Got to grow up sometime

 
The Chaos Marxist jury is still out on whether Jacques Lacan was the most original and useful psychoanalyst since Wilhelm Reich, or whether he was simply a bullshit artist who wrapped Freud's insights up in impenetrably flighty jargon to sell himself as a new guru/master; in other words, the French L. Ron Hubbard. But we are finding his central concept of The Name of the Father (which, in French, can also mean "the Name given by the Father", as well as a pun on "the NO! of the Father") very productive.

To put it in the rather quaint and patriarchal language of the Freudian Oedipal complex, the Father draws boundaries for the Son by saying NO! you've had enough snuggle-time with Mummy, it's my turn now. But when you grow up, if you're a good boy, you can have a woman of your own. In exchange for the sacrifice of undifferentiated infant bliss, the Son gets a Name of his own and a place in the Symbolic Order - aka a role to play in the Real World of Horrible Jobs - plus the promise of a replacement Mother (Wife) sometime later. Of course, where the hell does this leave women, the queer or the genderqueer; but perhaps Virginia Woolf gave us the answer to that one, in saying that since beforra dawna time women have been looking for A Room of One's Own in the symbolic order, alongside those carved out for their brothers.

Lacan argued that the Name of the Father is not only the Law of Society, but the master signifier in the Son's system of meaning, in the way he makes sense of the world and his place in it; and also (and this I think is quite debatable) that the failure to provide the NO! of the Father leads to very vague and provisional ego boundaries prone to collapse into psychosis later on.

But the Name of the Father is also, to put it in the terms of Neil Gaiman's Delirium of the Endless, "something you know that I don't that makes everything you do okay". It is privilege; it is an excuse for harmful behaviour towards self/others/nature, at the base of that claimed by all religions or cultish ideologies. It is a demand for sacrifice and obedience in return for deferred pleasure; or, alternatively, the obscene pleasure of enforcing the Law on the nonbelievers. It is the 72 virgins or the tree covered with a million leaves each showing a porn film which is the reward for the faithful martyrs in Paradise. It is the seed-faith donation of $5,000 to the IAS or your local megachurch pastor which will turn into untold riches maybe in this world, maybe the next. It is the coming classless utopia in the name of which we can lie, cheat and steal in the here and now. It is the line between us Real People / revolutionary cadre and the brute beasts / homo sacer over there who don't belong to our Symbolic Order and thus can be ruthlessly exploited, or exterminated, and our Big Nobodaddy doesn't care either way.

===

 Lacan is reputed to have told the 68ers "you are hysterics looking for a new Master, and you will get one". And that certainly happened; the libertarian movements of that era, born from the generation in the West who had decided that their Fathers who fought the Second World War didn't know what they were talking about and deserved no more obedience, after a few years substituted new Names at the head of their symbolic orders, for whom they were expected to sacrifice and die. Trotsky, Mao, L. Ron Hubbard, Jesus Christ (an oldie but a goodie there), Jim Jones, Aleister Crowley, Ayn Rand (women can be The Father if they act like one), Hare Krishna Hare Hare... But the most powerful new Master Signifier, and the one which overwhelmingly dominates the world today, was - as befits reification in late capitalism - not the name of a man or a woman, but of a social institution or abstraction: The Market.

The Thatcher/Reagan revolution was twofold. One part was a neoliberal "negation of the negation" of 1960s radicalism, which encouraged ex-hippies to become yuppies and fulfil their dreams of A Room Of Their Own within the globalising market system. There was plenty of money sloshing around, now that profits had been restored at the expense of the workers; why not cash in? That succeeded triumphantly.  The other part was a neoconservative rollback of 1960s radicalism, aimed at restoring Western imperialism (aka the Defence of the Free World) and Traditional Family Values as the Name of the Father in the global symbolic order. This was only half successful.

The Market as the new Name of the Father, unlike the more traditional ones, demanded no personal sacrifice in return for A Room Of One's Own; except in the sense of having to pay the mortgage on it, if you follow the metaphor. You need not accept any personal/sexual discipline, only market discipline. Hedonism was good for the economy now; savings were less important in the era of easy credit; you could have as much sex and drugs and rock'n'roll as you wanted if you were a successful yuppie (the Drug War was only on the poor/black homo sacer). The yuppies decided that "you could be a socialist and still have staff", that a Cadillac was just as good as a VW Combi van for putting Deadhead stickers on and smoking weed inside of. You could follow any bogus guru who would condone your mega-egotistical lifestyle and yet tell you that you were better than anyone else. And you would vote Republican/Conservative because Daddy Ron or Mummy Maggie (the Market in human form) would guarantee your freedom, at the expense of the Others standing in the dole queues, lying in the gutters or in pools of their own blood in foreign parts.

Eventually, of course, the yuppies grew up somewhat, left Mummy and Daddy behind and chose their cool big brothers Bill and Tony (a sax player and a former lead singer, yet!) to lead them instead, who relaxed authoritarianism on the moneyed middle classes while intensifying it on the poor, the neo-colonised and other Others (you know what I mean). Biological racism was increasingly replaced by a cultural racism directed against the working poor, welfare beneficiaries, prisoners, and unruly racial/religious Others threatening Western interests in foreign parts. Cheerleading imperialism and scapegoating refugees meant no personal sacrifice for the middle classes, even more so when fought by armies based on an economic draft among the poor rather than a social-wide draft. Financialisation means that wars can be fought on credit, and resulting inflation of the military budget can always be blamed on whoever you'd decided to blame social problems on anyway.

