One of my primary reasons for writing The Politics of Psilocybin is to share a modern, critical analysis of the industry that has emerged around psilocybin. And because this industry is an inherently capitalist phenomenon, it is apt that such analysis be rooted in political science and economics.
In the course of my research into psilocybin I have sometimes wondered what Karl Marx (and other similarly influential historical figures such as Adam Smith, John Maynard Keynes, etc. and more modern minds like David Graeber) would think of the current state of the psilocybin industry. Eventually I decided that the finished book should apply some of the most popular ideas from some of the most influential economists and political theorists to the psilocybin industry. In doing so I hope to deepen our collective understanding of this industry and the plethora of possibilities which may come from its emergence.
One of the figures whose ideas I have applied to my analysis of the psilocybin industry is Karl Marx. Love him or hate him, Marx was an undoubtedly influential thinker whose work had a seismic impact on the parallel histories of economics and political science. In 1867, Marx published the first volume of Capital, a work that is still today among the most thorough, advanced analyses/critiques of capitalism out there. Many of the most vibrant and popular criticisms of capitalism can be traced back to Capital and other writings by Marx.
Today’s newsletter will apply certain concepts from Marx’s Capital to the burgeoning psilocybin industry.
Critical Analyses of Drug Industries
First, we should note that I am definitely not the first to apply Marx’s critique of capitalism to analysis of a drug trade.
Marx himself pointed to the British colonial trade in salt, opium, and betel as a premier example of capitalism.1 More than a century later, an anthropologist named Sidney Mintz, who taught at Yale and Johns Hopkins, applied a Marxist critique of the sugar industry in Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern History.
Yale-educated historian Alfred McCoy, who now teaches at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, did something similar with opium and heroin in The Politics of Heroin. McCoy’s must-read masterpiece explores how opium and, in turn, heroin became modern commodities. He also examines the function of these drugs within global economic and geopolitical systems from the Medieval era to the turn of the 21st century.
While there have been countless books written about psilocybin, to my knowledge none yet exist which provide the same sort of comprehensive, socioeconomic framework with which to understand the modern psilocybin industry. Probably the closest thing we have is Shroom: A Cultural History of the Magic Mushroom by Andy Letcher. Letcher’s Shroom is an excellent work, and is highly recommended for anyone wishing to learn more about psychoactive fungi. But Letcher’s analysis is primarily cultural. It lacks the political depth and economic analysis that Mintz’s and McCoy’s works have achieved. Additionally, Shroom was published in 2006. Suffice it to say, a lot has happened since then regarding psilocybin.
As such, a thorough political/economic analysis of the modern psilocybin industry is warranted. Thus, The Politics of Psilocybin.
So, what would Marx think of the shroom boom?
What is a commodity?
In Capital, Marx explores the philosophical and political underpinnings of money, its alter ego capital, as well as labor, commodities, technology, and the overall structures of capitalism more broadly. An entire chapter is devoted to the concept of the commodity, how commodities arise, and their functions within our economies and political systems.
Commodities, according to Marx, are a direct result of that seemingly magical quality of money: it can buy anything. Nothing is exempt from its spell. This quality of money and its relationship with human desire provides an excellent starting point for understanding commodification.
As Marx wrote, “everything, commodity or not, is convertible into money. Everything [is] saleable and purchaseable.”2 In the same passage, he cited a letter that Columbus wrote from Jamaica in which he extolled the virtues of gold and all it could buy (including, according to Columbus, entrance of the soul into Heaven).
Ok, so anything can be bought for a price. But what distinguishes a “commodity” from “anything”? When does something that happens to exist turn—as if through some type of alchemical metamorphosis—into an in-demand product to be bought and sold?
A commodity is, according to Marx, a “useful thing.” This usefulness derives directly from “the physical properties of the commodity.”3 And the degree to which a thing is useful determines its value (whether emotional, financial, or otherwise).
According to Marx, when a given product becomes associated with specific characteristics which are socially meaningful, it attains the status of commodity—something which is at once a mere product but also an abstract idea in the collective social mind.4 He further clarified that a commodity is inseparable from the labor that produces it, insofar as it is precisely that labor which gives the product not only its value but its very status as a commodity.
