P.S.

Welcome to the rebirth of Anonymous as a libertarian political project. It will be interesting to see whether Freeweb undergoes the same kind of process of development as Chanology did. One of the problems with Chanology is that it merged with the existing anti-Clam protest movement, who were (let's face it) mainly ex-Clams and therefore kind of nuts. This protest, on the other hand, has at least the potential to become a REAL mass movement. And, since an unfiltered intarwebz is clearly in the self-interest of the toiling pixel-stained techno-wretches of the world (as the downfall of the poison dwarf David Mi$cavige would not be), the accusations of "moralfaggotry" (aka liberal altruism) are not going to be as damaging to this iteration of the meme. Stay tuned.

In "self-organization of nerds" news...

... trolls now have their own code of honour. Also worth noting is:

I've come to realize that without some artistic fagmastering all these free speech projects will die on the vine (as they should). I could probably write a Consensus TLDR post about this (by this meaning how you should harblecake such an enterprise) the likes of which r3x's code of trollshido / vibe / insane cocksuckery would be jealous.

(source, referring to this). "Harblecaking" means "exercising leadership in a mass movement", as applied to internet activism, with special reference to this. So the above poster is the troll equivalent of Lenin, or perhaps a Platformist.

Free love and irresponsible sex

Marxism teaches us how to change the world, not how to live our lives. If you try to adopt Marxism as a way of life, then that's what it becomes - a lifestyle option rather than politics, and you end up in a sect or a cult indistinguishable from any other small, cranky, incestuous social circle. And I use the word "incestuous" advisedly. The sexcapades of small Marxist or anarchist social circles are legendary.

You do hear about otherwise upstanding socialist groups which have an internal culture based on primitive chimp-like sexual hierarchy, where rank has its privileges, and one of those privileges is sexual access to the desirable gender(s). On a lower level, you get small-group drama like you get in any community who tends to look to itself for its romantic partners. I really think that socialists should bring back the ancestral tribal tradition of (cultural or totemic) exogamy - or, to put it in modern language, don't screw the crew.

And the really dodgy thing is when people make apparent appeals to political principles - such as the critique of the nuclear family - to justify treating their comrades, friends and lovers with disrespect. There is a difference between free love (which socialists have been historically for, and with good reason) and irresponsible sex (which is what I think so many of us actually practice). Two-facedness and using other people are not socialist virtues. I do hear that Fripp's Guitar Craft tradition has actual community guidelines for how to sex one another responsibly while on their courses, although apparently the advice for those who're just beginning the recommended practice is "keep it in your pants". Good advice.

Robert Anton Wilson was wrong, the freedom to fuck is not the keystone to all other freedoms - in fact, that very idea (that the only real freedom is the freedom of private leisure-time activity) is at the basis of bourgeois individualism. I value my freedom to fuck or not to fuck, but I value my right to my own labour and my right to democratic participation equally as high.

The song remains the same

In 2010, war was beginning:

Mr Gore was talking sense and Mr Bush nonsense - but Mr Bush won the debate. With statistics, the voters just hear a patronising policy wonk, and switch off.

For Mr Westen, stories always trump statistics, which means the politician with the best stories is going to win: "One of the fallacies that politicians often have on the Left is that things are obvious, when they are not obvious.
[...]
Thomas Frank, the author of the best-selling book What's The Matter with Kansas, is an even more exasperated Democrat and he goes further than Mr Westen.

He believes that the voters' preference for emotional engagement over reasonable argument has allowed the Republican Party to blind them to their own real interests.

The Republicans have learnt how to stoke up resentment against the patronising liberal elite, all those do-gooders who assume they know what poor people ought to be thinking.

Right-wing politics has become a vehicle for channelling this popular anger against intellectual snobs. The result is that many of America's poorest citizens have a deep emotional attachment to a party that serves the interests of its richest.