However - with the exception of a brief explosion of moralism during the early AIDS crisis - "traditional family values" (aka the patriarchal nuclear family and the sexual codes thereof) have been fighting a losing battle. Partly this would be due to the newly liberated yuppies not seeing the need to make their kids go through the metaphorical castration they themselves struggled against. This wasn't necessarily great for the kids, as New Model Army sang in "A Liberal Education":

Be yourselves, please yourselves,
Express yourselves so more!
It's your right to do what you like
Because we can't really be bothered with you at all.

But it may well have made the future possible.

Partly, also, this would be due to the same socio-cultural processes which led to the original crumbling of the peasant nuclear family during the Industrial Revolution and a kind of abortive original women's/children's liberation - i.e. the need for all family members to work to survive in the crisis-ridden globalised neoliberal economy. Partly, it was because of the Pink Dollar - gays and lesbian yuppies were just as important as consumers and skilled workers as straight ones (hence the eventual triumph of same-sex marriage worldwide).

So, while neoliberalism rolled back the social gains of the working class which had built up during the era when "we were all Keynesians", and led to a rebirth of imperialism (especially in its sickening social-liberal "humanitarian" form), it preserved and actually promoted a market-libertarian form of feminism, gay rights and multiculturalism, not attempting to prevent changes in family structure and child-rearing which would have been seen as breathtakingly radical even in the 1960s. The "Millennials", as the generation brought up in neoliberalism, might be spoiled and egotistical/ individualistic, but they don't see any reason why women shouldn't work/have reproductive autonomy, why gays and lesbians shouldn't get married, or even (increasingly) why gender boundaries should be policed at all. This may be the Achilles' heel in the neoliberal utopia.

There's a joke that the real front-runner for the US Republican presidential nomination, if people were to answer honestly, would be Zombie Ronald Reagan. This is very similar to the way that Zombie Kim Il-Sung is still President of north Korea. Like Moses or Obi-Wan Kenobi, the authoritarian Father is more powerful dead than alive. But the Republican base (unlike the British Conservatives, who've been smarted in adapting to social liberalism) are growing old and dieing off. They may run the state legislatures but I doubt they'll elect another President any time soon. As a broad rule, the younger generation just don't need the Name of a human Father any more. Can these pure children of neoliberalism both realise and suppress neoliberalism's utopian promise?

===

A revolutionary counterhegemony will also come with a new, revolutionary symbolic order - a new way for people to belong, to participate, to be in community. Can we build a symbolic order without a Name of the New Adopted Father? Can we hope for something better than having a Mao or Lenin up there on the wall where the Holy Icon or Granddad's portrait used to be? Certainly there is no going back. Nostalgia is simply nostalgia for having a human authoritarian leader to fight against, and may well lead into a bloodthirsty yearning for killing authoritarians elsewhere (war on Da'esh, anyone?)

Well, I think I mentioned last year sometime that Anonymous might be the first forerunner of that. Refusing to have "a forename, a hind-name and an address", while accepting the techno-commercialism of modern globalism, they opt out of the Symbolic Order altogether. Why opt for a Room Of Your Own in the Father's house when you've built your own space-age yurt on a vacant lot across the street? Of course, this certainly doesn't mean to say that the defiantly racist/misogynist/queer-baiting social norms of various Anon formations are utopic. But they show that it is possible to opt out of the Father's Symbolic Order without the kind of mass psychosis which American Lacanian analyst Bruce Fink fears.

The global egalitarian/libertarian economic mode of production of the future communist utopia will surely come with a global egalitarian/libertarian symbolic order; in which "the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all", that is, there will be a symbolic place for everyone, no matter physical status or social occupation, as well as a physical Room of One's Own. It will mean the end of homo sacer, the sovereign or the despised outcast who is exempt/excluded from the Community or its Law. In future communism, you will no longer need to be real, or have a face, or a gender for that matter. Perhaps the only Law in the future will be the Golden Rule of antiquity, most memorably recently rephrased by nerd-culture hero Wil Wheaton: don't be a dick. Which in itself would be a telling blow against phallocentrism.

===

It is said that the best way to understand Scientology as L. Ron Hubbard's own attempt to find a way out of his own private psychic nightmare while keeping his narcissistic ego intact. Similarly, Chaos Marxism is clearly my (Doloras') attempt to awake from the nightmare of my personal history.

Brought up with an absent father and a mother with very insecure boundaries, my only ever "place" while I was growing up was being the smartest kid in the class, something I did quite easily. I didn't like the social exclusion that this engendered, but a place in the symbolic order as the Golden Child who would one day redeem humanity (DON'T LAUGH) wasn't nothing. Later on, my mother attempted to bring various stepfathers into my life, who did their best to crush my infantile dreams of omnipotence, but never offered me a place in the Symbolic Order in which I could live in a million years. That could not even begin to start happening until I realised that a heterosexual lifestyle could not be mine, at the age of 25.

But until very recently, I was still yearning for an authority figure who would give me the keys to my future kingdom. Which meant - in my professional, emotional and political life - offering myself up as a servant to some exploitative or authoritarian authority figure who claimed to know "the way out". They were all lying or bullshitting, every one of them. And they didn't understand why I should have been so resentful - they never actually promised anything, did they? And I suppose, at this distance, they were right.

