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.
===
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.
Showing posts with label plans for action. Show all posts
Showing posts with label plans for action. Show all posts
2009-07-13
2009-07-06
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, IñigoMontoya 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.
The founder of the Jesuits, Iñigo
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.
2009-06-17
The turn to the mystical
Psychic nomad made a useful comment on the 1 Key / 9 Commitments post in that I seemed to be prioritising the Greater Work (the struggle against the false self / nafs / Ego) over the Lesser Work (the struggle against injustice and mass brainwashing in the real world), when really they should go together. He (please correct for gender if necessary) was right, in principle. However, as VI Lenin said, one has to bend the stick to the needs of the present moment. And this ties in with the face that my political mentor (who's obviously kind of enlightened in his own way, although a traditional Marxist and therefore a hard-core atheist) told me ages ago I needed to be "more humble and less sensitive".
The essential reason for the shift of emphasis is the shift of emphasis on real life. It's a combination of two things:
- the actual political experiments I've been involved in have been, to use a Spinal Tapism, quite "selective" in their success;
- the realisation of what my mentor meant by humility; i.e. that so much of my political activism had not, in fact, been motivated by an intent to make it work. Rather, it had been motivated by Ego as we have been discussing it - the desire to be a "bad ass revolutionary" so that people would think I was cool and sexy, carrying with it the concomitant desire to never be wrong about anything, which led to avoiding criticism (and therefore accurate feedback) at all costs, which is obviously certain death to a political project which means actually talking to real people in the real world who don't share your assumptions and whom you can't control.
So I've negotiated a brief leave of absence (certainly not a resignation) from the Lesser Work to put serious effort into the Greater Work for a while. So this means that I need you the viewers at home to give more feedback on whatever you might have been doing in the actual real struggle against injustice. Me, I'll be sitting at home for a while, listening to my Ego screaming at me and waiting for it to be quiet for a little while.
The essential reason for the shift of emphasis is the shift of emphasis on real life. It's a combination of two things:
- the actual political experiments I've been involved in have been, to use a Spinal Tapism, quite "selective" in their success;
- the realisation of what my mentor meant by humility; i.e. that so much of my political activism had not, in fact, been motivated by an intent to make it work. Rather, it had been motivated by Ego as we have been discussing it - the desire to be a "bad ass revolutionary" so that people would think I was cool and sexy, carrying with it the concomitant desire to never be wrong about anything, which led to avoiding criticism (and therefore accurate feedback) at all costs, which is obviously certain death to a political project which means actually talking to real people in the real world who don't share your assumptions and whom you can't control.
So I've negotiated a brief leave of absence (certainly not a resignation) from the Lesser Work to put serious effort into the Greater Work for a while. So this means that I need you the viewers at home to give more feedback on whatever you might have been doing in the actual real struggle against injustice. Me, I'll be sitting at home for a while, listening to my Ego screaming at me and waiting for it to be quiet for a little while.
2008-11-29
Mistargeting
Call me a Marxist if you like (in fact, I prefer you do), but I think we have to re-orient ourselves to the idea that successful memes are always based in real, socio-physical-economic causes. People don't start hating X group of people over there for no reason - Hitler his own self couldn't have convinced Germans to go on an official anti-semitism spree, if there hadn't been a tradition of resentment of rich Jewish "usurers" going back to the Middle Ages. (Imagine how many votes he would have won with an argument that die Samoanen sind unser Unglück, although you could possibly get a hearing for that in some parts of New Zealand today.)
So, let's concretise this: the "black masses" (as 19th century Russian bloggers called them) of the rural peasantry / semi-proletarians, and the urban liberal "chattering classes", have been sworn mutual enemies way back to the days of the Enlightenment and possibly beyond. When an American rural conservative curses out the "faggots", I think you'll find in many cases they're not actually thinking about teh buttsecks (although in others I'm pretty sure they are... long and hard, if you catch my drift), they're thinking about a self-important, privileged, urbanised and (as they'd see it) parasitical "cognitive elite", living large off the proceeds of exploited factory, farm and call-centre labour. To bring 4chan back into it again, think carefully about what those people mean when they use "gay" or "faggot" as an insult. It more or less means what British or Australian slang means by "wanker", which is why the gay press sometimes see "extreme homophobia" in teenagers where it's not.
