Three brief notes

1) Chaos Marxism Aphorism #48 states:

If you start saying that people are not individuals - that they are created by their upbringing and the role they play in real, nasty, going-to-work-in-traffic society - then you open the door to the idea that only a social revolution can actually solve the real problems with humanity.

Interestingly enough, I wrote that without knowing what Marx's Sixth Thesis on Feuerbach said:

The human essence is no abstraction inherent in each single individual. In its reality it is the ensemble of the social relations.

The "human individual" is determined by their place in the social networks which form the "true" nature of our species. As Aphorism #3 puts it, you are not a beautiful and unique snowflake - or, at least, you're part of a huge drift of snow from which you can't be disentangled. I am only following in the rather large footsteps of giants, but at least I'm going in the right direction.

2) This Fandom Wank thread, on an interesting young wymyn who has declared that she can tell that Joss Whedon rapes his wife from watching his TV programmes, really does sum up every single problem with academic "radical feminism" in particular and bourgeois identity politics in general. Simply put, the equation is: identity politics = voluntary ghettoisation = the cultural logic of consumerism in late capitalism. This nonsense can only exist because little havens exist for the priesthood of the media culture to train their successors and to think up strategies to sell identities/goods/services to new niche markets. In this case, we are talking about Women's Studies departments as the factories where the identity-commodity of "radical lesbian wymyn" or whatever is produced and sold. Those who buy such an identity will not only buy the appropriate clothes, books, memorabilia etc to make sure no-one forgets their Special Unique identity for a moment. They will also hide in their little communes or staff common rooms or book circles or other voluntary ghettos, and never venture out to bother the real world again - except perhaps to go on the occasional abortion-rights or anti-rape demo and act like sectarian imbeciles just like their Marxist, anarchist etc. counterparts.

3) For those following Chanology - a schism has arisen. Some of the more hard-core anonymous are angry at the movement's turn towards "respectable" protest politics, and wish to return to (quite simply) trolling and pranks, of anti-Scilons as well as Scilons. Those on the other side, however, point out that if "respectable" protest politics can actually dismantle Scientology in its current form, how much lulz would then be produced?!? As I keep saying, even those who don't consider Scamintology any kind of real priority or threat must keep an eye on Chanology, because it is going through all the major dilemmas and turning points that any serious mass movement does.

Dolorasnetics: The Chaos Marxist Science of Mental Health

Starting from a basic Marxist view of the world: Matter comes first. Then comes life. Then comes social consciousness. Then comes individual consciousness.
Individual consciousness can be "in control" over small areas of matter, but can only affect social consciousness in proportion to common understanding and action with other social consciousnesses. Only widespread agreement within the social consciousness can be "at cause" over large areas and systems of matter.

What is sanity?

Sanity is defined as the ability of an individual or group consciousness to understand:

- the rules of operation of material reality (both inorganic matter and life);
- the rules of operation of social consciousness;
- the rules of operation of individual consciousness;
- the relationships between each sphere - what concrete actions by individuals and groups can bring about desired changes in social and physical material reality.

For an individual consciousness, being "more sane" means "having a greater understanding of the rules of these three spheres, and thus being more able to affect change in individual, social and material reality in accordance with desire, in proportion to how many options for individual action are allowed by current social and material circumstances."

(Yes, after writing this I realised that my definition of "sanity" seems to be an expanded version of Crowley's definition of "magick". How bizarre, how bizarre.)

What can prevent an individual from being able to affect social and material reality?
- real social or material impediments (lack of options for individual action)
- a lack of correct understanding of the rules of the social or material world - this can be solved by study and experiment.
- problems in the individual consciousness which cause the rational centres of the mind to not be able to comprehend aspects of reality or the correct relationship between them. This is the domain of psychology.

In turn, these may be "hardware" or "software" problems - caused by physical or chemical imbalances in the body, or by assumptions and habits held in the subconscious mind and thus not amenable to rational analysis under normal circumstances, or by a combination of the two. (It could even be possible that humans are "hardwired" to not be able to properly understand reality, but I'm not going to believe that unless I see evidence for it.)

Sanity (defined as "correct perception of material reality") is distinguished from happiness. Unhappiness and other negative emotions are the natural and healthy reactions of a consciousness deprived wholly or partially of control over its circumstances of life - i.e. everyone everywhere at some time. Some crazy people are happy as hell, but we don't want to be crazy because it would mean total powerlessness. You couldn't be 100% sane and miserable all the time, because if you were 100% sane you would know predictably what could be done to make you happier, even temporarily (something that would temporarily restore your sense of being able to make things happen in your world).

Roughly: sanity = a correct perception of where an individual or group has power and where they do not. Happiness = perception of relative power. Unhappiness = perception of relative powerlessness. (This is a generalisation. Sorry, masochists. DOn't write me any nasty letters.)

