"Swamp fever" - aka "small group psychosis"

By demanding a choice between 'thought' and 'action,' the various groups and individuals infected with swamp fever are promoting a false dichotomy. Clearly, the material unfolding of the class struggle leads the proletariat to self-consciousness, and therefore to a unity of theory and practice, something swamp inhabitants rail against precisely because they don't operate from a proletarian perspective.

- Stewart Home rips a new hole in the "activist lifestyle", in the midst of a fascinating diatribe against Green Anarchist primitivism.

Even Hugo knows about the serious business

Chavez stressed that, "Only the conscious peoples, in organization and in motion can make history, therefore the consciousness of our peoples, of our nations, is essential."

This is precisely why North American imperialism attacks and bombards us using their "cultural artillery"- to placate and divide the peoples, Chavez argued.

"Through offices, analysts and millions of dollars, the United States carries out a media war against our peoples and governments. With different intensities and variants but in exactly the same format," he explained.

The Venezuelan people and government have been subjected to a fierce media war for the past 10 years which was intensified in the last few months, with a dirty psychological war appealing to peoples fears, aimed neutralising the Venezuelan people, Chavez said.

Moar!

The biggest meme of the modern era

At this juncture in history, the meme pushed hardest by the industries that shape the global noosphere is the meme of polyarchy. At its simplest, this is the idea that fragmentation and paralysis are actually the preferred state of human society. Any attempt at systemic organisation or solidarity spreading beyond the village, clique or family is evil, anti-human, inefficient, doomed to failure or some combination of the above. You can see this all over not only popular discourse but intellectual narrative - from all those stories where people who want to organise or build large-scale collective action are villains, dupes or egomaniacs, to lazy use of non-concepts such as "mob rule" or "majority dictatorship", to its repackaging in a more learned form in the works of Foucault and other post-modernists.

When, in the 1940s, Joseph Schumpeter argued that ordinary citizens should limit their participation in a democracy to electing its leaders, he was effectively arguing for polyarchy.... According to Schumpeter, massive political participation is regarded as undesirable and even dangerous. Schumpeter thought that the electoral masses are incapable of political participation other than voting for their leaders. Most political issues are so remote from the daily lives of ordinary people, that they can not make sound judgements about opinions, policies and ideologies.

In Preface to Democratic Theory (1956) Dahl argues that an increase in citizen political involvement may not always be beneficial for polyarchy. An increase in the political participation of members of "lower" socioeconomic classes, for example, could reduce the support for the basic norms of polyarchy, because members of those classes are more pre-disposed to be authoritarian-minded (by which we, of course, mean in favour of actual majority rule - DlaP).

According to William I. Robinson, democracy is a contested concept. He argues that when U.S. policymakers use the term democracy, they mean polyarchy - a system in which a small group rules and mass participation in decision-making is confined to leadership choice in elections carefully managed by competing elites. Polyarchy then may be thought of as "low intensity democracy" or "consensual domination". In contrast to polyarchy, Robinson posits "popular democracy", which refers to a dispersal throughout society of political power that can be used to change unjust social and economic structures.

What polyarchy actually represents is a "hollowing-out" of democratic government in particular and all human society in general. Interestingly, it is the form of "democracy" most aggressively pushed by the actual state apparatuses, most particularly against actually democratic movements that they don't approve of. They want a "harmless", laissez-faire form of democracy that will not have either the power or the will to challenge the truly undemocratic, hypercentralised and anti-human interests of corporate capitalism. You see the contradiction here - when a political or social entity promotes centralisation and concentrated power it's evil, but somehow they don't notice that that's the natural direction of growth of capitalism. (People threw a fit about Hugo Chávez having more than 12 years in power, but how long as Bill Gates been in control of an entity with more power than Venezuela?)