Finally I learned that only I can build a Room Of My Own in community with others who have accepted responsibility for fulfilling their own drives, for not being a dick despite how much easier life becomes if you do act dickishly. Paradoxically, a responsible egotism requires a humility which comes from "spirituality" - not necessarily any supernatural belief, but a belief in something which is more important than your own wants or needs. As the Russian soldier in the 1987 Doctor Who serial "The Curse of Fenris" demonstrated, this can be The Revolution; but only in the sense of a real commitment to a true utopia, a new social and symbolic order without the Freudian castration complex or bowing to any God made in the image of Man, where we can all live.

Disjointed thoughts on first grappling with Hegel

• If I understand what I've read so far right - and that's a big motorscootin' if - Hegel argues that the objective and the subjective form a dialectical unity (as compared to the idea that the subjective is a more-or-less imperfect copy of the objective, as mechanical materialism would have it; or that the objective is only an agreement between subjectivities, as Scientology and other wacky New Age beliefs would have it). Doesn't that make him a non-dualist in precisely the same way that Advaita Vedanta, Zen Buddhism, Sufism and Chaos Marxism would recognize? I really hope I've got that right.
• Karl Marx said very clearly that the proletariat would become fit to be the ruling class during the struggle to become the ruling class. The subject of action becomes its object and transforms itself. And yet, actually-existing revolutionary socialists seem to believe in one of the two one-sided, undialectical narratives set forth in this article - either they think that the personal has nothing to do with the political (like Corin Redgrave saying "If Gerry Healey is a rapist, then we need more rapists!") or thinking they're the same thing (viz. "callout culture"). Personal change outside the political struggle is just neoliberal self-fashioning, the ego changing itself into more efficient fuel to be burned in capitalism's engines. But if you don't change as a person via the struggle, and for the better, then you by God have a problem, and you're probably on the wrong track politically.
• I'm thinking of writing a book entitled Read This When You're Depressed: Self-Help For Revolutionaries. Instead of sappy New Age affirmations which build up your ego, it would remind you just how far you are from a special and unique snowflake. Look: if all the above is true, the Universe is a hologram; "as above so below", or in other words, the whole is reflected in the part. Therefore you are as you are precisely because the Universe is as it is, and there could be no other way. "Free choice'', clinical depression and various other psychological states and stations must exist somewhere in this universe - just like, under capitalism, grinding poverty must exist somewhere. So why shouldn't it be you? It certainly doesn't mean you're bad or inadequate - you feel bad and inadequate because the system requires some people to feel bad and inadequate. Once you understand this you can stop blaming yourself, because your Self is an illusion caused by the necessity of living in the $2.99 Material World.

Review: The Newhaven Journeyman, issues 1 and 2

The principal interests of Chaos Marxism are revolutionary politics, psychology and culture – and the place where, like the fundamental forces of nature, they are revealed to be a unity under situations of high pressure. It has been increasingly gratifying to discover, over the last year or two, that – particularly in Britain – we are not alone in these concerns. Making contact with the Materialist Esthetix current was a decisive point in our evolution; another was being sent the first two editions of the Newhaven Journeyman, a journal under the capable editorship of Alastair Kemp at Eleusinian Press.

The Journeyman subtitles itself “a haven for dilettantes”. Dilettante comes from Italian and literally means “someone who delights” - that is, someone who takes delight, pleasure, jouissance in a field of endeavour. In original Italian, it has the same meaning as the French amateur - “someone who loves”. (Italian football's highest amateur league is Serie D, for dilettantes.) And both these words have taken on the secondary connotation of the opposite of “professional” - not only in the sense of “doing it for money, rather than love”, but, sadly, as in “not up to the highest standards of craft; shoddy; half-baked”.

Professionalisation, of course, was originally a step forward for working people. The history of organised sport began with a struggle between, to use old-fashioned sexist cricketing terminology, “Gentlemen” and “Players” - i.e. between the ruling class who had no day jobs and could therefore take time off whenever they felt like it to train and play, and working people who needed to be paid to bring themselves up to the “Gentlemen”'s level. Similar things happened in the world of music and other artforms, when the old-school patronage model (where, as Frank Zappa put it, “the duke said, I'll chop your fingers off if it doesn't sound like this”) was replaced with the freedom to sell one's creative efforts in the market place.

As good communists, we of course recognise that the negation of amateurism by professionalism was a triumph of the bourgeois revolution over feudalism; and yet, perhaps it is time for that negation to be negated once again. Professionalism in sports, the arts, academia and music has led to a hypostatisation of all the worst elements of the “celebrity cult” - hyperspecialisation means that our performers have become untouchable, unreachable, iconic, inhuman, and their increasingly superlative performances have ceased to bear anything but a vague family resemblance to anything that ordinary people might do for fun. In my own country, a recent series of newspaper articles have explored the hitherto-hushed story of mental health issues among elite sportsmen. Meanwhile, we all know from a million rock biographies and artist documentaries that success in the cultural market economy can screw our creative heroes up far worse than failure.

Karl Marx predicted that the communist future would mean a kind of “return to amateurism”, a reversal of the inhuman hyperspecialisation in the division of labour encouraged by the unfettered commodity economy - where “nobody has one exclusive sphere of activity but each can become accomplished in any branch he wishes” (The German Ideology). In the spirit of the Hegelian dialectic, this would mean that the dilettante – she who does things for fun, for passion, for use-value – has become more useful than the full-time professional, paid a good living to concentrate on a vanishingly small area of human endeavour.