(This in turn feeds into a meme where straight sex is a necessary social glue - an "investment" in the future of society, as it were - whereas gay sex is seen as a purely "consumption commodity", a frivolous luxury. The Protestant work ethic has much more in common with the Protestant sex ethic than we might have thought.)
And you'll find that liberal Islamophobes (as opposed to conservative Islamophobes motivated by ideas of imperialist self-interest) will talk about the aforementioned conservative underclass of their own country in exactly the same way. For example, one Northern Irish blogger who I do like to read has the habit of referring to the hard-core Unionist minority as "the Prodiban". The "ignorant religious peasants are our enemy" meme not only justifies imperialism abroad, it encourages the kind of condescending attitude to everyone who doesn't drink lattés and watch The Daily Show which has led to the complete and utter isolation of the liberal Left from the lives of real people - and thus led to the ascendency of working-class and rural conservatism.
Meanwhile, while all this are going on, our real common enemy - the capitalist and rentier overclass - giggle maniacally at watching the latte-drinkers and the black-eyed-pea eaters beat the shit out of each other, and yell "DANCE, MY PUPPETS, DANCE!!!"
I'm not saying we should make the mistake that Tim Wohlforth made when he ran Gerry Healey's branch office in America in the early '70s, of declaring "the working class hate faggots, hippies and women's libbers, and so do we!!!" The solution must be to build UNITY between the faggots, hippies, women's libbers, workers, and oppressed ethnic and religious minorities. The unity of the blue-collar and the white collar workers - the old GDR logo of the hammer and compass had the right idea behind it, despite the nastiness of that particular effort at "socialism in half a country". The theory is that if the white-collar liberal left can start presenting concrete material program for change to blue-collar conservatives, perhaps the presents of faggots, hippies and moooslims in the former's ranks will cease to be the wedge issue that it is today.
So, let's concretise this: the "black masses" (as 19th century Russian bloggers called them) of the rural peasantry / semi-proletarians, and the urban liberal "chattering classes", have been sworn mutual enemies way back to the days of the Enlightenment and possibly beyond. When an American rural conservative curses out the "faggots", I think you'll find in many cases they're not actually thinking about teh buttsecks (although in others I'm pretty sure they are... long and hard, if you catch my drift), they're thinking about a self-important, privileged, urbanised and (as they'd see it) parasitical "cognitive elite", living large off the proceeds of exploited factory, farm and call-centre labour. To bring 4chan back into it again, think carefully about what those people mean when they use "gay" or "faggot" as an insult. It more or less means what British or Australian slang means by "wanker", which is why the gay press sometimes see "extreme homophobia" in teenagers where it's not.
(This in turn feeds into a meme where straight sex is a necessary social glue - an "investment" in the future of society, as it were - whereas gay sex is seen as a purely "consumption commodity", a frivolous luxury. The Protestant work ethic has much more in common with the Protestant sex ethic than we might have thought.)
And you'll find that liberal Islamophobes (as opposed to conservative Islamophobes motivated by ideas of imperialist self-interest) will talk about the aforementioned conservative underclass of their own country in exactly the same way. For example, one Northern Irish blogger who I do like to read has the habit of referring to the hard-core Unionist minority as "the Prodiban". The "ignorant religious peasants are our enemy" meme not only justifies imperialism abroad, it encourages the kind of condescending attitude to everyone who doesn't drink lattés and watch The Daily Show which has led to the complete and utter isolation of the liberal Left from the lives of real people - and thus led to the ascendency of working-class and rural conservatism.