Marx wrote that “the mystical character of the commodity” which is “abounding in metaphysical subtleties” derives from “the social characteristics” of the labor that went into the production of those commodities, or, in Marx’s words, “the socio-natural properties of these things.”5
What is commodity fetishism?
Useful things become commodities when they become socially meaningful, or, put another way, when they become not just a thing but an abstract idea in the collective social mind. And it is precisely from this abstract, social nature of commodities that what Marx terms commodity fetishism arises. There is a practically automatic form of fetishism “which attaches itself to the products of labour as soon as they are produced as commodities” and which becomes “inseparable from the production of [those] commodities.”6
This fetishism is constructed around the “social character of the labour” that produces the commodity in question.7 Applied to the psilocybin industry, this could very well describe the widespread fascination with the story of R. Gordon Wasson and María Sabina, which was in reality a case of manipulative biopiracy but which exists in the public imagination as a quirky, mystical adventure from the pages of Life magazine.
Commodities, labor, and social meaning
However, as Marx reminded us, “objects of utility become commodities only because they are the products of…labour.”8 While psilocybin mushrooms are often branded as a natural product, it took countless hours of human labor to distinguish those species of mushrooms from the others, learn ideal preparation methods and dosage, and create a social understanding of what occurs upon their ingestion. To overlook this labor is to ignore the very process that transformed the mushrooms from a wild organism into a product.
Further, “since the producers do not come into social contact until they exchange the products of their labour, the specific social characteristics of their private labours appear only within this exchange.”9 More simply, commodities are accompanied by their own unique constellation of social characteristics which derive from the historical setting in which they were produced.
What does this mean for shrooms? We only know about Sabina because she happened to be the curandera that provided Wasson mushrooms on a particular trip to Mexico in the mid-1950s. And the various things that we associate with magic mushrooms (indigenous medicine, spirituality, healing, etc.), we do so only because these elements relate to the cultural container in which the mushrooms were transformed via the labor of Sabina and generations of other curenderas into commodities fit for mass consumption, pushed far and wide by J. P. Morgan public relations executive Wasson.
Both/And (or: commodity dialectics)
Marx wrote extensively about the dualistic (and dialectic) nature of commodification. On the one hand, more access to products is generally a good thing. On the other, the process of commodification comes with a particular power dynamic which is born from the physical production of the good in question.
Everything bought is also something sold. Or, as Marx wrote, “a sale is a purchase.”10 Every dollar we have ever spent on anything has ultimately, at one point or another, been someone else’s profit. As soon as we exchange money for commodities, we relinquish the small quantity of value (or, alternatively, social power) which is stored in the money in exchange for the small quantity of value which is stored in the commodity.
Thus, commodities can possess seemingly contradictory qualities simultaneously. Psilocybin, for instance, can be both a life-saving therapeutic and yet another mass-produced, over-prescribed drug—even at the same time. (Opioids are similar in this regard.)
“It is quite evident,” Marx wrote, that the processes of appropriation and privatization “become changed into their direct opposite through their own internal and inexorable dialectic.”11 This may seem a bit wordy, especially if you don’t study philosophy or economics. Allow me to break it down.
We already saw how commodities can be simultaneously helpful (in that they are useful material resources) and harmful (in that their production is controlled by capitalist power dynamics). Thus, the same substance may be both a means of liberation and a tool of oppression, even at the same time.12 Many commodities are both of these things, all the time. Psilocybin is certainly no exception.
In fact, it is the liberatory potential of commodities which so often serves as the basis for their marketing and advertising. Consider psilocybin.
Shrooms and their derivative psilocybin (which is itself just one of several psychoactive compounds found in psilocybe mushrooms) are often sold on the promise that they will deliver some sort of radical change to the person who consumes them. But to what extent do they actually produce such results? It’s complicated.
I have noticed that there is an increasingly common sentiment in which the act of taking shrooms is itself seen as some sort of anti-capitalist achievement and even an act of solidarity with indigenous populations. But in fact the act of taking psilocybin is neither of these things. It is commodity consumption.
