Contradictions

 
The late, interesting-if-not-great Palestinian-Jewish-British socialist Tony Cliff said that the essential contradiction of Marxism lies between "the emancipation of the working class is the act of the working class" and "the ideas of the ruling class are the ideas of society". Can I add another very vital contradiction, for those of us who understand Foucault, Lacan, Crowley and Robert Anton Wilson on the link between language, reality and power:

Thesis: "Every identity within capitalism is constructed by capitalism, and there is no outside to capitalism."
Antithesis: "Capitalism is an internally contradictory unity prone to ever-worsening crises which can only be delayed, not avoided."

If only the first were true, there is no point to anything and we might as well have a good time until the oceans rise. If the second is true, there is no need to do anything and we only need to wait until the thing falls over. But since BOTH are true, we need to find a way to operate IN capitalism while realising that the identities it gives us are social relations and are NOT REAL, and finding ways to sharpen the contradictions in such a way that the next world-system is socialism rather than barbarism. Actually, that might be another contradiction:

Thesis: "Capitalism alienates human labour and requires us to play identity-games of oppression, exploitation and psychic injury."
Antithesis: "There is no outside to capitalism except death and insanity."

The Weaver in the Web That He Made: preliminary notes towards a workable model

1. Stephen Hawking's model of the universe as "infinite but bounded" (i.e. spherical) in 4-dimensional space-time sounds good to me, forgetting the pesky little curled-up dimensions required by string theory for a moment. It is always-already complete. "Time" as we know it is an artifact of travelling through this area. The Time Lords in Doctor Who fiction are said to create "4-dimensional statues", i.e. things which have decay and change-through-time built into them. Some Muslims say that the Qu'ran is like this. But in any case, if Hawking is correct everything is like this. Every physical "thing" is a 4-dimension tunnel through space-time, and they intersect with each other.

2. Buddha, Heraclitus and Karl Marx all came to the same conclusion. The mental 3-dimensional "snapshots" we take of this reality and call it "the Real World" are illusory. πάντα ρει: everything is always slipping down its own 4D tunnel. Nothing is solid. Materialist dialectics is the philosophy of how things journey down the tunnel, conceived as a process of the resolution of internal contradictions.

3. The argument among Marxists of whether there is a "dialectics of nature" is therefore a complete waste of time. "Nature" as we perceived it and describe it in laws is a 3D snapshot (or, at best, a limited 4D "videoclip") of... okay, we will refer to the Universe as it really is under all that crap, the "emic reality" as R. A. Wilson and anthropologists put it, by the Arabic term al-Haqq. Yeah. Therefore anything that we can understand and put into words is an artifact of our viewpoint and understanding; therefore it is a creation of consciousness; therefore, what the hell, we can say it follows a dialectic process if it helps us. The "dialectics of nature" is thus a heuristic rather than an ontological truth, and much like Charlie Brown, I'm always certain when it comes to matters of opinion.

4. Anything we can actually conceptualise and put into words is a map, not the territory. Some maps are more useful than others. "Etic reality" is the world that we actually experience based on our interactions as primates blessed with rational minds on an M-class planet. We interact with thought-forms in our brains which provide a workable model for dealing with everyday reality.  By interaction with the others around us who are already totally plugged into the existing system by which humans create the necessities of life and of meaning, we create a Ego (called the Little Self or the nafs by Sufis) as our "counter" on the playing-board of life. We can refer to this as the Matrix, to use a Gnostic/Buddhist metaphor which everyone gets now.

5. So the Matrix is being continually and collectively constructed - a game of existence worked out by its players over the course of millennia. And as Marx correctly noted, its fundament is the struggle for material existence - keep these primate bodies alive, reproducing, and happy. But past that we go up Maslow's hierarchy of needs - safety, love/belonging, esteem and self-actualisation. And all of these are things which are drives as Freud would have recognized them - real physical needs, filtered through the logic-making systems of the Ego.

6. So: the basis for the evolution of human society (and therefore class society) is the production and reproduction of the hierarchically-organised needs of the Ego. And of course modern consumer capitalism has busied itself, in the era of possible abundance, of creating artificial scarcity and implanted needs so as to keep the system running. The Matrix is self-perpetuating - it has no 4D perspective, it sees no end to itself, although its continuous efforts to keep the status quo dialectically mean it continually changes and progresses.

7. The Matrix is holographic in the sense that "as above, so below" - all of the "tokens" or "counters" in its system depend upon and bear the imprint of the whole system, just as in the structuralist view of language. Your Ego (what you almost always think of as "you") means absolutely nothing outside the context of your particular socio-economic Matrix. In fact, what you've come to think of as "you" evolved specifically to aid your survival and success within that particular system or game. Fish have no word for water. The ideas of the ruling class are generally the ideas of society.