Increasing sanity will therefore not directly increase happiness - it might decrease it, in the short term, as comfortable illusions are dispelled. However, it will increase an individual's ability to evoke positive emotions and dispel negative ones, by restoring the correct mental connections between emotions and the events that evoke them, and snapping incorrect connections between emotions and thoughts, concepts, people and objections, which become "self-sustaining". For example: something bad happened to you and you have an incorrect idea of why. You build habits of behaviour to try to avoid that ever happening again, but these are based on an incorrect assumption and thus don't work. Also, the pain is so bad that even remembering it hurts so you can't even look at the bad thing in order to correct your assumptions.

The process therefore runs:

Perception of the correct rules of consciousness and matter + perception of the correct relationship between emotion and action or outside events => increased ability to take effective action to affect consciousness and matter => increased ability to invoke positive emotion and dispel negative emotion (and to take effective corrective action in the case of external events reducing personal power and thus inflicting negative emotion.)

In brief, my essential problem with "self-help" therapy is that it embodies pre-existing social norms that the individual is finally and totally responsible for their personal reality, which I see as oppressive and an ideological tool of those who hold power (and of bullies, who all survive on the principle that their victims have the responsibility for their actions). Institutional psychology, on the other hand, seems to embody the idea that "sanity" means adapting smoothly to existing reality rather than an increased ability to affect it in accordance with desire - also an ideological tool of that which holds power.

I like UCP because it's simply a process of comparing memory, current perception and images of other possible or impossible realities, to understand the differences and connections between them all, and hence the correct relationship between individual consciousness and social and physical reality. This seems a good, basic way of increasing sanity, by the definition above. It's totally up to the individual to work out the connections between these for themselves - which could, of course, be a pitfall. The assumption is that the practitioner (absent organic damage which would impede a rational understanding of reality) will inevitably and eventually work out the correct patterns and connections between them, by experiment and by testing against reality, and this could be a false assumption. Only experiment and testing against reality will solve this!

We must also remember that "sane" doesn't mean "good". I would expand the concept to include "socially sane" - someone who not only has correct perceptions of power and powerlessness, but increases those correct perceptions among other people. I suppose you could be "individually sane" and methodically attempt to deprive others of sanity so you could rule and exploit them - I think many of the real leaders of our society fall into that category. Is a dictator or cult leader necessary crazy? I'm not sure. Hitler was mad as a mongoose, but Stalin seemed almost scarily, coldly rational. Stories vary over whether "LRH" actually believed his own lies or not.

But still, I would like to see scientific study of UCP and its beneficial effects and problems, in comparison with other "self-help" therapy, and with conventional, institutional psychology.

One final hint: I realise that by the above defnition, if you hold an idealist view of reality, you are ipso facto not entirely sane. Unless, of course, your ability to cause change in reality oustrips that of we materialists. Then we're the crazy ones. Go on. I dares ya.

Do UCP and see!

I have mentioned the Universal Conscious Practice - a form of meditation/self-analysis/DIY psychotherapy invented by a refugee from Scientology - before. Now a practitioner has invented a programme (written in Gambas for Linux) which will give you all you need to do it yourself. Check it out. I heartily recommend you give it a go if you feel the need for more personal insight - it certainly blew out a few of my psychic cobwebs.

DISCLAIMER: this process bears some family resemblance to things that the followers of Pedobear Hubbard do, but it won't give you Tom Cruise's total psychosis bad-ass telepathic powers.

An aphorism on cults

Cult methods of organisation are nothing more than boiled-down and spiced-up versions of accepted behaviour-control and thought-reform methods used commonly against children and "deviants" in late capitalist society. Nothing that Scientology or the Moonies or the Sparts do is really dissimilar in kind from what ordinary mums and dads, schoolteachers, psychiatric nurses and prison guards are encouraged to do every day - only in degree, and in target.

Discuss.

100th post special!: A unified theory of cults

Scientology, Objectivism, most varieties of "orthodox Trotskyism" (more here) or Maoism... all the same sociological features. A Marxist analysis would locate the foundation of all these political cults (and similar religious organizations) in a social base almost restricted to the middle-class intelligensia, who, in modern capitalism, are the layer devoted to ideological production on which the system depends. 

The essential principle of a cult is an unchallengable ideology and an unchallengable leadership who "bear" or "preserve" the ideology. So the features of all such cults are: 

1. Idealism - the belief that physical reality is "less real" than the words of ideas. Note that the pretend-Marxist cults, although holding to materialism as a dogma, by that very act betray Marxism - any dogmas, any ideas which are untouchable and unamendable, and the associated belief that those who hold the "correct" ideas are the elite, are against anything that Marx or indeed Lenin would have recognized. The belief that the test of practice is not the deciding question is the only thing that means that a single set of ideas can be set up as untouchable. 
2. Elitism - as above. Also - those who produce the correct ideas are not only elite but godlike. Some flavours of Objectivist even claim that only Ayn Rand herself is a valid source for Objectivism (exactly the same opinion that the Scienos have about their dead conman guru). Note that in some cases the mythical godfigure was dead before the cult showed up - all the better, because then s/he's not around to contradict them. Stalinism got going by turning Lenin into an idol before they dared put Stalin in his place.
3. Thought reform. Since ideas are what's important, and the idea-bearers are the elite, they must continually purge their ranks of thought-criminals or those who just aren't up to snuff ideologically (or just different). Sadly, you can see this starting in the Fourth International during Trotsky's time - despite his many achievements and genius insights, Uncle Leon was a middle-class intellectual building a "party" out of middle-class intellectuals. Of course it was going to go wrong. 

