We interrupt this programme...

I just received this email via an electric bicycle forum, would you believe.

Dear Anonymous,

The purpose of this message is to inform you about the Revolution:

OCCUPY HOUSES OF PARLIAMENT IN LONDON ON NOVEMBER 5, 2012.
OCCUPY CONGRESS IN WASHINGTON D.C. ON NOVEMBER 11, 2012. 

STOP WAR.
CANCEL ALL DEBT.
REDISTRIBUTE WEALTH.

Please, watch the "Nazi Banksters' Crimes Ripple Effect" movie to find out why, how, and to have sound arguments to persuade others. The movie can be easily found with a search engine.

Please, print the flyers at 2012jubilee.info and distribute them.

Please, spread this message and the movie to everyone you know. 

-Anonymous

Ah, Anon. If only revolution - of the kind which really changes things, as opposed to "colour revolution / meet the new imperialist-approved puppet, same as the formerly imperialist-approved puppet" were that simple. But I must say this is exciting and I'm looking forward to seeing what happens.

I think people of the future will realise what a huge impact the Wachowski siblings have had on the culture of the Internet age. Everyone knows what The Matrix (the original movie) did - pretty much bring Gnostic/Buddhist ideas into the mainstream - but V for Vendetta, even though it was a pretty craptacular rewrite of Alan Moore's excellent graphic novel, and it embraces conspiracy theories in quite a reactionary manner, gave birth to Anonymous as a political project.

Go cats go!

I am following the outcomes of this class with rapt interest, and not just because they stroked my ego by putting this blog on their reading list. This is the kind of thing that I always hoped Ultraculture would turn into, and I look forward to seeing whether the results of their reality-tunnel-hacking can be shared and replicated with the broader Occupy movement.

A fallow period

Quite often in my daily meditative practice I suddenly have a "cognition" or a "bright idea" and I think "HOLY CRAP must remember to post this to CM when I'm done", but then afterwards I either can't remember it or it just seems silly. It is possible that "less is more" at this stage in my publication - or, at least, an aspect of quality control enters in.

It makes sense, I suppose, to reformulate the aim and mission of this blog: to harmonise the languages of transpersonal psychology and revolutionary socialism, with non-dualist spirituality thrown in there for anyone who might be interested in such a thing. As I said to Sage Kiesel what seems an aeon ago, Chaos Marxism is interested in practicality above all else, and we want to develop practical insights and techniques that YOU the occupier or stirrer or picketer or NGO volunteer or political candidate or author out there at the coalface can apply to your own practice, and that of your group, to attempt to shed light on previously insoluble problems.

In many previous periods, I have suggested "audience participation" for readers of this blog, none of which have been taken up, but how about this? Go through The Aphorisms on the sidebar (or any other sufficiently wacky thing from this blog) and ask me to expand on it in depth. I'll start with the following aphorism which just came to me:

Yearning is healthy; despair is unhealthy.

This assumes that we know how to tell the difference. The Sufis have the famous tale of Layla and Majnun, where hopeless, unfulfillable love is celebrated as the love of God. I suppose we can call that love of "the unknown ideal", "the Unborn Goddess" (to resurrect a stillborn meme from my back pages), or "the unfolding future of creativity". We are motivated by the drive to utopia, not by the defence of what we already have. The latter turns into the siege mentality found in all good totalitarian dictatorships and mind-control cults. It is in fact the "lesser of two evils" logic - justifying Obama's warmongering or Castro's heavy-handed suppression of dissidents because "they're not as bad as THE OTHER GUYS". Acts of suppression are always forgivable; quite often excusable; never acceptable.

 On the contrary, a certain bigoted strand of atheism/skepticism/rationalism seeks to pathologise yearning for anything more than creature comforts and seeking status within the World-As-Is, the Black Iron Prison. On the contrary, the Sufis call on the disciple to "reject both worlds", i.e. both here and the Hereafter. The answer is to "seek pain" as Rumi puts it - learn to be content with the yearning, with the knowledge that reality is imperfect and always will be because it is our human nature that makes it so.

But to accept that perfection will never be ours is not an excuse to give up, but an injunction to serve perfection by trying to get there. Who knows? When we give up what Crowley called "lust of result" and abandon ourselves to the process, perhaps the Inexpressible Benevolence of the Creative Impulse will have mercy on us.

