This blog is in semi-retirement at the moment because I'm finally able to make these arguments in the movement (and, via Facebook, in the movement in other countries) in such a way that I'm actually getting dialogue, and action. So I just wanted to keep you up to date with a few extremely interesting articles:
- perhaps this McKenzie Wark's concept of "low theory", in the sense of "the attempt to think everyday life within practices created in and of and for everyday life, using or misusing high theory to other ends", is precisely what CM is all about. Hell, shouldn't that be what Marxism is all about in general - the bringing together of workers and science? I know that OTL goads me occasionally about being hyper-wordy, but as a translator, I know that you have to fit the presentation to the audience. I talk one way on Facebook with other overeducated communists, another way with Sufi brethren, and a third way with my football team. Who is McKenzie Wark, anyway?
- our favourite Zen monk punk bassist Brad Warner suggests that Cartesian dualism, the idea of humanity as "a ghost driving a machine made of out meat", was all that saved science being destroyed by religious obscurantism in the 16th century. I think it's the equivalent of Stephen Jay Gould's idea of "non-overlapping magisteria". But going on further from Warner - perhaps the collapse of dualism, with the New Age popularisation and bastardisation of the insights of materialist psychology and the wackier kinds of "mind-body unity" stuff, once again the physical sciences have started treading on the bounds of the guardians of the totems of the Tribe Of The West. The ruling class in the United States, in particular, is increasingly becoming anti-knowledge and anti-science, at least for their own citizens who have a vote. Just like Dubai and Saudia Arabia have solved the problem of the proletariat as the gravedigger of capitalism by importing a semi-indentured labouring class from the subcontinent, so the rulers of the United States have decided to deliberately dumb down their own masses, trusting that they can import all the scientific skills they need from overseas with the super-profits resulting from the native proletarian religiously voting against its own interests.
- $cientology refuses to tell you exactly what it's about without paying for it. L. Ron Hubbard banned "verbal tech", i.e. anyone explaining his psychology/philosophy in any words other than his - which should be the first sign that it's a form of fundamentalism i.e. braindeath. However, if you really want to know how it works, an Austrian "independent Scientologist" gives you the full, detailed course. All you need to do it is a study buddy and an E-meter clone (sold separately).