Thomas Frank thinks that voters have become blinded to their real interests

Thomas Frank says that whatever disadvantaged Americans think they are voting for, they get something quite different:

"You vote to strike a blow against elitism and you receive a social order in which wealth is more concentrated than ever before in our life times, workers have been stripped of power, and CEOs are rewarded in a manner that is beyond imagining.

"It's like a French Revolution in reverse in which the workers come pouring down the street screaming more power to the aristocracy."

Actually... no. In 1933, war was beginning:

In many German meetings around 1930 revolutionaries, such as Otto Strasser, who were intelligent and honest though their thinking was somewhat nationalistic and mystical, would say to the Marxists:

"You Marxists always point to the theories of Marx. Marx taught that theory is confirmed only in practice. But you always come up with explanations for the defeats of the Workers' International. Your Marxism has failed. The defeat in 1914 you explain with the 'defection of the Social Democrats,' that of 1918 with their politics of betrayal.' And now you have new 'explanations' for the fact that in the present world crisis the masses turn to the right instead of the left. But your explanations do not alter the fact of these defeats! Where, in the past eighty years, has there been any confirmation of the social revolution by practical action? Your basic error is that you deny or ridicule the mind which moves everything, instead of comprehending it."

These were the arguments of many revolutionaries, and the Marxists had no answer to them. It became increasingly clear that their political mass propaganda did not reach anybody except those who already belonged to the left front, simply because this propaganda referred to nothing but the objective socio-economic processes (capitalist production, economic anarchy, etc.). The elaboration of material needs, of hunger alone, was not sufficient, for that was done by every political party, even the church.

Thus, when the economic crisis was most acute, the mysticism of National Socialism defeated the economic theories of Socialism. It was evident that there was a wide gap in the propaganda and in the total conception of socialism, a gap which was responsible for its "political mistakes." It was a defect in the Marxist comprehension of political reality. True, the method of dialectic materialism had provided the means for correcting this defect, but they had not been utilized. In brief, Marxist politics had not included in its political practice the character structure of the masses and the social significance of mysticism.

The liberal middle-class media priesthood will never get this, because their actual political programme is based on rational technocracy - and the fact that the opposition are a bunch of lunatics - but their livelihood as a class depends on keeping people afraid, docile, hostile and hypersexualized via the entertainment/propaganda apparatus. The culture they create is one of narcissism and infantilised wish fulfilment, so why are they amazed that the masses don't suddenly start thinking rationally when it comes to election time?

We need, as Wilhelm Reich put it, to understand culture, sex and mysticism to build a revolutionary movement that will work - or as some songwriter put it, understand what "roses" means in the phrase "bread and roses". Sadly, the Marxist blogosphere, made up as it is of disaffected members of the media priesthood, is making precisely the same rationalistic mistakes as left-liberals always have when faced with reactionary mysticism. (Even though those of them who are actual members of Marxist sectlets make up for this with mystical appeals to the all-powerful father figures of The Party and heresy hunts when faced with opposition... You see, the repressed always returns.)

Marxism gives us the intellectual tools to change the world, but doesn't tell us how to live our lives and be human here and now in the Black Iron Prison of Capitalist Jobs and Shitty TV Programmes, except for a very vague ethic of solidarity. The most rationalistic and skeptical of Marxists will therefore have to fill in the gaps with either unexamined crap from their cultural background, or barely-examined crap they picked up from the media, or some kind of small group / cult programming. If you don't take proper care of the irrational parts of your brain, the rational part will be sabotage. Chaos Marxism aims at a revolutionary approach to the whole human personality, and its interrelations with society, nature, and whatever might lie beyond or beneath or above.

