How hard it is to grow - can you imagine it?

Truly the road to one's own personal enlightenment is like unto crawling over five miles of broken glass on your hands and knees. Even worse, there's no real road map, so if you're not lucky you might be going in circles.

Hence the temptation, from all of us who've gotten somewhere and achieved something (though not necessarily communicable, or indeed significant), to instantly publish our own Revealed! The Only Roadmap You'll Ever Need to the Broken Glass Field!

Except, of course, everyone starts from a different place in the Broken Glass Field, so someone else's road map will be of limited use. Note I said limited. The essence of Marxism is that there is a fundamental material base to all our spiritual, social and physical yearnings - and as globalization picks up speed, the amount of "sameness" increases on a global scale. Therefore, mystical manuals and manifesti grow in usefulness and applicability in the modern era, just because the diversity of frames of reference is being narrowed.

But any roadmap is useless if you follow it 100% - except for the person who designed it, and you have to look at them to see how useful it is for them. All that anyone who is consciously setting out on a programme of initiation / political activism can do is clarify the principles by which they had whatever success they have had, so that the experiments can be replicated to see if they are universal or only true-for-you.

This is where we are going with the oncoming booklet - it will be in part a collection of what we think are basic universal principles for the struggle for human consciousness in decadent global capitalism of the 21st century, and in part a series of experimental accounts. In fact, we might just publish the first part on its own and then do the experiments later (don't laugh, that's how we got The Communist Manifesto). But it won't be complete until the results are in.

We are not making a map for you - we are explaining how we've made our own map so you can make your own. Eventually, I think all the worthwhile maps lead in the same direction, which is not necessarily "out", but to areas of a better quality of broken glass. As Robert Fripp puts it, out of the basement onto the ground floor, if we're lucky.

Speaking of Fripp: what he did for guitar players, I suppose we're trying to do for democratic, radical and socialist political activists. Except of course Fripp was a bad-ass guitar player to start with and I'm not exactly Hugo Chávez, but we all do what we can and then God-however-defined does what we can't.

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I am at the moment meditating on the image of / praying three times daily to the quasi-monotheistic God/Dess of the World To Come. I encourage everyone else who is excited by the Chaos Marxist principles to do likewise for, oh, let's say, from the New Moon in April (25th or thereabouts) to the New Moon in July (22nd or thereabouts). And publish your results, in comments here, in emails to me, or on your own forums or blogs and send me a link. Those of you who've been working on images of this godform are invited to publish them and use them in this discipline, although I'm personally not using anthropomorphic iconography at the moment.

The aim

We're making this into a book. The preliminary title is Chaos Marxism: do-it-yourself psychology and spirituality for the social movements. It will be very pretty and well laid up, but will only be produced in electronic form unless someone offers us big money. Expected publication date is "about a year from now". For those of you who are fans of Watchmen, imagine "The Veidt Method", only without the Charles Atlas stuff and I'm pretty sure I didn't kill fifteen three million people recently.

An introduction presents itself:

This course is not a manual for mystical initiation. Only for a tiny minority is that achievable in a single lifetime, or even a good idea. This course is not a self-help manual to help you manage your life better. There is already a truckload of material on that theme, of varying levels of quality. This course is also not a rigorous academic presentation of mass media theory, memetics, or the Marxist theory of ideology. However, it does offer a basic introduction to all of the above, boiled down to what we think will be useful for our target audience.

This course will teach you to do magick, of a sort - in the sense of Aleister Crowley's definition of "changing consciousness in accordance with will". It goes beyond most of the material on this matter however, in that it is written for a social movement seeking to change the consciousness of a whole society, or even a whole species.

This course is actually not for individuals at all. Our basic idea is that the "individual consciousness" or "spirit" is only a meaningful concept in the context of our whole species-being, much like the wind only has meaning in the consciousness of a planetary atmosphere. This course is for social movements aiming at a new and better way of being human together, and the members of such movements.

It suggests ways of being able to be more human together, of overcoming separation and alienation in our networks of struggle - and thus, necessarily, perhaps the tiniest glimpse but still real, of what a new, truly human world might look like. In this sense the only book like it we are aware of is Starhawk's Truth or Dare (1987), which you really should read as well.

This book is only the first volume of a useful open-ended approach. If you are reading this more than ten years after its publication, and there was never a second volume, containing experimental results and refinements of the theory, then it was obviously a dead end and you should throw this book away now.