The academy, in the current vogueishness of “interdisciplinary studies”, has finally begun to catch up to this. But by that it means teams of hyperspecialists. Woe betide any generalist – or even someone who wants to start in an interdisciplinary fashion – getting such a position. Combined with the “bums on seats” model of tertiary education, where pushing people up the ladder to dissertation becomes an end in itself, and you get what I like to call the lumpen-intelligensia – the “reserve army of philosophy and art”, people with all the verbal, creative and cognitive skills necessary to make real steps forward in combining theory into practice in creating new stuff which means something, and yet not able to use those skills in the market economy. So many of us end up earning a crust by proofreading, grammar-checking or indexing the works of those good enough at, to use another Zappaism, “politics or blow-jobs” to have landed one of the jobs that the rest of us were trained for.

Where was I? Oh yes. So in one sense the whole Internet/blogosphere can be seen as a “haven for dilettantes”. But the flip side of open access is zero quality control – except in the sense that “click-baiting”, sensationalism or pandering to prejudice for an audience, creates its own superstars. Surely the future of a communist logosphere must be in collective quality control. It's the difference between “private publishing” and “vanity publishing” - you can put your stuff out completely freely, screw the market economy and the institutions, etc, etc... but if you're not part of a collective or a community which can help you spellcheck your work, give it a wash and shave its armpits, or even in extreme cases to tell you that you've just wasted your time... I don't fancy your chances of producing something great. You need a grindstone to whet your sword of burnished gold against.

And herein is the genius of the Newhaven Journeyman – it comes out in the format of a small booklet, of similar size and shape to institutionally-backed journals, and – one assumes! - has an editorial agenda of quality control. And yet the content is a metric fuckton more interesting than anything you'll find in a “real” journal, because it comes from the intersection of theory and practice. This ain't a bunch of psychs reading off the results of randomised controlled trials of the new Blahdeblahdezine tablet in making crazies sit down and shut up, no sir. When – in Issue One (2012) you read Jan Tchamani talking about her experiences of syanesthesia when the outside world becomes literally too painful to step into, or Andrew Roberts' deeply sad exploration of the life of poetess Charlotte Mew, who lived a lonely life for fear of any progeny falling prey to the “lunacy” which had led to her sister and brother being locked up – this is real stuff. This is what being “differently sane” to use the Church of the SubGenius's terminology feels like on the inside. It's a cage made of bars no-one else can see. This is radical subjectivity, the subaltern telling Gayatri Spivak to get lost and doing its damndest to speak. Or – in the case of Kim Withnail's “Two Women” - when it's gone too far down to speak, you'd better hope you have an artist/therapist/activist with a hell of a lot of compassion handy to at least transmit a glimmer of what's really happening to those on the outside.

The subaltern, as I think Aleister Crowley might have recognized, can only speak from a place of “darkness”, that is, from the “blind spot” of the All-Seeing Eye of official consciousness. This is the place of Freud's “uncanny”, or Robert Graves' “objective poetry” which is the same thing as the most ancient voodoo magick chants in that you can tell “the presence of the Gods” (or Muses, or the Juice) by the hairs on the back of your neck bristling. So we have experiements in weird fiction which are deeply unsettling. I must say that I didn't enjoy either Thomas DeAngelo's “The Scientist” or Liz Aidl's “Beneath” from Issue Two (2013). But that's because I recognized where they came from. The first is a morality of tale research into radical subjectivity gone too far, while the other explores the masochistic complicity of the partner of a Dixie version of Josef Fritzl. I don't like those places where the writers delved, because I've been close to them and barely got out again with my ego intact. Which is precisely the kind of thing that “objective art” reminds us of. You're not suppose to like the “real stuff”.

Hold on, I almost forgot myself. Talking about “whetting the grindstone”, and I was about to finish this review without any criticism? Well... I must say I wasn't too impressed with Tristan Vivian Adam's “Talking with Cries”, which read to me a bit like “cargo cult academia” - aping the obscurantist langage of our social betters to come to a conclusion which might have worked much better as a one-page poem. Daniel Spicer's cut-up was very interesting for the first few iterations, not so much after that. As for the work of Michael Burnett, I thought "Ghost in the Cell" was quite clever and apposite, while "Black Widow" disappointed by relying on old school misogynist tropes. And – while I'm personally excited by the whole meme of ecosocialism – I found his non-fiction “The Cost of Winning” a bit too abstract, without direct connection to doing stuff in the here and now. With regard to reconciliation ecology, Michael – a subject which I find intriguing – what is to be done, by us, to coin a phrase?

So – although of course I love the way Ben Watson writes and his contributions to both issues give me real pleasure – I don't suppose you read the Newhaven Journal for fun, any more than you write for it for fun. To quote Rorschach, the disturbed vigilante from Alan Moore's Watchmen - “we do these things because we are compelled”. We write and draw and make music because to do otherwise means having no mouth and yet you must scream. It might not be any good but we can never tell that in advance and we must do it to find out if it was worth doing. And, if we are deeply honest, we find music and art and writing and politics which bring us face to face with the Blind Spot of our whole culture (the exploitation of the proletarian and the oppression of anyone who doesn't “fit), and with the Blind Spot in our own minds which is the internalisation of the lies we have to tell others in order to live in this $2.99 material world.

Keep going, Alastair and your motley crew of fellow travellers.

Neoliberalism as magick

 “Government of the self ” becomes the taproot of all social order, even though the identity of the self evanesces under the pressure of continual prosthetic tinkering; this is one possible way to understand the concept of “biopower.” Under this regime, the individual displays no necessary continuity from one “decision” to the next. The manager of You becomes the new ghost in the machine.

