the lens of stolid, ahistorical theory, but as it is—experientially. In this way, at that time, acid anarchism revealed a preference for the insurrectionary over the revolutionary; for the lived experience over the imaginary.
And, in the end, the form insurrection takes depends precisely on when, where, and with whom it happens.