A combination of all three of the above expresses themselves in moralism - since ideas are not determined in practice but are in themselves good or bad things, the logical outcome is to seek the origin of the "wrong" ideas in "wrong" personalities. Cults believe in the idea of "evil" - that ideas can be wrong in themselves - and generally lump oppositionists in that bracket. A defining feature of every cult is personal attacks against adversaries and internal critics(as opposed to, say, reasonably pointing out that it was funny for Ayn Rand to talk about the wonders of rationality when she was off her face on speed all the time). If you are wrong and you won't be convinced, the only solution is that you are bad and you should feel bad. (It's tempting to locate the social origin of cults in clever kids with a middle-class education who dream of their internal world of ideas being, not only accepted, but dominating others in the way that they feel that the existing ideas dominate them. Which would explain why I've always dreamed of having my own cult. Never mind.) 

Before the snobs at Infoshop start crowing, let me note that you don't need a formal leader to be a cult. All you need is sufficient peer pressure to "maintain the consensus". Many modern anarchist "communities" fail on the tests of ideology/dogma, elitism and anathematization of contrary opinions - just look at the "uniforms" they wear (patches, t-shirts for "correct bands", body hair on women, etc), the pressure to eat the right (vegan) food and listen to the right music, etc. Also note the pressure on newbies to start anathematising the hated Leninists - identified as "the enemy within". And of course the pseudo-Leninist cults fight straight back. You can be a leaderless cult, no problem. 

In passing, I want to blow away the mystical belief that "the consensus process" is always and everywhere the correct way for a group to make decisions, which in itself is an idealist and therefore potentially cultist idea. A consensus process can be a means by which a "secret" leadership group simply enforces its dominance as nastily as the most Stalinist Central Committee - and with the same level of self-serving hypocrisy. In contrast, a majority-democracy group which fully tolerates dissent in thought and word while requiring unity in action may grow a "group mind" which is always a little unsure of itself and self-reforming, which has to be a good thing. The process of decision-making is less vital than ensuring the total freedom of each individual consciousness to have opinions different from the group ideas, and to have real opportunities to change the group's ideas. 

 Here's a classic description of how cults operate, as opposed to their basic premises as explained above. I was thinking of making "Humour is the one thing cults can't stand" a CM aphorism. However, that's not precisely true - all cults have endless jokes about outsiders. Just not about the leadership or the sacred ideas, at least not in public. Just in passing - "cult" is not an absolute term. But the more a group is idealist, elitist and obsessed with purifying its own dogma, the more "cultish" it is. On the contrary, a real political party - or any social or cultural change organisation - values the test of practice - what people actually do - above all else. Requiring unity in action is not cultish - requiring unity in thought is. 

A true collective consciousness (aka "culture") can only arise where every member of the culture gets to transmit as well as receive. A cult is closed - a culture is open. A cult is simply the prejudices and personality problems of a leadership group written large - a culture might be less of a "strike force", but it will be more flexible, more healthy, and more likely to perpetuate itself.

Their magick and ours, part the umpteenth

Even when we sleep, the web of nervous plexuses emanating from that ancient region of the lower brain remains awake, haunting our bodies with a mysterious presence. Perhaps, long before the day the central nervous system convinced us it was in charge, our way of understanding the world had been purely involuntary and autonomic, fluctuating without subtlety between poles of stimulus and response, contraction and relaxation, excitement and satisfaction. Perhaps the enteric brain remains our last link to the time before we ate the apple of the tree of knowledge of good and evil, the time before we knew death. The primeval brain of the involuntary, the abdominal brain, the brain that controls sympathy and revulsion but not ratiocination, that is the brain of the wow.

When it comes to television, the theory becomes practice: Whether on the Hot Network, E! Entertainment Television, or CBS, the splanchnic response, not the lucubrations of the intellect but the primal gut reaction – that’s what hauls in the ratings. When the new president of CNN/US, Jonathan Klein, took over last November, he introduced himself to the troops with what has become the perennial “it’s about the storytelling” speech. As Van Gordon Sauter preached in the 1980’s, news needs the emo, and executives now understand that the emo comes from the gut, the gut makes the wow, and the wow makes the money. It’s not the content that matters – food, sex, or news – so much as the autonomic form.

Read the whole thing. The tl;dr version of it: the media priesthood have perfected memetics to the point where they can actually bypass the rational brain altogether and provoke, literally and directly, "gut reactions" (or groin reactions, for that matter). HOLY SHIT if we do not learn to do this ourselves and socialise the means of production and distribution of media signals (exchange will not mean anything in a post-itellectual property era), they may well perfect the means to control us with pleasure rather than pain and the species will be doomed. On the other hand, it may well be that, like any media technology, our ability to resist it if necessary will be able to more-or-less keep pace with its advance, but I'm not sure I want to take that risk.

