Theses on the New Chaos Marxism

1. We hereby disavow the "Old Chaos Marxism"'s interest in "meme magic" for the following reasons:
   1. The fascists got there first and did it better (or at least did it as successfully as possible).
   2. We should have predicted they should do that, because as Walter Benjamin identified in the 1930s, fascism is precisely turning politics into aesthetics.
   3. Meme politics are stupid politics. We announce Gresham's Law of Memetics: boomer memes drive out dank memes. Memes which appeal to the dumbest, grossest part of the lizard brain spread further and faster (as is being proved in practice by mainstream conservative media operators as we speak).
   4. Communist politics are supposed to be about coming to consciousness. But with great consciousness comes great responsibility. Fascism is a fantasy of childish irresponsibility in which Great Leader allows you to do whatever you want in return for loyalty, and that is precisely its appeal.
   5. It's no coincidence that when actual "communists" try meme politics, you arrive at tankie politics - politics which are identical to "channer fascism" in their nihilism, delight in violence, aggressive anti-intellectualism and bootlicking to the biggest bully on the block, only with swastikas being replaced by hammer-and-sickles, with racial nationalism replaced by a sick, Red-Brown "proletarian nationalism" (which is in fact lumpen-populism and majoritarianism, as shown in the cringing support for Han Chinese racial nationalism draped in a red flag in Xinjiang, Hong Kong etc).
      
2.  New Chaos Marxism pivots to building consciousness, and therefore immunity to memes. Memes work by subverting the rational mind ("slow" mind) in favor of the "heuristic" mind, the "monkey" mind, the mind that works on like/dislike; Chaos Marxist aims to marry the two.
3. But how?
   
   1.  It can't be done on an individual basis because there is no way for an isolated individual to know whether she is a noble defender of The Truth who sees things that the slack-jawed yokels can't understand; or just a crank (the two look identical from the inside).
   2. But it's difficult as hell to do it in a group because most groups are brought down by their own internal bullshit: ego-centricity and meme-based thinking feed off and are fed by clique politics and abusive/authoritarian leadership.
4. "Truth" (in the sense of learning to create change in objective reality in conformity with intention) can only be identified in a praxis group (a group melding theory and practice). The long-term goal of Chaos Marxism is to turn humanity as a whole into a praxis group, healing the split between theory and practice.
5. 1.  All groups are problematic but some groups are more problematic than others.
   2. For a long time we resisted the idea of "prefiguration", the idea that groups that want to change the world have to embody their own principles. It seemed far too close to the hippie bullshit of change the world to change yourself: i.e. a recipe for doing nothing but jerking yourself off to your own saintliness for not actually doing anything. But we hate to say it, a group that doesn't embody reflexivity (being able to smell its own bullshit) and making its own desires and ego subservient to the search for Truth will not only degenerate into a circle-jerk, a cult or a money-making enterprise, but will actually degrade the consciousness of its own members.
   3. A group aspiring to be a real praxis group will be able to smell its own bullshit, and must expect a commitment from its members that they themselves will at least make every effort to smell their own bullshit.

A retraction and an apology

Much like B. B. Rodriguez, I only like mobs when I'm leading them

To sum up in a sentence, the project of Chaos Marxism was to try to build links between two of my main interests - classical Marxist politics and magick/mysticism - through materialist approaches to cultural studies, religion, the sociology of movements and transpersonal psychology, all filtered through a Church of the SubGenius style gonzo-rant aesthetic.

Early posts in this blog extolled the concept of meme politics - the idea that a liberatory anti-capitalist political project could be spread through something like the Anonymous internet mob phenomenon which grew out of 4chan /b/, the asshole of the Internet, and secondary websites like Encyclopedia Dramatica.

Well, the future is here, and it FUCKIN' SUCKS.

Do you guys know about QAnon? That's pure meme politics of the type I used to foresee. It's also a bloodthirsty fascist braindeath cult, operated by grifters and exploited by mainstream political operators. (The latter is the classic relationship, of course: the original Nazis were despised by mainstream German conservatives as dumb thugs, but were cynically used to bash the Left with.)

The main problem is that meme politics are stupid politics, in its current form. It's effectively precisely because it destroys consciousness - it encourages people to switch off their minds. YouTube is a hive of conspiracy theories and fascism not just because of its algorithm, but because studies have showed what Chaos Marxism always understood - that people will believe absolute garbage if it's in video form with smooth graphics and creepy music, that they would reject if they saw it written on the page. ETA: Memes are aesthetics; Walter Benjamin said that turning politics into aesthetics was an essential point of fascism. You do the match.

Some wiseacre on Twitter was recently saying that QAnon in particular is something like the Snow Crash mind virus, creating a "human botnet" which will do whatever the signals tell it (or, for the real nerds, the Remote from the Faction Paradox universe). So, Q can tell someone "$30 grand and I'll instruct my minions to stalk and harass that café down the road which gave you bad service". Tell them that they're harvesting adrenochrome from babies in its basement or something.

(As I've said before, Anonymous didn't have to wind up in GamerGate, QAnon and similar fascist online mobs - but its anti-capitalist, anti-systemic leadership were taken out when Lulzsec was destroyed.)

So if Chaos Marxism still has a project, I suppose it'll be something like trying to create a vaccine (or a psychological anti-virus program) that will make socialist movements immune to meme politics. And it would have to be something like creating an intellectual culture in the movement, rather than some kind of individualist CBT thing.

Could memes be used to convey positive messages? Yes. But let's face it - it was always an elitist idea, the cynical idea of overriding people's conscious minds and appealing straight to the preconscious. Chaos Marxism now rejects that in favour of what Marx himself, as well as Sigmund Freud, wanted - bringing ourselves and the whole world to full consciousness, so we can no longer be worked like a puppet by cynical meme-lords.

Anyway, check out this lady, she seems to be working in a similar tradition.