2008-09-21

I prove my own theory

Further to the suggestion below that consciousness responds to broad socio-cultural-economic-political forces according to predictable laws... is it any coincidence that I got excited about this blog and its ideas right at the time when financial capitalism seems to have finally run out of people to lie to?

Charles Fort of course had pretty much the same thing in mind when he said: "When it's steam-engine time, it's steam-engines." But as George Galloway puts it, too many people who think they're socialists or revolutionaries or anarchists or whatever are too busy "arguing about dead Russians" (or Germans, or Spaniards, or Americans for that matter) to get out there and start spreading memes which will lead to mass illumination around a practical social-political project.

The traditional, elitist occultist argument is that the masses are asleep because that is their natural state. The Chaos Marxist argument is that the masses are asleep because it is a rational survival strategy, given their powerlessness in modern globalised capitalism, and given the vast resources of the powerful devoted to the means of mass hypnosis. We argue that the masses will awaken precisely at that point where they find a reality tunnel which enables them to make their lives physically, practically better. At that point, they will, as Trotsky put it, "storm heaven and earth" and leave the elitist small-businessmen occultists scratching their heads and desperately trying to put their own preferred illusions back together.

2 comments:

  1. Surely if you want to make the concept more open to the general public you should try and avoid making it sound like they need a degree in economics to be able to benefit?

    The trouble as I see it is that people are not choosing to sleep, but avoiding that which they don't think they can understand.

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  2. When you say "you", are you referring to this blog or to Marxists/leftists in general? If the former, I kind of am writing for those already In The Know to some degree - mass outreach work has to use a more streamlined vocabulary.

    If the latter, the basic insight of Marxism is that (a) the system exploits workers; (b) workers can devise and run a better system themselves. You don't need to even know the Labour Theory of Value to be convinced that that makes sense. Of course the problem with the sectarian left is that they go in there with all this jargon about "proletariat" this and "Soviet Russia" that which alienates any sensible person.

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