Note that Chaos Marxism is not "luddite" in the pejorative sense, or indeed puritan. We don't oppose the technology of provoking pleasure or pain via media, in fact, we think it's pretty damn neat, but only when under the control of mass, grassroots democracy - like governmental power itself. I don't trust anyone else with the ability to bypass my thinking, conscious brain without explicit permission.

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.

Their magick, and ours

For the first time in human history, there is a concerted strategy to manipulate global perception. And the mass media are operating as its compliant assistants, failing both to resist it and to expose it.

The sheer ease with which this machinery has been able to do its work reflects a creeping structural weakness which now afflicts the production of our news.

This extract from a new book on how the spooks took over the news explains in great detail about how al-Zarqawi had nothing to do with al-Qaeda... until the meme-machines of the Western media made him that way. (Hey, it's a good metaphor to think of a newswire service or a website as a prayer wheel of the modern era.)

And this is exactly why we need Chaos Marxism - or something like it. I think we have an aphorism which points out that the reason why there is a "concerted strategy" of brainwashing and black memetics right now for the first time in history is because the traditional forms of manufacturing consent, brute force and bribery, don't work in an advanced industrial democracy. Constant competition for the advertising dollar has had the same effect as constant competittion for market scare - the means of production of memes are becoming ever more efficient, and yet their equivalent of the "rate of profit" (the rate of effectiveness?)tends to ever diminish. And much like we need to learn from the industrial workers how best to make the revolution in the factories, we need to learn from the cyberworkers and the internet nerds how to build the revolution in the mediasphere.

==

ON that subject, for those following Project Chanology at home: February 10 rocked, London and elsewhere. What has the "traditional protest movement" learned from this phenomenon?

1) Just because people follow some weird and offensive memes doesn't mean they're not potent allies.
2) A protest movement is NOT a community - when it becomes a "community", with its own "permanent" power structures and ethos, you're in the realms of small-group psychosis and you by Goddess should be looking to bust out.
3) We haven't yet begun to plumb the depths of what the self-organisation of internet nerds is capable of. There must be cross-fertilisation with the "Traditional" workers' movement, expecially for those of us seeking to organise the cybertariat of the 21st century.

Your reviews are appreciated

A friendly fellow recommends us as

a blog that my friend found very useful in terms of how he thought about the world. It's someone who started out as a Discordian and then became a hardline Trotskyite. As I was telling someone over AIM earlier, it's two components that, individually, are profoundly stupid, but combined at least have some internal consistency and interesting ideas.

Thanks for the pimpage. However, I should make clear that I was never a Discordian, I was a SubGenius, which is many leagues stupider than Discordianism, and proud of it. Also, while I admire and appreciate a lot of Trotsky's work, I'm beginning to think that it's no coincidence that so many of the groups who take his name in vain are scary mind-control cults - Scientology with the Labour/Black Struggle instead of body thetans.

While we're on the subject of cults (subliminal message), The LJ post linked to above also says some things about the Illuminatus! trilogy which are perceptive. I would add, though, that while I loved this book to death when I was 17 (and , indeed, credit it partially for the person I am today), there are more things wrong with it than the sexism. The book itself shows one of what I think was the most disturbing things to come out of the 1960's radical California subculture - the rise of the "self-improvement cult". The plot of the book is that an ascended master with mystic powers (in a yellow submarine) not only converts a disparate bunch of radicals to his own oddball mysticism, but to his anarcho-capitalist political beliefs.

This, I feel, plugs into something which I think was fundamentally wrong with the whole middle-class radical 60's thing. Because it was middle class, and therefore individualist, it's no surprise that it ended up focusing on "personal enlightenment" rather than political change - although the circle kind of closed in the 1980s with the foundation of the Green parties. The middle-class radical mind can't conceive of a mass collective consciousness as anything other than threatening brain death. They say idiotic things like "without private property there is no private life" and never stop to realise that this ais a simple tautology, while paradoxically at the same time start rambling on about the wonders of ego loss!

The middle-class radical can't conceive of a real collective, so their models of organisation are the "affinity group", the commune, the monastery... and, yes, eventually, the cult. If you accept that personal change is far more important than political change, and also accept that some people have achieved Superhumanity in their own life time, then surely your rule from that point onwards it to shut up and listen. And donate. And sell the paper. And if they don't end up in cults, they end up as small capitalists - because that's truly what they believe freedom looks like. It's funny that the middle-class radical's utopia is generally anarcho-capitalism, because that's possibly the only political system which is in itself an oxymoron.

Material and social reality determines consciousness. The only real way to improve one's psychic health is to clean out the psychic toxic waste dump which passes for the mass media nd and popular culture under capitalism.

Help me, Wise Beard Man. You're our only hope.