 Anyway, some hilarious recent links:

•  documentation of L. Ron Hubbard's large intellectual debt to, or outright plagiarism of, Aleister Crowley; 
• documentation of the ongoing war of conservative-radical-modernist exoteric Islam against Sufism; 
•  ... and the first ever practical application of Chaos Marxist principles to actually-existing small group revolutionary socialist politics.

Welcome to the future.

It's like all the dreams of Chaos Marxism are coming to rampaging life, in city squares across the planet. And just my luck to have been ill in bed all week. Definitely getting down there this afternoon. Socialists thought I was nuts when I was talking about how Project Chanology was the wave of the future, but who's laughing now, oldthinkers? Tell me that, who's laughing now?

The obvious question

Who out there has got fun tales to tell about #Occupy?

Riot! The unbeatable high!

Tomorrow you're homeless... tonight it's a blast. Still, sometimes it has to be done.

The energy has been released - now is it going to be a firework or a laser beam? Only the people on the ground in [England] can tell, and so far we're only hearing all the voices yelling "SIT BACK DOWN AND SHUT THE HELL UP".

Of course implacable opposition, rioting, etc are fun and all. But what does it accomplish, if not tempered with a positive?

We commented on riots in Tonga in 2006, and in Greece last year, and the same rules still apply. My favourite Trot gives a good analysis - interesting how the American media are far enough away from the action that they can actually see what it's about, as opposed to the British media demanding troops on the streets, mass floggings, etc.

The forest fire burns everything down. Then possibly new growth can happen.

Anon v Monsanto, IN A STEEL CAGE

In other death news...

... so what do you think of the argument that "the price of genius is a tortured mind, and more often than not an early death"? I don't 100% buy it. It makes as much sense as arguing that being gay is unhealthy because it makes you want to kill yourself. No, homophobic culture makes you want to kill yourself, and I suggest we live in a creativity-phobic culture.

What is happening is we live in a culture where inspiration is either bullied out of you or commodified. They'll try to destroy you unless you become useful for their agenda, in which case they'll turn you into a brand and a cash cow, which will also destroy you, just with a higher budget. The article also lets off the hook the fact that the music industry has been known to actively encourage drug addiction among its artists because that's a very effect mechanism of control. It used to be quite common in the 80's for club owners in the USA to offer to pay musicians in cocaine.

Robert Fripp knows all about this because he's one of the few people who have been successful enough to be tempted by the Great Deceiver and lived to tell the tale. Of course, he also suggests that truly great artists are channeling a source of power which just burns their human personality away. Was Ms Winehouse a truly great artist? Even a pivotal figure for her generation like Courtney Love's husband? I don't know, never actually heard her work, perhaps you can fill me in in the comments.

Solidarity

No to fascism.
No to race-hatred.
No to Islamophobia and other religion-hatred.
No to the belief that "words don't have consequences" and that therefore free speech comes with no responsibilities.
No to allowing memes of hatred to survive unchallenged in our media and in our conversation.

If there's one thing that you yes YOU can do without getting out from in front of your internet connection, it's to slap down anyone who tries to make Muslims, non-whites, queers or leftists "the Other" who have no rights. (But try to do that without just unleashing hatred against Christians, atheists, conservatives or people who haven't read as many books as you. The "arty queers vs. rednecks" thing is a false dichotomy to stop us embracing the true diversity of our culture and forging unity in that diversity. Ideas are the enemy, not those who hold them.)

ETA: Amanda Knudsen in Norway writes: "I understand that people just want to show solidarity with those killed in the fascist massacre on utøya and in oslo, but please, understand that using the norwegian flag is not an appropriate symbol for this. Our response to the nationalist nazi violence must be openness and internationalism, not to support the nation borders that divide us."

Even the BBC knows about the serious business

Twenty Reasons Why It's Kicking Off Everywhere. Note in particular points 11-14, talking about the class basis of the new worldwide movements.

A few points:

- Point 1 is mistaken. The "graduate with no future" has been an endemic feature of the Middle Eastern client states of the West for decades now. They were the same crowd who overthrew the Shah in '79.

- Point 3 is also mistaken. Truth and lies now move at the same speed. The speed of a narrative meme is not determined by its truth content, but by how much it makes sense given the pre-existent consciousness of those spreading it. "Teabagger" memes in the USA spread plenty fast. But I suppose the point is that sheer memetics have rendered traditional propaganda obsolete, although people like the Chinese Communist Party and the Republican-aligned think-tanks in the US are keeping up with the play.