Thank you, Philip Mirowski. Classical liberalism - or we might way paleoliberalism - was all about the freedom of the (monadic) individual, continuing the Western tradition of believing in a unique "soul" or core to the human personality. However, classic liberalism also understood the labour theory of value, labour being defined as socially useful activity under the guidance of the monadic intellect.

Neoliberalism is what happened when post-war capitalism took Freud seriously, and understood his insight that the "individual" is pretty much a pattern of habits and behaviours adopted so one particular human-shaped body can fit into its society, layered over a bubbling cauldron of half-formed dreams, nightmares, drives, repressions etc.

Neoliberalism blew apart the whole rationale for traditional class society by making it clear that potentially everyone could be a self-actualising Superhuman. But the flipside of that is that classical liberalism at least felt sorry for the poor and had an idea of charity - "there but for the grace of God, or upbringing, go I". But under neoliberalism, everyone is responsible for their own self-fashioning, so no-one ends up in a gutter without - at some point - making some choice to become a "waste of social space." Kein Mitgleid für den Mehrheit, indeed. There is no charity or pity under neoliberalism.

Is it any wonder that "magick" in the Aleister Crowley sense became big among the petty-bourgeois radical underground at the same time that psychology became an industrial science? Radical libertarianism - anarcho-cap or anarcho-commie flavours - hooked onto Crowley's insights (or the bastardised versions served up by Gerald Gardner, R. A. Wilson, Werner Erhardt or, God help us all, Foul Ole Ron) to beat the ruling class at their own "self-fashioning game". They called it self-liberation, but in fact it turned into neo-liberal self-fashioning, because the goal was to create for the (generally white male) individual the most comfortable life possible. Success meant being a celebrity, selling books, having a fan club, and otherwise score big in the market economy which of course the Big Names were too cool to really care about.

More than one scary mind-control cult claiming to be socialist - Fred Newman's International Workers' Party, or the LaRouche mob - attempted to do this on a collective basis. The Newmanites called it "breaking down the bourgeois ego to create a proletarian ego". What nonsense. We don't need a proletarian ego for the same reason that Trotsky argued in 1923 that we don't need a "proletarian culture". What this process meant was really to brainwash followers into being extensions of the Great Leader's Ego. R. A. Wilson pointed out, for example, the technology by which the SLA did this to Patty Hearst.

Meanwhile the revolutionary groups got left behind because the tradition of revolutionary psychology had petered out after Voloshinov disappeared in the gulags and Reich fled to the US and went a bit nutso. So back in the 1970s - and still today to a lesser degree - Marxists have been stuck with a theory of the individual which is just like that of an Adam Smith classical liberal - "the individual" as a monadic whole as opposed to "the collective" or the community. A dialectic between the two in the more sophisticated groups, but no overcoming of the contradiction at a higher level.

So what Chaos Marxism suggests is that we need to leapfrog the neoliberal enemy, which has destroyed the idea of the classical "individual subject" in the name of some kind of "individualism". The ideal neoliberal subject is nothing but a tool allowing capitalism to reproduce itself more effectively, continually refining itself as "human capital" to make more profit to its exploiters. To this extent, the next step for revolutionaries must be an ethic of community which transcends the individual/collective duality altogether. A community which offers a respite from the neoliberal urge to continually "consume more" and to "improve oneself".

What I am suggesting is that we need a revolutionary party whose cadre are appreciated as they are and as they feel comfortable being. If "the Party" wants us to become someone or something else to accomplish its own needs, exactly where lies its superiority to the corporation which brainwashes us with positive thinking and company loyalty? We await the day that the working class transforms itself into a class-for-itself; expecting to do that with socialists who have transformed themselves into activists-for-the-Great-Leader, fighting workers who have transformed themselves into good-corporate-drones, is really expecting the new era to come out of Bad Versus Worse.

Hope that makes sense. What I'm getting at is that the classical-liberal individual is indeed an illusion - we can all transform ourselves - but neoliberalism wants us to transform ourselves into its own tools - whereas we need to transform ourselves into the tools of the Future - and we can only do that in mutually respectful community and in revolutionary praxis.

New directions for the New Year

Language is a virus. The ego is a meme*. "The world flows through us." Most of what we do starts long before the left-brain language centres decided to make up a good excuse for it. The "unconscious" is that left-brain inventing someone else to blame for actions which don't fit within its own self-image, which have their sources in the Real World of Horrible Jobs. When the left-brain shuts down or is bypassed (stroke, dreams, drugs, spiritual/psychic practices, brainwashing, art), then you begin to see how "thermoplastic" your personal reality is. But corporate psychotherapy / self-help is all about you paying to adjust your reality so it's closer to theirs.

David Smail got there first. Hello, comrade.

* I picked this up from a book on post-Kantian philosophy, and it was so obvious and confounding that I was amazed to find out that only those wacky Grant Morrison fanboys at Barbelith had got there first. But it is here that social-materialist psychology agrees 100% with non-dualist spirituality. "YOU ARE NOT REAL". You cannot fix your world from a position of "I". In Truth and Love, there is no I and thou.

Communication breakdown

"You've got to know three things to be a witch - what's real, what's not real, and what's the difference", says Lancre University Professor of Headology, Mstrs. Esmeralda Weatherwax. And Chaos Marxism agrees that the essential "insanity" of life under capitalism is the combination of reification and alienation - or, in other words, treating things as people and people as things - and co-comitant commodity fetishism - treating social relations as if they were actual real things.