8. The existence of a crappy watch proves the existence of a Blind Watchmaker. A system which evolves in response to a particular need will continue on that evolutionary trajectory (4D tunnel) even if that need no longer exist, because all systems become self-perpetuating once the Egos which partake in them become dependent on the system. Systems only become obsolete when the Egos making them up no longer find their needs met by the system. The main reason why capitalism (the human System based on generalised wage-labour and commodity production) has endured long-past its use-by date is that they've used the advanced sciences of Psychology over the last 100 years or so to perfect the art of consciously reprogramming Egos to become more useful to, and thus more dependent on, the System. They call that "neoliberal self-fashioning".

9. All subsidiary systems are holographic representations of the overarching System. That's right. There is no "outside" to capitalist domination. There is no "counter-culture", except in the sense that you have to have a Devil if you have a God - any Ego and any organisation of Egos in the world of capitalism will follow the rules of capitalism. In fact, the sick and sad thing is that the more an organisation which seeks to change the System actually adapts to the rules of the system - that is, the extent to which it "sells out" its own ideas and reproduces the oppression, repression, commodification, reification and concepts of its environment - the better of a chance it has of surviving. Revolutionary socialists understand this extremely well when it comes to worker-cooperative firms; until recently, they didn't seem to "get it" about their own groups (except for those French libertarian communists who wrote "Militancy: The Highest Form of Alienation").

10. The Ego - in the absence of some "fixed point" of reference already outside the System - cannot get outside the System for the same reason a fish cannot get outside water. All attempts at magick (the art of changing consciousness at will, i.e. the Ego editing its own programming) can only make the individual more successful in (and thus less dangerous to) the System - thus, the "occultism of small businessmen". At worst, it might lead to a collapse of the Ego, i.e. psychosis. Rational analysis can show where the exit doors are in the system - as Marx and Freud did - but they can't go through them.

11. Mysticism is about attempting to give the individual Ego exactly that kind of "fixed point" outside the system - in the form of al-Haqq, the absolute. The fundamental practice of mysticism is meditation - a kind of mental "neutral gear" in which the mind disconnects from the body and allows the automatic thoughts of the Ego to flood past without any sequelae in the physical world. Eventually, the discipline develops of forming a subset of the Ego which not only observes the ego but is capable of making decisions contrary to the Ego's likes, dislikes and preferences - we can call this the Will.

12. But the fundamental principle of mysticism is love - defined as the Ego's willing submission of its own needs and desires to another's, or at least, for the Other's needs and desires to be put on a higher plane. That is, love is a voluntary surrender of the Ego's usually rock-firm boundaries between I and You and It. It is therefore a way out of the System to which the Ego owes its very existence. Love is a key out of the Matrix and into al-Haqq. And it takes all the forms the Greeks recognized - eros, philos, agape. Marxists might add solidarity - because the proletariat can only see reality collectively, as a class acting for itself in struggle, rather than the isolated Egos produced by capitalism.

13. The Ego lives in the world. The rational intellect explains the world. Will changes the world. Love creates the world.

Credo

In a Chaos Marxism special for the holiday season, let me attempt a quick profession of faith ("faith" being defined as "hope backed up with experience)...

I do not believe in a "personal God" - or, to put it another way, I do not believe that the abiding and controlling force in human affairs operates in any way analogous to that of a human ego.

I believe that humanity as a collective being has a potential destiny far more rich, deep and satisfying than that of individual egos and self-interested alliances between them.

I believe that capitalism is a social system which selects for the worst, most self-defeating behaviour in human beings. It also selects for great material wealth, and at least the (illusory?) possibility of abundance for all.

I believe we have to build the future we have with the people we have. We have to build a world where we can all safely transcend our individual egos, with people who have been trained to think of nothing but their little egos.

I believe that individual solutions by their very nature cannot save our collective species-being. In the same way that buying organic vegetables will not do a thing to smash the system of exploitative agribusiness, mediation and purifying your own little ego will not do a thing to destroy the social forces which select for bad behaviour. Only collective struggle can dod that.

I believe that no god or alien or ascended master will save us unless we save ourselves. However, I believe that in some circumstances the idea of "God" or "benevolent Space Brother" or "ascended Master" might represent a source of psychic/cultural energy we can call upon to save ourselves.

I believe in the inexpressible benevolence of the creative impulse, as something implicit in human nature and therefore in Nature itself.

Philosophy!

1. The world is a contradictory unity, which evolves under the pressure of its own contradictions. [ETA: That is, that's how we perceive the world, since our consciousness is a contradictory unity. We refuse to speculate about any ontological reality.]

2. Life evolves from matter, and consciousness evolves from life.

3. Consciousness in its basic form is based on the struggle for survival. "Higher" states of consciousness are simply meta-consciousness, and meta-meta-consciousness, and possibly more "meta" above that.