Further to yesterday's update on the Anonymous/Scientology war - Anonymous seems to have adopted Mark Bunker as their own personal Obi-wan. I think we can declare it a Chaos Marxist aphorism that:

Groups with no ideology will eventually be forced to adopt one under pressure.. Groups with no leader will eventually be forced to adopt one under pressure.

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.

"Swamp fever" - aka "small group psychosis"

By demanding a choice between 'thought' and 'action,' the various groups and individuals infected with swamp fever are promoting a false dichotomy. Clearly, the material unfolding of the class struggle leads the proletariat to self-consciousness, and therefore to a unity of theory and practice, something swamp inhabitants rail against precisely because they don't operate from a proletarian perspective.

- Stewart Home rips a new hole in the "activist lifestyle", in the midst of a fascinating diatribe against Green Anarchist primitivism.

Even Hugo knows about the serious business

Chavez stressed that, "Only the conscious peoples, in organization and in motion can make history, therefore the consciousness of our peoples, of our nations, is essential."

This is precisely why North American imperialism attacks and bombards us using their "cultural artillery"- to placate and divide the peoples, Chavez argued.

"Through offices, analysts and millions of dollars, the United States carries out a media war against our peoples and governments. With different intensities and variants but in exactly the same format," he explained.

The Venezuelan people and government have been subjected to a fierce media war for the past 10 years which was intensified in the last few months, with a dirty psychological war appealing to peoples fears, aimed neutralising the Venezuelan people, Chavez said.

Moar!

The biggest meme of the modern era

At this juncture in history, the meme pushed hardest by the industries that shape the global noosphere is the meme of polyarchy. At its simplest, this is the idea that fragmentation and paralysis are actually the preferred state of human society. Any attempt at systemic organisation or solidarity spreading beyond the village, clique or family is evil, anti-human, inefficient, doomed to failure or some combination of the above. You can see this all over not only popular discourse but intellectual narrative - from all those stories where people who want to organise or build large-scale collective action are villains, dupes or egomaniacs, to lazy use of non-concepts such as "mob rule" or "majority dictatorship", to its repackaging in a more learned form in the works of Foucault and other post-modernists.

When, in the 1940s, Joseph Schumpeter argued that ordinary citizens should limit their participation in a democracy to electing its leaders, he was effectively arguing for polyarchy.... According to Schumpeter, massive political participation is regarded as undesirable and even dangerous. Schumpeter thought that the electoral masses are incapable of political participation other than voting for their leaders. Most political issues are so remote from the daily lives of ordinary people, that they can not make sound judgements about opinions, policies and ideologies.

In Preface to Democratic Theory (1956) Dahl argues that an increase in citizen political involvement may not always be beneficial for polyarchy. An increase in the political participation of members of "lower" socioeconomic classes, for example, could reduce the support for the basic norms of polyarchy, because members of those classes are more pre-disposed to be authoritarian-minded (by which we, of course, mean in favour of actual majority rule - DlaP).

According to William I. Robinson, democracy is a contested concept. He argues that when U.S. policymakers use the term democracy, they mean polyarchy - a system in which a small group rules and mass participation in decision-making is confined to leadership choice in elections carefully managed by competing elites. Polyarchy then may be thought of as "low intensity democracy" or "consensual domination". In contrast to polyarchy, Robinson posits "popular democracy", which refers to a dispersal throughout society of political power that can be used to change unjust social and economic structures.

What polyarchy actually represents is a "hollowing-out" of democratic government in particular and all human society in general. Interestingly, it is the form of "democracy" most aggressively pushed by the actual state apparatuses, most particularly against actually democratic movements that they don't approve of. They want a "harmless", laissez-faire form of democracy that will not have either the power or the will to challenge the truly undemocratic, hypercentralised and anti-human interests of corporate capitalism. You see the contradiction here - when a political or social entity promotes centralisation and concentrated power it's evil, but somehow they don't notice that that's the natural direction of growth of capitalism. (People threw a fit about Hugo Chávez having more than 12 years in power, but how long as Bill Gates been in control of an entity with more power than Venezuela?)

"Polyarchy" is simply the system of organisation natural to capitalism - hundreds of different and competing systems of power, all dictatorial within their own little fields, but engaging in anarchic and destructive competition with each other. Democracy, as we would understand it, is certainly dictatorship - seen from their point of view, since they recognize the authority of only the government which deflects and makes harmless actual democracy, and actively attempts to fragment and atomise human consciousness.

While some push polyarchy cynically as a stick to beat democratic reformists with in places like Venezuela, others (typically members of the ideological priesthood) seem to really believe in it, and think that fragmentation and dispersal, can destroy the centralised capitalist-state system of this world, rather than it being just what that system wants its enemies to do. That's right, workers and ordinary people worldwide will simply walk out of the corporate machine and join your organic yoghurt-knitting commune en masse. Right.

Against this religious belief that somehow if we're good enough - "good" defined as adherence to the religious maxims dictated by our enemies - our enemies will simply be swept aside by good fairies, Chaos Marxism counterposes the idea that to defeat an enemy you must be symmetrical to it. We must counterpose democratic centralism to dictatorial or bureaucratic centralism. (Sadly, the term "democratic centralism" is often used to mean "idiot sect leaders playing toy-Stalin" - but I think we have to reclaim it.) I do like the way in which Ma'at Magick takes on the dialectical conclusion that it is possible for a real collective consciousness to exist without destruction of, and even contributing to the growth of, individual consciousness.