"Polyarchy" is simply the system of organisation natural to capitalism - hundreds of different and competing systems of power, all dictatorial within their own little fields, but engaging in anarchic and destructive competition with each other. Democracy, as we would understand it, is certainly dictatorship - seen from their point of view, since they recognize the authority of only the government which deflects and makes harmless actual democracy, and actively attempts to fragment and atomise human consciousness.

While some push polyarchy cynically as a stick to beat democratic reformists with in places like Venezuela, others (typically members of the ideological priesthood) seem to really believe in it, and think that fragmentation and dispersal, can destroy the centralised capitalist-state system of this world, rather than it being just what that system wants its enemies to do. That's right, workers and ordinary people worldwide will simply walk out of the corporate machine and join your organic yoghurt-knitting commune en masse. Right.

Against this religious belief that somehow if we're good enough - "good" defined as adherence to the religious maxims dictated by our enemies - our enemies will simply be swept aside by good fairies, Chaos Marxism counterposes the idea that to defeat an enemy you must be symmetrical to it. We must counterpose democratic centralism to dictatorial or bureaucratic centralism. (Sadly, the term "democratic centralism" is often used to mean "idiot sect leaders playing toy-Stalin" - but I think we have to reclaim it.) I do like the way in which Ma'at Magick takes on the dialectical conclusion that it is possible for a real collective consciousness to exist without destruction of, and even contributing to the growth of, individual consciousness.

We have to take this particular demon or egregore and thoughtform on. It is so deeply embedded in the consciousness of those of us who grew up in the consumerist-corporate noosphere that we don't even notice it's there most of the time - but we certainly see its effects when it encourages us to splinter our movements, pride our private ego over the effectiveness of our collective thoughtforms, and distrust actually effective leaders. Conversely, it's in small splinter-groups that you get the really nasty dictatorial behaviour.

The great "reds under the altars" scare of 1930

Nor do I think that Bolshevism ever gained any foothold in the Lodges, though I believe it tried; as witness the application to my own fraternity. The average occultist is not interested in politics, his concern is with things invisible. Moreover, the occult fraternities are too uncoordinated and scattered to be formidable political weapons even if they were imbued with Bolshevism.

Dion Fortune lays it on the line on page 223 of Psychic Self-Defence (orig. publ. 1930 - new edition Weiser Books, 1997). Well, we'll fix that.

Seriously: I must recommend everyone out there read the above book, for the small morsels of occult good sense, the hair raising True Stories of Astral Derring Do, and the general high levels of what the young people call LULZ. I love the bit where she suggests that the downfall of Greek civilisation was due to all the buggery that went on (and then goes on to quote approvingly from The Confessions of Aleister Crowley - obviously she didn't know what the "eleventh degree" was all about). I also love all the tales which have clearly been recycled since as eps of Buffy or Supernatural, or the ones which really look like they should be.

The author's style, while stuffily Georgian in places, is also refreshing in a very "no bullshit" kind of way. It reads like a sex-ed manual from a private girl's school of the period in places, in the sense of "Now stop all that silly gossip and innuendo, here are the basic physical facts so you know how not to get yourself into trouble." You get the feeling that, while she jumps to what appear to modern eyes, even modern occultist eyes, to be insane conclusions in places, she was really on the side of good and wanted to save people from fucking up their shit. Classic quote: The three main dangers of modern occultism are immorality, drugs, and the bamboozling of silly women. Very little has changed, although of course silly men are equally ripe to get bamboozled up.

I also love the bit where she speculates about the possibilities of inducing orgasm via telepathy. Where do I sign up for that programme? If all the above doesn't convince you, then let me remind you this is the book which did its part (along with a fuckload of cocaine) in driving David Bowie crazy in 1976. What more reason do you need? As I say, it's lulzy, but you'll chuckle rather than sneer if you have one shred of deceny in your astral body - and there is some serious good advice which has passed the test of time in there, along with some tall tales which you'll end up repeating endlessly to impress the gullible.

In other news: experiment in the next 48 hours with an honest-to-Karl Chaos Marxist Initiation Ritual. Published if it's not a disaster.