- Point 4; I'm afraid "radical Islam" works as a meme just like we mentioned above and spreads the same way. In fact - and this vital - Al-Qaeda itself is a meme, rather than an organisation, which spreads via online videos, flash animation games, etc etc. What is becoming obsolete are vertical bureaucracies - as people have said elsewhere, the platonic form of capitalist domination is not the Pentagon or a Central Bank, but it's Wal-Mart, with its networked forms of surveillance and domination.

- Point 18: "young people believe the issues are no longer class and economics but simply power". Hah. We'll see how long that lasts once the econocataclysm starts to bite. And in some cases - the open-source movement - that is simply not true, as the true interconnectedness of power with economics and class ("class" in the sense of "who does the work and who rakes in the money?") becomes obvious.

- Complication (e) - this is vital stuff. The highest ranks of the media priesthood and the ruling class no longer speak the same language as ordinary street humans. This is a contradiction that needs to be heightened.

Anon-tech just kicked in yo

Okay. You guys will remember that 4chan and associated intarwebz nerds declared war on the cult of Scientology at the beginning of last year. What you might not have heard since then: 4chan and similar fora have disowned Chanology, mainly on the grounds of it getting boring and respectable and about something other than the lulz, a phenomenon referred to in their usual tasteful manner as "moralfaggotry". However,
Chanology is still going (and scoring some hits), so therefore we must distinguish between "old Anonymous" (aka /b/tards, SomethingAwful goons, and other Chaotic Neutral intarwebz denizens) and "new Anonymous", which is pretty much a "chaotic good" hacktivism network.

Well, now "new Anonymous" has taken up the cause of the Iranian uprising. As mentioned below, we have been skeptical about the attempts of intarwebz denizens to climb on the barricades watered with the blood of real live Iranians to give themselves a moralistic hardon. (So perhaps CM disapproves of moralfaggotry as well.) However, this is serious business, as "new Anonymous" are clearly no longer a single-issue campaign, but an example of the self-organisation of intarwebz nerds, which yesterday's post suggested was the logical outcome of the digital revolution. More fundamentally - "new Anon"'s campaigns are being supported by The Pirate Bay.

A hundred years ago, Marxists and revolutionaries knew perfectly well what had to be done. Lenin said that the working class were spontaneously socialist and revolutionary (of course, he said this about five years after saying the precise opposite, which is why arguing from quotation is of limited value.) Therefore - the goal of Marxists and others with an actual ideology and a plan to change the world was to unite with these spontaneous radical forces - and attempt what Rosa Luxemberg called "the merging of workers and science". Learning and teaching, combining concrete experience with theoretical rigour, left brain plus right brain of a new collective class consciousness.

Well, intarwebz denizens are certainly not spontaneously socialist. But they certainly are spontaneously libertarian (much like the broader "information-processing classes" are spontaneously socially liberal), and they certainly do NOT tolerate anyone fucking around with their intarwebz. Remember, that's how Scientology got in the shit in the first place, trying to censor Tom Cruise spouting clam-speak on YouTube. And now the Islamic Republic of Iran have put their foot in it as well. It remains to be seen exactly how much use "Green Anon" is going to be. But - especially given the broader political implications of the involvement of the Pirate Bay, the first ever website to have a political wing - it behooves us to watch carefully and try to draw sensible conclusions.

Revolutionaries of the 21st century are going to have to take the self-organisation of internet nerds as seriously as the self-organisation of the working class, and let's start now. The question that can only be resolved in practice is: can the information-processing class in the Internet era be part of a revolutionary coalition that can change the world for a better, and if so, what possibilities are there for common cause and action with the industrial proletarians, the global slum-dwellers, the peasant masses, and other oppressed groups? Traditional Marxism suggests that the industrial workers will be the basis of a new world, but we're far beyond traditional Marxism now.

ETA: Holy Toledo Batman, the Pirate Party has a damned functioning international already. Serious business, as I said.

I'm the goddamned Batman.

Bullfinch's Mythology - or perhaps Crowley's 777 - for the new millennium, ladies and gentlemen and smizmars. Or, to put it another way, a guidebook to the mass media equivalent of the "sephiroth" and "pathways" between them. Or - to put it in plain language - a guide to the memetic structure of the early 21st Western cultural infosphere, or at least that part of it which appeals to internet nerds. Thank goodness it's in Wiki format so it can keep continually expanding, self-reforming and becoming more complex.