The important thing is that if you realise that social relations are not real things, then you can "walk through walls", as the saying goes: ignore what other people consider to be the objective laws of physics, as seen in the finales of those great Gnostic movies Dark City and The Matrix. (Scientologists would say "be able to as-is a speeding bullet", which is precisely what Neo does just before jumping into Agent Smith's belly in a really messed-up metaphor.) Of course, this tends to offend the people who're still living in the platonic cave. Bill Drummond and Jimmy Cauty set fire to a bunch of paper and people acted like they'd just burned down a pile of useful goods, when of course the sum total of useful stuff in the world had not changed. That's called sacrilege against the One True God of 21st Century Global Society.

In summary: if "people" is defined as "ego" (that is, the patterns of behaviour rather than the bipedal body), then real things (inc. our own animal bodies and brains) are more real than people, and people are more real than social relations. However, if you act on that insight as an individual you will be socially isolated. The trick is to bring that insight to a community which acts in a way that that insight becomes "real" for others.

But this requires communication, in the sense of a common ground of meaning. In this way the job of revolutionary mystics is to design a new language.

Reflections on "the juice"

Every "current", to use the Thelemite term - i.e. a sustainably self-replicating meme for action and living - is defined by what Robert Fripp calls "the juice", which is nothing other than life. This is to be distinguished from rules (although a current may have rules), in the sense that it is the spirit rather than the letter of the practice.

One way of telling if a current still has "the juice" is to see whether it generates Masters - that is, those who are not able to tell the letter from the spirit of the Law, but are perfectly capable of breaking the letter to preserve the spirit (thus causing the current to be reborn under a new name), and bear the terrible personal costs of doing so. So, an organisation or tradition where people simply reproduce and replicate the insights of a Master (orthodox Trotskyism or corporate Scientology) is dead, dead, dead, and only produces symptoms of brain-death and soul-death in its adherents.

A Master is able to renovate the tradition, and in some ways this may mean being able to abolish the Law in its current form. Robert Fripp closed down Guitar Craft; Brad Warner closed down Dogen Sangha International; but initates of both those orders continue to do the work, under new names. Compare this to the screams of "liquidationism!" hurled at those who suggests that revolutionaries may have other options to organise themselves than toy-town Bolshevism or Seattle-cool-person anarchism. Javad Nurbaksh renovated rather than closed down the Ni'matullahi Order, but he caused massive outrage when he declared that the Order was no longer Shi'ite, or Sunni for that matter.

But yeah, a real Current involves within it the possibility of not only producing a Master but of thereby giving birth to a new Current. The "juice" in Gurdjieff's tradition would be proved by the fact that J. G. Bennett learned from G, and then started his own branch of the work; just as Robert Fripp did for JGB; and how these guys have done for Fripp.

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Oh, and while I'm on it:

1. The structure of the ego can be described as a Bottom Line (self-description) and Rules of Behaviour which follow from and reinforce that Bottom Line.
2. The goal of the ego can be said to be avoiding an encounter with the painbody - i.e. the "shadow" part of the ego which is repudiated and repressed.
3. What the ego hates the very most is others who do things which are most strongly against its Rules of Behaviour, and therefore most strongly repressed into the painbody. This is trivially obvious, and even a joke when it comes to homophobia and other anti-sex Rules of Behaviour, but I don't think I realised its deeper applicability until now.

The "held-down-7" model

Chaos Marxism declares that the goal of revolutionary politics is to reconcile the material and the ideological/cultural/spiritual; this world and the next. It distinguishes itself from "false liberation" ideologies, which tend to combine mechanical materialism and the most rank superstitious idealism, and never the twain shall meet.

Stalinism was the Platonic model (heh) of this. "Mechanical materialism" - a hard belief in "management by statistics", in belief of overproduction of tractor factories and Sputniks as the road to social progress - went hand in hand with "voluntarist idealism" - the idea that you could achieve the objectively insane production quotas with enough revolutionary will, and anyone who didn't have that kind of will was a traitor subject to police action. Amazingly enough, this is precisely how the Church of Scientology works, as its schismatics argue. Hubbard theorised the spirit as an immortal being which wasn't bound by the laws of matter/energy/space/time, and simultaneously the mind as a mechanical computer in which every problem boiled down to a "stuck key". Of course, the mind/body/spirit is an internally contradictory complex living system with emergent properties. All words that weren't in common usage in the 1950s, but Uncle Joe and Foul Ole Ron thought they were the ultimate authorities on everything.

Modern consumer capitalism has at least the benefit that it competes against itself so superstition and inefficiency tend to be self-limiting in the field of production, although actively encouraged in the field of consumption. But we still have the "management by stats" - the worship of economic growth, the commodification of everything and the race to the bottom in workers' rights and conditions - at the same time it preaches The Secret, the Prosperity Gospel, and all the other lies that those bad things are happening to ungoodthinkful people. Please note that whenever a Newspeak word is appropriate, things must be really bad.

===

In personal news, once again actual practice has forced me to backtrack against some of my own "mechanically materialist" formulations in the realm of psychology. Seriously, I used to believe that my ideal scene was to transform myself into some cross between a Dianetic Clear and Mr Spock - never having anger, fear or other misemotion ever again. The works of Brad Warner have done great things in convincing me that this is an insane fantasy, that the truly enlightened continue to have human problems and human emotions until the day of their death. Enlightenment lies, as far as I can see, in being emotional or rational in accordance with what IS, rather than mental image pictures, "shoulds", ideological measuring sticks, etc. You can pick the woman up as long as you put her down again.