Quick thoughts before my brain melts

The "noosphere" (sphere of consciousness and culture) was conceived by Teilhard de Chardin as being the third layer of Earth, on top of the biosphere and the geosphere (living things and rocks, basically). But any good Marxist can tell that there's something missing there - the ergosphere, defined as the interaction of consciousness with living matter and rocks, without which the noosphere can't exist. ("Ergo" being Greek for "work" - you could also call it the "econosphere", but that's prone to get confusing.) To put it another way - what you do is who you are, or, your self-concept (or the collective self-concept we call "culture") is based on your interactions with real things including other people, not disembodied and floating in the air.

Humanity's evolution from the apes was fundamentally the result of the creation of the ergosphere - the invention of "work", as defined as "turning an idea in your brain into something existing in the real world". As Marx and Engels noted, this is what makes a crudely hand-chipped stone knife so much more different and interesting than a spider's web or a honeycomb, both of which are far more complex and beautiful. And that's how humans became the dominant species of the planet.

The central fact of capitalist life is alienation, being defined as the separation between your work and your life. Instead of using your brain to change the world, you spend most of your waking hours using your brain and muscles to create commodities (mass-produced interchangable things which can be sold in a market), for which someone else gives you $$$ which you can use to exchange for other commodities. Commodities fill the gap left by the lack of real human interaction - you watch TV or play computer games rather than going out and meeting people, and if you do that, odds on you have to pay for the privilege. But it's much worse now than in Marx's time, because not only material wealth has been commodified, but immaterial wealth, aka culture. Commodities have replaced actual life experience, what makes us human. I hear that in New York you can pay to go to a "cuddle party" these days.

There are nasty, gloating articles by marketing gurus which suggest that capitalism is all-powerful and eternal because it can now commodify any rebellion and make a profit from it, so it is now impossible to go outside the system. But there is one and only one way to go outside the system - workers' self-management, the end of alienation, a return to the primitive joy of the cavedweller chipping his mammoth-hunting spear, only in a collective with shiny modern technology. In other words - not by buying things, but by doing things for their use-value rather than exchange value.

Capitalism can tolerate any amount of propaganda, scatology, pornography, or memetic subversion as long as it's commodified, as long as someone's making money off it (see meditations on Avatar in the previous post). What it can't tolerate is threats to private property, the wage-labour system, and commodity production itself, put into action rather than just talked about. The hidden message of capitalist democracy is "say what you like as long as you do what you're told".

But the big problem is here - how can we survive when the enemy holds the means of production? How can you fight an enemy on whom you rely for your supplies? A new culture can only come about through a new socio-economy, which has to grow within the skin of the old, which is desperately hostile to it. But to do this, we have to live our truth - actually put into practice these ideas as much as possible in the Real World of Horrible Jobs. Being a good and docile worker, and then in your time off being a rabble-rouser and an anarchist, is a fun lifestyle but is not politics or magick.

Modern Western protest politics is built on precisely this kind of work/play opposition - it's far more fun and easy (even tolerated) to march for Palestine or Iraq or the polar bears on the weekend before clocking in at 8:30 on Monday at your widget-shifting job at Amalgamated Bastards. One example of transforming your everyday working life will do more to transform you and the world than all the marches, demos, teach-ins, punk gigs or radical film screenings in the world, because it will be real and not virtual. Similarly, hiving off and starting a commune or a "Transition Town" or similar is avoiding the question of what to do about the Corporate Megabeast, not finding a solution. Robert Fripp suggests that change in the Real World can only come as a result of working within the market without adopting the values of the marketplace. You can argue whether Fripp's got it right or not, but the slogan is a good one.

False choices: (a) do your job and be a rebel in your own time; (b) avoid the struggle by decamping to a safe space that only exists as long as you are no threat. The correct choice: (c) deconstruct capitalism by turning its own rules against it. Perhaps getting them to pay you to make propaganda against them - like Michael Moore or the first person to make a Che Guevara T-shirt - is a good start. Certainly it's doing something, however tiny, on a planetary level, rather than nothing, and one of the sure signs of narcissistic politics is believing that tiny incremental changes in the noosphere are of no importance and if we can't have RRREVOLUTION we won't bother.