The next step after you have a Table of Correspondences, of course, is to use it. The link between this site and the Real World of Horrible Jobs can be seen on those pages which have a "Real Life" section - i.e. where some contributor gets the levels confused and uses a meme to explain a real world event, rather than the other way around. (That's pretty much the Chaos Marxist definition of "ideology".) As we've said before here, once memes are set loose in the infosphere they will keep going until forcibly stopped, which is generally a real bitch to do (Newton's First Law of Memetics?) But it's much easier to subvert them - to impact the rolling ball so it rolls in another direction, with even a small amount of momentum impacting at just the right angle.

This work is only a fraction of what we need, of course. We need a "Ideological Tropes" wiki, where all these memes from fiction are linked into the memetic complexes of advertising, politics, news reporting, etc etc etc. If we can build something like that, it would be like mapping the genome of industrial deathculture. And then our "memetic engineering" will become less like praying for victory before a battle, and more like precisely focussing our own memetic artillery to pwn the enemy where he stands.

===

Your reports on using TV Tropes or similar grimoires as a resource to create a work of art or propaganda with real socio-political consequences are awaited eagerly.

Ten wins on the gay circuit

Are these guys the homo equivalent of Chaos Marxism? I'm perhaps a little sceptical of their breathless "OMG THE FUTURE IS HERE AND IT'S QUEER AND WE DON'T WANT ANY MORE BEARS" sloganising, but content-wise it's exciting and very fuckin' funny and we are proud to adopt it.

I'm also considering adopting a Patron Godform for Chaos Marxism, but it would probably be much better if people who consider the project worthwhile made some suggestions, and then we could come to some kind of more powerful consensus. Well...?

I am a Moralfag and I approve this message.

A rogue Anonymous (as if there were any other kind) covered himself with vaseline and pubic hair and ran around touching all the books in a Scientology cult outreach centre.

Now that's the kind of stuff that we've been missing here. Some of you might have wondered whether Project Chanology was still going, and I kind of wondered that myself. It seemed to be degenerating into staid, morally upright protest politics, of the kind which have completely failed to dislodge the cult for decades. Now we see "the chemo that is curing Chanology", as the trolls put it - the movement must walk on two legs.

Like South Africa needed a political as well as a military fight against apartheid, so the fight against Scientology requires a SERIOUS BUSINESS wing and a RANDOM INSANE OFFENSIVE SHIT wing, organisationally independent from each other. Only thus can the constituency spread and the meme gain new life. The "troll" is the irregular partisan of meme warfare.

2009 - The Year Before We Made Contact

This summary is not available. Please click here to view the post.

Chanology: The Evolution of a Movement

A recent drama-bomb dropped on enturbulation.org (ably summarised for the confused here) proves the aphorism that a "leaderless group" in fact means "a group where leadership is secret or not acknowledged". However, this isn't in the crude manner that the OSA goons seem to believe - they would go from this to believing that all you would have to do is destroy #marblecake and the whole thing collapses. On the contrary, that would just mean a new leadership or wannabe-leadership-faction would grow. Best to see #marblecake as a "political party" or "faction" within Chanology. It's a good thing, by the way, that Anonymous has grown its own leadership groups, rather than continuing to take the advice of the "Old Guard" (who, in general, are a little bit off the pace of what constitutes vibrant cultural activism in the 21st century).

Actually, Chanology is having to deal with the question which plagues every movement which goes on long enough to be somewhat institutionalised and have to work out a long term strategy - factions will always exist. The question is how to deal with factions - the belief in the "self-regulating hivemind" is revealed as the utopian/anarchoid dreaming it always was, which did nothing but simply encourage #marblecake and the various other factions which no doubt exist to be in private. The traditional solution in the Leninist tradition is to allow factions (or at least platforms), but to restrict their activities to "internal consumption". But that simply won't work in a totally decentralised movement like Chanology.

Seriously, this flap is not really going to derail the movement. One or two talented individuals and/or groups thereof may be lost to the movement, temporarily or permanently, but it has shown its ability to continually replace them.

To sum up our lesson here: every mass movement must have leadership otherwise nothing will ever happen. But the movement creates the leadership, not the other way around.