4. The sphere of consciousness is "relatively autonomous" from the field of matter, and thus plays by its own rules within limits.

5. Consciousness in humans can be divided roughly into "left-brain" (logos) and "right brain" (gnosis).

6. Logos is logical, verbal, analytical, sees patterns, and communicates. It is the seat of the ego. Gnosis works in images, themes, and gut reactions. It is intimately tied in with "the Real" - physical reality and underlying themes in the world around us. It is the closest thing you are ever going to get to "God" in a concrete sense.

7. Gnosis "speaks" in emotions, psychosomatic symptoms, the hair standing up on the back of your neck, "religious experience", psychosis, etc. Freud started the modern science of trying to understand it, but much like Marx, bourgeois social science fled in panic from the implications of his research, and come to think of it, so did Freud.

8. Gnosis generally has a much better idea of what's really going on than logos, but becoming a responsible adult in modern culture means learning to live almost entirely from logos rather than gnosis. Since logos can't understand the language of gnosis without special training, gnosis is either repressed, ignored or put into a kind of "apartheid of consciousness". Gnosis is like the proletariat - it makes things happen even though the ruling part of consciousness makes itself deliberately unaware.

9. Creativity, in the concrete sense, is logos getting a hint from gnosis and acting accordingly. In that sense, creativity comes from "above" or "somewhere else".

10. Logos can be taught - gnosis can only be experienced. For this reason, once humans had invented speech, written communication, media etc, logos-based ideas and patterns spread much further and faster than those based on gnosis. Also, logical patterns are far more useful for day-to-day survival, which is of course what left-brain consciousness evolved for. However, it's not only pro-survival logical patterns that stick - it's also patterns which don't contribute to individual survival, perhaps even work against it, but find some kind of echo in gnosis - i.e. in subconscious perception of actual reality. This is what successful art and ideology have in common.

11. Gramsci's "common sense" is logical patterns which contribute to daily survival in the world-as-is, but which contradict objective reality, personal experience, and gnosis. Gramsci's "good sense" can be defined as logos based on gnosis, and most importantly, on shared gnosis from common activity and real situation. (This is the way in which we can understand Gnostic ideas, without having to literally believe in literal archons who are screwing humanity over for the lulz. If there are archons, we invented them subconsciously in order to sustain class society, which was - let us never forget - a good idea at the time.)

12. The fact that there are so many archetypes and common themes in human culture suggests that certain experiences are common in essential form among large groups, or even universally. In that sense you can talk about a "group gnosis", or "collective unconscious", of any group which has a common reality and experience. A class in the Marxist sense, by definition, will have the strongest group gnosis short of that of humanity itself. (Probably you could say the same for traditional tribal cultures.)

13. Chomsky pointed out that intellectuals fall far harder for propaganda than anyone else. Not surprising that if your left-brain consciousness is ruthlessly advanced, you'll fall for any plausible-sounding crap that comes through the logosphere (shall we use that word for the sum total of cultural/memetic patterns, or noosphere? Both are good.) In contrast, the lower orders of society are prone to act in "irrational" ways - crime, social deviance, riots - which are simply forseeable reactions to their real situation of alienation. Gnosis has an outlet in violence to self and/or others, lacking any logos-approved ones.

14. As long as Marxism remains only in the sphere of logos - i.e. a kind of "counter-academia", working on the same principles as existing academia and media, only with good guys changed for bad guys - it will continue to be irrelevant.

15. The enemy is philistinism. Without a real understanding of gnosis, and its outgrowths - religion, individual and group psychology, art, culture and memetics - any project for changing reality is doomed to fail. "Revolutionary art" does not mean art with revolutionary themes or slogans. It means art that revolutionises the soul - art which is appropriate for the next aeon of human consciousness, and points the way there to right-brain consciousness.

16. We can train ourselves to understand the promptings of our own gnosis, in logical terms (psychology) or in narrative, symbolic terms (religion). We can engage in communication with other humans on a gnosis-to-gnosis level (art). We can learn to change our own personal gnosis through symbolic and practical action (magick). We can learn to change collective reality through a combination of logical planning and gnosis-to-gnosis communication, and to spread "good sense" at the expense of "common sense" (politics). However, this last presupposes that we have any idea what "good sense" is ourselves. Let us test our ideas in practice before we proselytise.

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POSTSCRIPT: As a suggestion for practice - Marxism suggests that the central reality of human experience under modern capitalism is the workplace. Your closest colleagues-in-gnosis are the people doing the same boring, retarded thing as you do every day of the week. If you're not able to do magick and political activism at your workplace, we humbly suggest that you're not really going to be able to do it anywhere else, except in the privacy of your own basement.