We have to take this particular demon or egregore and thoughtform on. It is so deeply embedded in the consciousness of those of us who grew up in the consumerist-corporate noosphere that we don't even notice it's there most of the time - but we certainly see its effects when it encourages us to splinter our movements, pride our private ego over the effectiveness of our collective thoughtforms, and distrust actually effective leaders. Conversely, it's in small splinter-groups that you get the really nasty dictatorial behaviour.

The great "reds under the altars" scare of 1930

Nor do I think that Bolshevism ever gained any foothold in the Lodges, though I believe it tried; as witness the application to my own fraternity. The average occultist is not interested in politics, his concern is with things invisible. Moreover, the occult fraternities are too uncoordinated and scattered to be formidable political weapons even if they were imbued with Bolshevism.

Dion Fortune lays it on the line on page 223 of Psychic Self-Defence (orig. publ. 1930 - new edition Weiser Books, 1997). Well, we'll fix that.

Seriously: I must recommend everyone out there read the above book, for the small morsels of occult good sense, the hair raising True Stories of Astral Derring Do, and the general high levels of what the young people call LULZ. I love the bit where she suggests that the downfall of Greek civilisation was due to all the buggery that went on (and then goes on to quote approvingly from The Confessions of Aleister Crowley - obviously she didn't know what the "eleventh degree" was all about). I also love all the tales which have clearly been recycled since as eps of Buffy or Supernatural, or the ones which really look like they should be.

The author's style, while stuffily Georgian in places, is also refreshing in a very "no bullshit" kind of way. It reads like a sex-ed manual from a private girl's school of the period in places, in the sense of "Now stop all that silly gossip and innuendo, here are the basic physical facts so you know how not to get yourself into trouble." You get the feeling that, while she jumps to what appear to modern eyes, even modern occultist eyes, to be insane conclusions in places, she was really on the side of good and wanted to save people from fucking up their shit. Classic quote: The three main dangers of modern occultism are immorality, drugs, and the bamboozling of silly women. Very little has changed, although of course silly men are equally ripe to get bamboozled up.

I also love the bit where she speculates about the possibilities of inducing orgasm via telepathy. Where do I sign up for that programme? If all the above doesn't convince you, then let me remind you this is the book which did its part (along with a fuckload of cocaine) in driving David Bowie crazy in 1976. What more reason do you need? As I say, it's lulzy, but you'll chuckle rather than sneer if you have one shred of deceny in your astral body - and there is some serious good advice which has passed the test of time in there, along with some tall tales which you'll end up repeating endlessly to impress the gullible.

In other news: experiment in the next 48 hours with an honest-to-Karl Chaos Marxist Initiation Ritual. Published if it's not a disaster.

My magickal motto

Sen stelsigno, sen sorto

(It is traditional for magickal mottos to be in Latin. As a Chaos Marxist, mine is in the Latin of democracy.)

A rephrasing of the political part of the model

In the modern era, in the countries rich in capital and information, the biggest and most effective weapon in the armoury of social reaction is persuading the oppressed to culturally identify with their oppressors, and to experience other oppressed groups as culturally alien, incomprehensible and threatening. This is most effectively done through mass media which encourages the masses to experience the world around them from the point of view of the ruling classes - or, more precisely, from the point of view of the cultural-professional middle classes who work for the ruling classes (analagous to how the priest in the middle ages worked in the interests of the local lord, while of course having their own identity and interests).

This ideological effect is strongest among white-collar (communication/linguistic) workers, who generally come from a social and educational background very similar to those of the media priesthood. Case in point: the press releases from the striking writers in the United States emphasise that the writers are "middle class", that is, they are pledging allegiance to mainstream America - as communication workers, they know that that's necessary to win support from those who see the world entirely through the prism of the TV screen.

When media commentators talk about the underclass, they are not necessarily talking about an objective economic differentiation (since in many cases the physical-labour workers are better off financially than those in call centres and the like). They are talking about the gap between those fluent in the language, verbal and symbolic, of the oppressor classes, and those who aren't. The camera doesn't go into the homes of those workers who don't speak the dominant verbal or symbolic language because their experiences need to be interpreted for them to make sense to our rulers. So they are kind of left to fend for themselves, like Orwell's proles, except when they riot more than the police are prepared for.

The aim is twofold: (a) to build unity between the workers in language and information, and the workers in physical production and services; (b) to learn the skills of the media priesthood to create our own "worker's symbolic universe" or "proletarian noosphere", independent from bourgeois culture (but not rejecting it - instead, building something better on its foundation). A united and successful workers movement often causes splits in the media priesthood which encourages some defections, but that's a bit of a hard road to success for anywhere outside France or Venezuela right now.