Lesson #4 from Chanology

The relationship between the old-school anti-Scientology battlers and the massed ranks of anonymous shows us precisely what the relationship between a vanguard party and the revolutionary masses should be.

Yes, I know, it doesn't look much like the model we're always being fed by the Leninist sects. Which is of course a problem with those sects and their warped parroting of phrases from Lenin and/or Trotsky that they don't actually understand. Let's examine the model closer:

A long-term, close knit group of activists grow up around a common struggle. They built a tight network, supporting one another, swapping information and intelligence, but lack of mresources and mmanpower prevent them from making any breakthroughs. Suddenly, a "spontaneous" movement from the classes - actually stemming in origin from the vanguard group's propaganda over the years - breaks out. What do the vanguard do?

Some write off the new masses, declare that they're "just kids" or "lumpen elements" or "internet nerds", critique their methods in a negative rather than a comradely way. Some insist on their own right to lead the movement, or point to reasons why it's not the right sort of movement, that some of the memes it regulates by are wrong or even offensive, and how it will have to change before they'll be involved. Some even fret that the new movement is some kind of diabolical enemy plot, or a potentially reactionary force, and find in those a reason to stay away from or even condemn the movement. These people have proved themselves worse than useless.

However, others engage with the new mass forces properly. They give constructive, comradely criticism, giving helpful and practical suggestions, based on long experience rather than book-leraning, how their struggle can be more successful. They seek to give helpful advice to the leadership of the new mass forces, rather than insist on becoming the leadership of the new mass forces.

Why, then, do the mass forces listen to these vanguard activists? Because their advice now makes sense in the context of their own experience in the struggle. Because they don't insist that they have the right to lead just because they've been doing it longer. Because they know things about the enemy that the newly mobilised forces don't know. Certainly not because "we are in the possession of the one true theory and we are going to fight tooth and nail to make sure that we and our comrades are in control of this". That would of course kill any movement stone dead.

All you commies, anarchos, radicals and trots out there, learn from Mark Bunker and Tory Christman how to show actual leadership in a mass struggle. They wouldn't thank me for saying so, but they're acting in the best traditions of people like Lenin or Che Guevara or Malcolm X. Make yourself relevant. Don't lecture, but learn as well as teach. You are only worth anything in your self-proclaimed leadership if you can actually win the trust and confidence of the masses - you don't earn it by being "orthodox", by spouting the right memes. Memes are in fact irrelevant except insofar as they directly influence action.

Scientology's closed due to thetans

Chaos Marxism supports Project Chanology 100%.



Not only because the fascist brainwashing corporation is a worthy target, but because Anonymous has so much potential and it's a pleasure to see them not just saying things like "faggot" and "pool's closed due to AIDS" over and over again.

As always happens in a revolution, practice has shot far ahead of theory on this issue. There are attempts to write off Anonymous due to (justifiable) disdain for the strong racist, misogynistic and homophobic memes in their culture. These resemble the recurring meme among the cultural-technician classes that the proletariat - or certain ethnic or social groups - cannot be revolutionary because of prevalent backwards social attitudes (with the corollary that a revolution has to be run by an "enlightened few" with the "right culture", generally including the person who made that statement). As some Russian once said:

To imagine that social revolution is conceivable... without revolutionary outbursts by a section of the petty bourgeoisie WITH ALL ITS PREJUDICES [italics in original], without a movement of the politically non-conscious proletarian and semi-proletarian masses against oppression ... --to imagine all this is to REPUDIATE SOCIAL REVOLUTION.

I also note that the mealy-mouthed response from the "community of long-term critics" is very similar to the attitude with which gutless liberals always greet militant (and therefore effective) anti-fascist action. The alt.religion.scientology and Operation Clambake crowd have, I think, settled into a comfortable stalemate (almost a mutually beneficial, symbiotic relationship) with the cult and are don't want anything happening that might change the balance of forces. Sadly, this is common in any political campaign that goes long enough - people get used to nothing happening and build a comfortable, ritualistic lifestyle around it. This leads to the same kind of degeneration that happened to the Marxist left in the 1980s.

We are not of course saying anything as dumb as that Anonymous is some kind of revolutionary vanguard, but there are analogies for political practice in the real world - in particular, the way that an idea whose time has come - and which is easy to replicate and distribute - can seize the masses. I would be interested to see if people like the Centre for Tactical Magic take up this lead.

Here's a fascinating discussion of what this project means for applied memetics, the purpose of this blog.