Meanwhile, while all this are going on, our real common enemy - the capitalist and rentier overclass - giggle maniacally at watching the latte-drinkers and the black-eyed-pea eaters beat the shit out of each other, and yell "DANCE, MY PUPPETS, DANCE!!!"
I'm not saying we should make the mistake that Tim Wohlforth made when he ran Gerry Healey's branch office in America in the early '70s, of declaring "the working class hate faggots, hippies and women's libbers, and so do we!!!" The solution must be to build UNITY between the faggots, hippies, women's libbers, workers, and oppressed ethnic and religious minorities. The unity of the blue-collar and the white collar workers - the old GDR logo of the hammer and compass had the right idea behind it, despite the nastiness of that particular effort at "socialism in half a country". The theory is that if the white-collar liberal left can start presenting concrete material program for change to blue-collar conservatives, perhaps the presents of faggots, hippies and moooslims in the former's ranks will cease to be the wedge issue that it is today.
2008-10-06
I've got some bad news, Mr Spock
Jim Robertson, lider maximo of perhaps the ultimate crazed pseudo-Marxist cult the Spartacist League, has a saying which surprisingly has some truth to it: "Program generates theory". Generally "Marxists" prefer to believe that it's the other way around - that their plans of action are based on a scientific dialectical materialist analysis of the world. But it simply doesn't happen that way. The decision to act precedes the rationalisation of the act - and, friends and comrades, that applies to the decisions of individuals as well as organisations. Decisions to act can be absed on many other sources of knowledge - instinct, subconscious compulsion, primate territorial politics, intuitive insight, even mutterings from God / the Holy Guardian Angel / the Zeitgeist / whatever you call the little voice in your head which comes up with all the good ideas.
The purpose of rationality and logic is to work out why the decision to act did or didn't work, post-facto, and give suggestions for future options. "The owl of Minerva flies at twilight," said Hegel, meaning it's generally impossible to rationally work out what's going on until it's all over, and he was damn straight - all the decision-making forces above operate much much quicker than rationality or logic do. Also, you can make correct intuitive leaps based on incomplete information, a situation in which rationality doesn't work very well (which is why neoclassical economics is bullshit, parenthetically).
Interestingly enough, this suggests that the reason no activist organisation can operate by strict formal democracy / consensus is exactly the same as the reason that Vulcan society wouldn't really work - it takes too long and it's uncreative. "Paralysis by analysis" is a hard fact. "Leadership", we can tentatively suggest, embodies something of the irrational - rationality and logic can come out of a committee and in fact are probably best when they do, but intuition and creativity never do.
Now the place where Marxists keep coming up with this problem is discussing the Russian Revolution. If Lenin had fallen under that train at the Finland Station in April 1917, would the Congress of Soviets still have seized power six months later? Trotsky said "probably not". But aren't you just ending up at the "great man" theory of history there, something anathematic to Marxism? Another Marxist historian, whose name I forget, explained further: "The Revolution would probably not have happened without Lenin, but Lenin was made by the Bolshevik Party". I.e. - Lenin was only the leader in October 1917 because of his 20 years experience to that date acting up at the sharp end of underground revolutionary politics in Russia. And a lot of what happened after October 1917 also finds its roots in that fertile yet murky soil - reasonable people can disagree over whether, on balance, it was all worth it.
We certainly don't want to have any truck with any "great man" theories, which tend to end up at the nightmarish terminus of the fascist Führerprinzip - in which irrational leadership completely replaces rational analysis. That generally ends in fire, or a bullet to the brain in a bunker under a burning city. But Chaos Marxism can tentatively suggest:
Yes, what I am suggesting here is that Chaos Marxism is concretising itself as the magickal science of identifying the essential memetic "current" of the actually existing vanguard movement among the class... and of invoking that current in those individuals called to be leaders of that vanguard, and evoking that current in culture, agitation and propaganda to make it spread. (That's the "irrational" bit of it, anyway. The "rational" bit is still all about attempting to create a materialist science of memetics/culture/psychology/ideology.)