Magic, mysticism, marxism

The goal of the traditional Magus is to learn how to effectively manipulate this world of illusion in accordance with will.

The goal of the traditional Mystic is to dissolve the individual ego and will and attain cosmic consciousness, in order to see through the world of illusion.

The Chaos Marxist practice is:
a) to learn to distinguish objective reality (matter, physical energy, political economy, brute force and social practices) from subjective reality (the social myths which grow up around objective reality);
b) to recognize the consciousness or personality of both herself and others as "interpellated" (derived from the biological individual's attempts to fit in with the prevailing social practices, rather than essential to the individual) and therefore as subjective rather than objective reality;
c) to re-organise the individual consciousness to something which is more capable of being able to provoke change in objective reality, as a vanguard of a liberatory "current" of the oppressed and exploited. By recognizing that our "self" was constructed to fit in with capitalism, not to challenge it, we challenge ourselves to surpass the imposed boundaries of the self. In other traditions, I believe they call this "ego loss".

Marx declared that the proletariat were the revolutionary class, not only on the basis of their objective role in the economy, but on the supposition that this objective role led to an objective "class consciousness" that would make them capable of overthrowing the system. But Gramsci pointed out that this "good sense" was overlaid with "common sense" which develops to keep individual working people docile, obedient, and in all other ways able to survive in actually-existing capitalism. I have argued on this blog that the technologies of promoting "common sense" have leapt ahead since Gramsci's day, with the powers of mass-media marketing and psychology. We need to make that quantum leap ourselves, or keep talking to ourselves forever.

This side of the revolution, the successful revolutionary will have to learn to simulate a personality which operates on the basis of "common sense" in order to survive, while also developing a personality which operates on the basis of "good sense" in order to be effective in the struggle. "Good sense" will get you fired - "common sense" will ensure that you never actually change anything - so best to be able to pick "horses for courses". This seems to require the mystic insight that consciousness and personality is performative rather than essential (thank you Judith Butler).

You are not real. You are what you do. Lose your ego - your image of "yourself" and where "you" fit into your social setting, and your obsession with defending it - and you can become one with a current or force which can actually shape material reality. To put it in magickal terms, we are "helping create a solid egregore [conceptual entity with a will of its own] embodying the will to revolution of the most advanced section of the working masses, and subordinating the individual ego to this task". But remember that even after ego loss, there is much chopping of wood, carrying of water and posting on blogs, and you will need to recreate a kind of "pretend ego" to make this possible. Anyone who's ever been a stage performer will understand what I mean by this. Being a tool of the vanguard of the class does not mean that the demands of holding down a job, having friends, looking after your physical needs and communicating with people who're not part of your crusade will go away. Forget this, and you my friend are lost in the Abyss and need to be saved.

(Note that this is similar but different to the traditional Mystic concept of "unity with the universal will", since of course as materialists we don't believe in abstract concepts like "universal will". Also, where traditional mystics see the world as an undifferentiated unity, Marxism sees the world as a self-contradictory unity, which is why something happens rather than nothing.)

Those political or magickal groups which attempt to "insulate" their cadre from the Real World of Horrible Jobs, rather than preaching a deep involvement in them, are not only make sure their cadre will never become real leaders/Magi, but ensuring that they will just get wrapped up with another false personality, another, smaller world with the same (perhaps even nastier) games as the real world. Kill sectarianism with fire. An effective Chaos Marxist must be willing to ditch even their most cherished personality if it becomes counterproductive - and this includes the personality of "member of the revolutionary party / Magickal Order that will save the world". You may have to destroy everything you love in order to do what is necessary.

So: the Chaos Marxist has to learn the ways of (political and cultural) Magick, while also applying the tools of Mysticism to make the Magick effective. On the external side, effective political/cultural memetics, based on evoking a radical mass movement and requiring a minimum of physical resources; on the internal side, merciless criticism of the mental processes which make doing the external side of things more difficult than it should be. To be concrete: for me, the external side of things comprises International Socialist politics combined with viral marketing and Situationism, while on the internal side I'm seeing what Maat Magick coupled with a healthy SubGenius/Discordian sense of the totally ridiculous can accomplish. (An essential insight of Crowley's was that nothing banishes demons more effectively than laughter.) This is only my personal Work - I would be most interested to see what other people can accomplish, slotting their own preferred ammunition into the theoretical firearm I am creating.

Chaos Marxism is a practice meant to give an intellectual framework to the processes needed to become a revolutionary Magus - but we should never mistake the map for the territory, or forget that many of the great leaders of history got there by trial and error without the benefit of "system". In a sense, this is just a way of explaining to my people - over-educated young Westerners in the internet age - what is necessary. And, like every healthy form of Magick, it self-destructs on completion - in other words, all these mental processes by which we learn to be leaders of the class struggle will hopefully self-destruct if we ever get into a classless society. (Am I saying that the first thing the revolutionary party should do after the revolution is dissolve itself? Maybe if it doesn't self-destruct it did something wrong.)

Organic shamans of the working class

President Bush has achieved his dismal world standing despite spending $1.6 billion of hard-pressed Americans' tax money on black magic and brainwashing between 2003 and 2006.