Sure I'm shaking in my shoes as I'm sending out the news

It sickens me to link to the Daily Mail, aka the Daily Heil, but this argument about how CBT is not therapy is very interesting. The argument is basically that CBT patches up the symptoms of mental illness well enough to get you back to work but doesn't actually deal with the sources of the problem. I would suggest that this may be the case for "official" applications of CBT, as the British NHS are doing; but the CBT workbook that I'm using in my personal practice works, as the Scientologists put it, "on a gradient", in that the first part is the kind of psychological first aid / meatball surgery to which Dr James refers, but the second part actually looks at the sources of character aberration (Rules for Living, Bottom Line), which I have found by far the most interesting and useful.

Really, all that "therapy" is, in this regard, is teaching the subject to look at her own mind (habitual patterns of thought and behaviour) objectively, or as the Sufis put it "with the eyes of sincerity and truth". This means an "exteriorising" from the habitual patterns of the ego, which has evolved to survive as best one can in the specific circumstances of growing up - which is why, as Dr James correctly states, learning to look at bad things from your childhood is very important. (The therapist or spiritual guide can serve as a "temporary point of objectivity" until you have your own objectivity, which is why "doing it yourself", or without someone whom you really trust, is much, much harder.) And all this is, CM argues, precisely identical to the Marxist notion of the working class evolving into consciousness of their own real interests and out of dependence on capitalist ideology.

But surely CBT has a point that the first priority should be to stop your ego making things worse for you in the here-and-now? CBT and Marxism agree that consciousness evolves through self-activity. The problem with the past is that it is past, you can't change it, you can only learn to accept it for what it is. But acceptance of past and present reality also means responsibility for your actions in the now, your ability to create the future. If you can't actually take responsibility for everything you do - if you believe that you have to keep making things worse because of bad things that happened when you were little, or that the planet is doomed because capitalism has screwed everyone up beyond redemption - then you really do need someone else making your decisions for you. We make the new world, we make our new selves, with the flawed material we have.

On this subject, I'm also intrigued by the argument that CBT is "un-British" in that it valorises "American" goals such as positive thinking and going for goals. This is a nationalist version of the Marxist argument made in this article, which is quite gobsmacking and shows that some academic leftists are taking the concerns of CM seriously now. The authors' point that Freudian psychoanalysis evolved in an era where the abiding psychic problem of the bourgeoisie was neurosis and guilt, but that these days the representative symptom is depression, really bears further exploration. Depression basically boils down to an incapacity to work or consume properly, which means that you're not doing your job as a subject of capitalism.

So the argument is that "positive thinking" really means "trying to make you fit into the machinery of the Black Iron Prison". So... what is the alternative? I've talked about this before - if you understand that the goals of working hard so you can make big money so you can spend it on leisure items are False Goals implanted by The Bad Guys and there's no real point to it - what do you do then? One of the major problems with actual-existing radical groups is that they end up acting just like capitalist workplaces. Bill Logan used to use bourgeois management-training programmes in his Trotskyist grouplet, or so former members tell us. Tony Cliff said "to defeat an enemy you must be symmetrical to it", but does that mean that revolutionary parties are supposed to exploit the labour-power of their cadres, to expect (as James Cannon did) the cadre to achieve all their personal fulfilment in work/leisure activities endorsed by The Party? Is this not a precise analogy to the "introjection" of traumatising personalities into the psyche - your mother screamed at you so you grow up learning to scream at yourself?

Too many committed revolutionaries are forced out of active politics by political groups which unthinkingly replicate the productivist logic and the "you should be happy doing THIS" moralism of late capitalism. Those who want a new world have to learn to marry dialectical materialism and "metapsychology"/non-dualist spirituality. We have to understand that since our practice creates the new world, we need to be objective from our personal and collective practice. We have to remember that patterns of belief and behaviour which enable the ego/group to survive in a harsh world can be precisely counterproductive to self-actualisation/creating real political change. Loving-kindness is truly revolutionary practice - anything else is creating a new boss who will be the same as the old boss. The discipline of the barracks or of the capitalist workplace have no place in our movement.

Grazie mille to Comrade Seymour for publishing the article which led me to these links.

Sturm & Drang (or: back to psychology)

Chaos Marxism Aphorism #1 is: you are what you do. (I just found out the other day that this is also a lyric from a KMFDM song, cool beans.) And what you do is about 80-90% habit and conditioning, the power of which "it is difficult to exaggerate" (R. Fripp). It's just more efficient to run on automatic, even though you become half-ape and half-robot instead of a human being.

You can't change "what you are" - your wants, needs, desires, likes, dislikes, etc. - in any direct sense because you don't have the kind of objectivity necessary. "The only thing more powerful than the human mind is the human ego" (I. Stang). But your habits and conditioned reflexes are learned in the process of daily life - problems are usually solutions to previous problems (Hubbard) and if you kneel in the same place and recite the same prayers for long enough you will believe in God (Althusser).

And it is possible to do so consciously, as an act of will - you can change, first, your conscious choices of behaviour; and, secondly, learn to notice your habits and conditioned reflexes, at which point you can begin "reprogramming" them gradually, using magick or Cognitive Behavioural Therapy or psilocybin or Scientology or revolutionary political struggle, whatever's most convenient at the time. Of course, you can only do this through practice, which - when we translate this into politics - means that simply lecturing the workers about how they and the boss class has nothing in common will just get them pissed off at you. To do any good, your activism must have practical suggestions for the here and now which reinforce your goal-message.

