Was MF really in the CPGB? Are you sure? I don’t think he was. If so, not for long. When he died he was in Plan C, a communist anarchist collective. When did he say the Soviet Union was worse then fascism?

This notion of yours that to be a true communist one must deny the fundamental corruption of Marxism in the actually existing attempts at communism in the Soviet Union and China is ridiculous. The state merely replaced the private networks of capitalists in terms of worker exploitation (expropriation of surplus value), material distribution was socialised through planning but clearly at the expense of freedom, bureaucratic abuse and a limitation of horizons - the expansive notion of meeting the full potential of human species-being which underlay all Marx’s ideas could not have been achieved under those systems, and we see how easily China has reversed into the worse form of neoliberal capitalism (and state, and imperialism). Mark’s idea of Acid Communism was an attempt to find a prospective optimism about how social and material conditions can interact with ideas, the mind and conceptions of reality which might break the impasse of capitalist realism. It was an attempt to reckon with the failures of Leninist Communism, of trade unionism, of social democracy, or various waves of anarchism, to transcend the traps that dwelling on these appear to pull us into, while recognising that Acid 1968ism was co-opted by capitalism (as you infer), and indeed was not radical enough by half (and arguably a mere elite youth movement in many respects).