Chaos Marxism is based on science, as we keep saying, but mistaking "science" for hard-core logical skepticism is what Pope Bob called "Fundamentalist Materialism" (capitals in the original). Watson and Crick came up with the double helix structure of DNA in a vision, as did that fellow who intuited the structure of the carbon ring. The non-rational can be scientific, too - as long as in a mutually reinforcing dialectic with the rational/evidential/pragmatic.
The purpose of rationality and logic is to work out why the decision to act did or didn't work, post-facto, and give suggestions for future options. "The owl of Minerva flies at twilight," said Hegel, meaning it's generally impossible to rationally work out what's going on until it's all over, and he was damn straight - all the decision-making forces above operate much much quicker than rationality or logic do. Also, you can make correct intuitive leaps based on incomplete information, a situation in which rationality doesn't work very well (which is why neoclassical economics is bullshit, parenthetically).
Interestingly enough, this suggests that the reason no activist organisation can operate by strict formal democracy / consensus is exactly the same as the reason that Vulcan society wouldn't really work - it takes too long and it's uncreative. "Paralysis by analysis" is a hard fact. "Leadership", we can tentatively suggest, embodies something of the irrational - rationality and logic can come out of a committee and in fact are probably best when they do, but intuition and creativity never do.
Now the place where Marxists keep coming up with this problem is discussing the Russian Revolution. If Lenin had fallen under that train at the Finland Station in April 1917, would the Congress of Soviets still have seized power six months later? Trotsky said "probably not". But aren't you just ending up at the "great man" theory of history there, something anathematic to Marxism? Another Marxist historian, whose name I forget, explained further: "The Revolution would probably not have happened without Lenin, but Lenin was made by the Bolshevik Party". I.e. - Lenin was only the leader in October 1917 because of his 20 years experience to that date acting up at the sharp end of underground revolutionary politics in Russia. And a lot of what happened after October 1917 also finds its roots in that fertile yet murky soil - reasonable people can disagree over whether, on balance, it was all worth it.
We certainly don't want to have any truck with any "great man" theories, which tend to end up at the nightmarish terminus of the fascist Führerprinzip - in which irrational leadership completely replaces rational analysis. That generally ends in fire, or a bullet to the brain in a bunker under a burning city. But Chaos Marxism can tentatively suggest:
- A successful movement balances the irrational and the rational, the democratic and the autocracy of creativity, the collective and the individual.
- Analysis is collective - leadership is individual. But the collective makes the individual who can give leadership, and the individuals make up the collective which makes the analysis.
- The leader creates the followers as much as vice-versa. This probably goes back to our most essential primate nature, as in generally all an ape has to do is act like Troop Leader and he'll pick up some kind of troop. Everyone can "know" what needs to be done, but it really does take one brave soul to actually set out in that direction.
- It is tempting to speculate that "natural leaders" are those individuals who embody most closely, in their background and individuality, the "current" of the movement which they find themselves leading. Which brings up the suggestion, based on the whole tradition of Western occultism, that an individual can hack their own personality in order to "invoke the Godform" of the movement.
Yes, what I am suggesting here is that Chaos Marxism is concretising itself as the magickal science of identifying the essential memetic "current" of the actually existing vanguard movement among the class... and of invoking that current in those individuals called to be leaders of that vanguard, and evoking that current in culture, agitation and propaganda to make it spread. (That's the "irrational" bit of it, anyway. The "rational" bit is still all about attempting to create a materialist science of memetics/culture/psychology/ideology.)
Chaos Marxism is based on science, as we keep saying, but mistaking "science" for hard-core logical skepticism is what Pope Bob called "Fundamentalist Materialism" (capitals in the original). Watson and Crick came up with the double helix structure of DNA in a vision, as did that fellow who intuited the structure of the carbon ring. The non-rational can be scientific, too - as long as in a mutually reinforcing dialectic with the rational/evidential/pragmatic.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)