Perhaps "you cannot walk the path without a Master" (Rumi) because the Master offers a necessary "stable datum amid confusion" (Hubbard) to act as a truly objective reference point. And to be a stable datum you must submit to that stable datum absolutely, no matter whether it's actually "good" in any objective sense. This is why "any act based on principle is a good one" (R. Fripp), and why some people have even got positive results from the teachings of Joseph Smith or Bhaghwan Shree Rajneesh. But eventually the goal would be to "find the Master (or the hero) inside yourself" - uncover the heart as an internal stable datum, not the endlessly fickle feline ego/nafs.

The Scientology goal of "clearing the reactive mind" - i.e. having no habits or conditioned reflexes - seems foolish. Imagine if you had to remember to breathe, as apparently some psychonauts have ended up doing to themselves. No, the more feasible goal is to be fully conscious of all your habits, and edit them in accordance with Love and Will.

Couple of fun readings for you: my old buddy Michael Lebowitz argues against John Holloway that you have to struggle against the Black Iron Prison, not just opt out of it, since only struggle makes it possible for you to learn to live outside a prison cell (see above); and our favourite junkie queer literary genius William S. Burroughs reminds us that, at one point in the past, cool people like himself and Leonard Cohen were attracted by L. Ron's research project.

(Note by those offended by the positive references to Scientology teachings and concepts: L. Ron Hubbard was a massive plagiarist and of course even a blind squirrel finds a few tasty nuts once in a while, and it's those "tasty nuts" that Independent Scientologists are interested in promoting, rather than that bat-shit crazy stuff about Xenu or the fascist antics of the existing "Church" run by pope-on-a-box David Miscavige.)

The important point...

... is that people are not monadic subjects. Your average human being consists of:

- a physical body;
- a consciousness (or awareness);
- various instinctual drives arising from the intersection of that body and consciousness;
- various subconscious "programmes" arising from the intersection of the instinctual drives and the Real World of Physical Laws and Other Humans;
- a rational mind;
- a self-image (created by the rational mind from on the basis of the subconscious processes - the purpose of this is to allow the individual to survive in the World-As-Is, and is the ego or at least what the individual thinks he or she is);
- and, in potential but only if worked on, a will capable of independent action, produced by the rational mind by the application of consciousness, which is capable of standing apart from all the above mental processes and making decisions based on principle.

Above that there's probably a Higher Self / True Will / Soul / God, accessible if all the above are working in co-operation, but about this it is not permissible to speak (because anything I could say would be asinine at best).

The essential crime of capitalism is that its ideology is based on the idea that the individual is nothing but a rational mind and instinctual drives (ignoring the deep interface between the two); and keeping the individual docile by deliberately trying to induce a gap between them. Capitalism and Schizophrenia, indeed.

The essential failure of leftist ideology is to believe that you can change this solely by an appeal to the rational mind. When rationality comes up against tasty treats offered to the animal brain, in all but those cases where an independent will has been developed, the rational mind loses every time.

Political radicalism must truly understand cultural theory, psychology, memetics, magick and mysticism if it has a chance of defeating the status quo this side of a total collapse of human civilisation. Because our enemies get it. They've turned it into an art, if not quite a science.

New aphorism

In my experience, this simple rule of thumb is invaluable in politics, psychology, and anywhere else which involves dialectical discourse:

Criticism always says more about the critic than the criticised.

(Ref: previous post on psychological projection.) If you read person Y saying "X sucks", then they may be right or they may be wrong, but what is 100% certain is that you can see clearly what person Y means by "sucks", and from there speculate about their inner life, or at least what life experiences might have led to them to adopt the reality tunnel where object X conforms to the category of "sucks".

Sectarianism = political narcissism?

Narcissism is a defense mechanism related to the splitting defense mechanism. The Narcissist fails to regard other people, situations, or entities (political parties, countries, races, his workplace) as a compound of good and bad elements. He either idealises his object - or devalues it. The object is either all good or all bad. The bad attributes are always projected, displaced, or otherwise externalised. The good ones are internalised in order to support the inflated (grandiose) self-concepts of the narcissist and his grandiose fantasies - and to avoid the pain of deflation and disillusionment.

The narcissist pursues narcissistic supply (attention, both positive and negative) and uses it to regulate his fragile and fluctuating sense of self-worth.

(source)

Compare this to the toytown-Leninist attitudes of "won't get out of bed for anything less than pure proletarian revolution / we are uniquely gifted with the correct insights"; or ways in which, say, the GOOD regime (eg Lenin's Russia) gets a free pass for things that the INFERIOR AND THEREFORE WORTHLESS regime (eg. Chávez's Venezuela) is roundly criticised for. In fact, in general, the attitude from any shade of opinion that "it's okay if we do it / pure-evil-on-a-stick if those guys over there do it" is pure grade-A narcissism. (Or its variant, "they did it first so we get a free pass to do it".)

Narcisstic politics are one way for narcissistic personalities to recruit the unwary around into propping up their pretend selves. But be warned that you can only make this judgement call on the basis of practice, rather than speech. Plenty of sect-warriors will happily admit "in abstract" that their organisation has faults and flaws - but if in practice they act like only they are allowed to say that, and if an outsider says that they must be motivated by sordid personal failings, that's also grade-A political narcissism.

Our old buddy Ben Watson...

... with some more interesting speculations on how capitalist psychology works, or rather doesn't.