- Paul Craig Roberts. Oh, sorry, that should read "public relations", not "black magic and brainwashing" above. Or should it?

Capitalism head-fixing technology smashes all previous forms of family and social life, and incorporates and commodifies any new social movements which do not base themselves on a clearly defined anti-capitalist political praxis. As Buddhism and the teachings of Thelema (properly understood) make clear, the individual is an illusion, something which is a result of the world we live in, not a cause.

The novelty in the current epoch of history is that the egregore of capitalism (generalised commodity production and wage labour) now dominates the majority of all human experience, and its sphere of domination inexorably expands in the absence of successful class struggle. You are what you are - I am sorry to say - because of how your personality evolved to enable you to survive under capitalism. (And if it failed to do so, I'm glad to see that they allow you to read my blog in the mental hospital or prison.)

This way of thinking bears some relationship to Althusser's concept of the individual being "interpellated" in capitalist social structures through the "Ideological State Apparatuses" of academia, media, etc. But I reject Althusser's essentially Stalinist and anti-humanist approach. All social structures are traceable back to human biological imperatives which in some cases predate our acquisition of consciousness, and the whole purpose of Chaos Marxist work is to create harmony between our essential animal nature and a technological civilisation which could enable us to transcend, rather than repress, that nature. The idea is that human individuality will become possible for the first time after capitalism. Also, he killed his wife.

Lies and delusion are the common currency of the modern era, since our rulers have decided they can no longer afford to buy our compliance with real money. Superstition, fanatical religion, fanatical religion disguised as politics, mind-control cults and cargo cults flourish in an era of social defeat. There is an "arms race" going on in current culture between the brainwashing / black magic skills of the ruling class and their ideological apparatus, and the objective despair, alienation and anger at the grassroots of society.

The bone-level anger and hatred, evoked in working people by the grimness of life as disposable labour in 21st century capitalism, expresses itself in a continuous "slow motion" riot. Working people take it out on themselves and occasionally random members of the bourgeoisie, in the shape of violence, drug abuse, sexual abuse, and property damage. Our rulers attempt to channel this continually welling hatred into mindless patriotism, hatred of religious, political or ethnic outsiders, and compulsion to buy whatever commodities will engender the illusion of being a valued part of a community for about ten minutes - like Fox News, or those reality TV shows where you get a vote which will affect collectively-experienced reality more significantly than a vote in a general election. (For the niche market who think they're too cool for Pop Idol or whatever, they've got you with the games which give you the illusion of being part of the Chosen Elite.)

Simply put: in internet-consumer culture, games and similar commodities substitute for unbearable reality. Chaos Marxism plays games as well, but as training for reality.

The task for organic intellectuals / cultural-political magi / revolutionary witches / whateverthehell can't just be coming up with the ideology needed for our side to win. We need to come up with an entire culture, and by extension, an entire identity - or at least a framework in which new and better identities of opposition can grow. If we don't do that, people have no choice but to continue to believe that they are who the TV, the teacher, the boss and the priest tell them they are. We don't just need our own academy - we need our own entertainment, we need our own mythology, until the day we break through and can just be human.

The catch is, though: how can we do this without turning into a self-absorbed sect or even a mind control cult? The basic answer is "vanguardism, not elitism" - the difference being that you can only be a vanguard if (a) you are actually, demonstrably out in front, (b) you've got a large number of people following you. If your particular Order or League or Party or whatever isn't an organic part of a mass movement and playing a leading role, don't you think it should be? The second part of the answer is: you have to have the right kind of boundaries between yourself and the mass movement, once you're in there. No boundaries and you might as well not exist. Firm, steel-hard boundaries and you'll be incapable of actually leading - your comrades will distrust you at best and hate you at worst. An actual revolutionary vanguard can't afford to have secrets or hidden agendas. To lead you have to learn as well as teach.

Sectarianism - kill it with fire

One of the chief banes of occultism is the addiction to paper credentials, authorisations, charters and the like, which it is felt lend some sort of spiritual weight, exaltation or glamour to the recipient organisation. However, the proof of the pudding is surely in the eating, and the yardstick for assessing any group can only be its creativity and vitality. Another bane is that of harking back to a supposed sort of Golden Era, in this case an imaginary homogeneous O.T.O. in Crowley's time. Now, anyone who has taken so much as a cursory glance at the history of occult orders must feel almost sea-sick from the flux and flow exhibited. Like minor political groupings, there is a succession of schisms and regroupings, alliances and splinterings.

- Michael Staley. This blog was founded on the presumption that there was a commonality of both methods and aims between post-1904 occultism and Leninist politics, but it seems that there's a commonality of pathologies as well. I mean, you'd expect it from occultists, who are generally idealists and elitists and can be forgiven for wanting to keep their intellectual bloodline pure, but why do Marxists act like this most of the time as well?

Is this kind of small-group psychosis something inherent in the nature of all small groups, or just in small groups who want to change the world? You don't hear about this happening in badminton clubs.