Back to the beginning again

The foundation of this whole blog / embryonic thought current, Liber MCMXVII, says plainly: "We declare that a cadre party of the Leninist type, properly understood, is a magical order." I think I'm getting a clearer idea of what that might mean.

The founder of the Jesuits, Iñigo Montoya Loyola, set out a truckload of Spiritual Exercises to give his order "a greater degree of freedom from his or her own likes, dislikes, comforts, wants, needs, drives, appetites and passions that they may choose based solely on what they discern God's will is for them." This is of course very close to what the Sufi orders claim for their own practice - only the name of God has changed - and, for that matter, the broad outlines of Buddhist practice as far as I can understand it. (Interestingly, there's a good article by a Jesuit priest pointing out that "oh, them Muslims ain't so bad, it's the same God after all" - and of course, the Jesuits were one of the main initiators of liberation theology, which should make our readers perk their ears up.) And of course most of you out there are familiar with the various psychic exercises used to strengthen the will in the OTO, traditional Wicca, and probably every other school of magick.

To some degree, where traditional Bolshevik organising has let itself down is that all the training formally given to cadres is either (a) practical political activism, or (b) academic-style learning of Marxist political economy and philosophy. That's the head and hands sorted out. Where is the heart? Where is the training for those who change the world to carry out the Greater Work of simultaneously changing themselves? All the current evidence suggests that this doesn't spontaneously happen, at least in the far-left sect milieu of Westernised countries. Probably in places like the Philippines or Nepal, where the rubber hits the road and if you don't do it right the death squads will whack you, and they'll probably whack you even if you do do it right, the cadres are shocked out of the bad habits of their personalities. But not around these parts.

Egotism = intellect + desire, and of course that's why capitalism is the most egotistical social system out there, because it really is all about a rational intellect which makes things happen and unbridled libidinal energy channelled towards for-profit entertainment systems (including, increasingly, sexuality). The Sufis and the Jesuits know that the part of humanity which taps into a more fundamental current - our own essential nature, or that part of our essential nature which may flower into a new improved humanity sometime in the future - has nothing to do with intellect or desire.

I suppose that, when I return to hard-core on the ground political activism, it will behoove me to start writing my own version of Psychic Exercises for Materialist Revolutionaries, and test it in practice. And that will be the point where my writings here start to mean something.