The idea that by taking shrooms we can tap into some ancient spirit world which, by virtue of our entering it, bestows some sort of mystical grace upon us is the epitome of commodity fetishism. Such ideas derive from the “social characteristics” of the communities that performed the labor that gave us psilocybin.
And because appropriation and privatization thrive on their apparent opposites—generosity and public access—the commodities which undergo the former processes (appropriation, privatization) are nonetheless associated in the consumer’s mind with the latter (generosity, access). Such is the magic of capitalist marketing.
Psilocybin as status symbol
This dialectical nature of commodities gives rise to another aspect of their use, one which Marx also discussed in Capital: the use of commodities as status symbols.
Financial capital is easily transformed into social capital. Marx wrote extensively of the various effects that money and commodities can exert on social processes and the public psyche. He wrote of the desire to appear rich, which is particularly present in people who are themselves not actually rich. To make his point, Marx cites the French philosopher Denis Diderot, who wrote, “Let us be rich, or let us appear rich.”13
Allow me to suggest that the current boom in psilocybin, MDMA, LSD, etc. is driven by a similar energy. “Let us be healed, or let us appear healed.” The consumer culture around these substances thrives on a kind of holier-than-thou attitude which often attaches itself to their use. But in an objective sense, all of the popular mysticism surrounding psilocybin is itself a direct reflection of the labor that went into their production and the social environment in which that labor was performed. And because the fetishization of commodities derives from the labor and environment(s) that produced them, it is quite natural that consumers of these drugs would endear themselves to the almost mythical origin stories which the drugs enjoy in the public imagination.
Why does this matter?
Even if one accepts that psilocybin is a commodity that has been fetishized and which is utilized as a status symbol, it is entirely reasonable that one might still wonder what all of this means or why they should care. After all, aren’t there people whose use of psilocybin lies outside of the confines of capitalism and commodification? Surely, not everyone who uses psilocybin has been influenced by this process, right?
One of the primary takeaways of this analysis will be, I hope, an awareness that the culture and industry around psilocybin, while unique, shares certain systemic similarities with the culture and industry of other commodities, similarities which themselves derive from the shared status as commodities, or useful things which are socially meaningful and exchanged for money.
What may appear to the consumer as a deeply profound body of history and knowledge is, to the manufacturer, simply the particular configuration of information necessary to incentivize the consumer to proceed with the transaction.
“Yes,” the capitalist says. “This is an ancient, sacred medicine. It will heal you.” You eagerly accept. The capitalist leaves with your money and you leave with your new fetish satiated.
Another important takeaway is that psilocybin, like any other commodity, can only be produced at the expense of the labor of those who produce it. This is true both in a historical sense, i.e. with respect to the indigenous populations that taught us about these medicines, as well as a modern sense, i.e. the labor of those people who produce psilocybin, whether in fungal or synthetic form. I hope such a perspective can offer a political and economic basis for not only a pro-labor approach to the psilocybin industry but also the argument against erroneous patents.
As Marx wrote, “capitalist production…undermin[es] the original sources of all wealth—the soil and the worker.”14 María Sabina died impoverished and alone, rejected by many in her community. And although Oaxaca has seen economic development in recent years and is a popular tourist destination, the region is still quite impoverished overall. And, like the rest of Mexico, it is in the midst of sociopolitical turmoil related largely to the various issues associated with the illegal drug trade. So, while magic mushrooms are more popular (and more lucrative) than ever before, the land and the communities that we got them from are not necessarily doing so well.
Such is the nature of capitalism.
Will Sabina’s fate be replicated for the untold number of other indigenous healers whose labor has enabled us to consume these drugs?
If psilocybin truly holds liberatory potential, such liberation must necessarily occur outside the container of capitalism. We cannot be free from exploitation while we still dwell in it.
Therefore, I strongly encourage psilocybin enthusiasts to ponder these issues as the capitalist industry around our beloved mushrooms expands rapidly before our eyes. When we trip on shrooms and encourage others to try them, are we truly healing and contributing to meaningful personal/social/political change, or are we merely fetishizing another commodity? Perhaps a bit of both?
Thanks for reading.