One face says terrorise, the other benevolise

The Murdoch media empire, despite the usual right-wing bias of its news outlets, has not leant the use of its powerful ideological cannons to the anti-Avatar campaign for a very sound commercial reason. 20th Century Fox, which is part of the Murdoch mega-corporation News Corp, is raking in hundreds of millions of dollars in profits from the film, and envisages that it will derive hundreds of millions more from the inevitable sequel. Further, the astounding success of Avatar is a commercial vindication of the advances in technology which were gained by means of the many millions of dollars invested in its production, opening up the prospect of a revival in the profits of the US-dominated global entertainment industry.

(source)

The corporate egregore is capable of saying contradictory things at the same time. It can do this because its constituent parts are independent from, even hermetically sealed from, one another. Thus it can maximise profit, by marketing two opposite "flavours" of ideology at the same time, at the long-term expense of exacerbating the contradictions in its own noosphere. As Michael Moore says, the capitalist will sell you the rope to hang him with. The main difference is of course people are encouraged to act on the memes of terror, fear and hatred (in voting and protesting), and to channel the anti-imperialist, liberatory memes into buying consumer goods, going to see movies, and in extreme cases, new lifestyles/religions. (WARNING: link contains massive stupidity and point-missing.) So if you're sold the rope, you won't think of actually using it - probably you'll just take it home, stroke it and imagine using it.

Some leftists have suggested leafleting screenings of Avatar along the lines of "This movie is REAL! Except that the Na'vi are really called "Iraqis" and they're sitting on oil, not Unobtanium!" I'm really not sure this will work, mainly because the Na'vi belief system is fluffy, friendly neo-paganism, exactly the opposite from the Western media image of Islam. But it really won't work because the mass media consciousness doesn't really work with analogy - it can accept things literally, or not at all. Rendering people incapable of understanding analogies was one of the principles of Newspeak, remember.

Even anarchists know about the serious business

Often, our concept of what is revolutionary is not really a mature concept of true revolution. If you've ever thrown a rock through a window, you know what I'm talking about. It feels good, but ultimately, someone just comes and fixes that window. It would be nice to really dismantle something, or really create something lasting. We need comprehensive solutions-based thinking, because these are some big-ass problems we're dealing with, and when the going gets tough, daddy is not going to drive up in his SUV and solve them by throwing some money around.

(source)

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.

Short shameful confession

I used to think that I had spoiled my destiny - that I had made such bad life choices that I'd ruined the purpose of my existence and thus had no real reason to live except that suicide would make it worse. To put it in religious terms, I had disappointed God to the point that She had turned Her back on me. It looks so incredibly stupid when you write it down.

ETA: ... and, of course, in retrospect "God" actually meant "my parents".

Cult leaders and cult followers

We have previously discussed cults spiritual, therapeutic and political, and identified a common thread in that their leaders are without exception people on a "no-ego ego trip" - i.e. identifying their own ego with objective reality. But I don't think we've mentioned before that the kind of people who join a cult - and stick with it - tend to be those people who aspire to that very status, of getting an ego trip by pretending not to have an ego. Which is how cults reproduce - if it was simply a vampiric, exploitative relationship there would be no benefit to sticking with a cult. But even being the hatchet man for a cult leader, or even a lowly but valued foot-soldier, is an acceptable Identity/Ego/nafs if you don't have anything better to do with your life. "Each heavenly body gotta have its moons", as Peter Hammill put it.

But what are we to make of the "epigone" phenomenon - where the main followers of a great teacher or Master end up running her teachings into the ground in service of their own ego? It happened to the prophets Jesus and Mohammed, to Marx, Lenin and Trotsky, and ugly rumour has it it's happening to Robert Fripp. Perhaps we can argue that in the Real World of Horrible Jobs, "enlightenment", or whatever you call it when a window in your head opens and you hear the angels blowing their trumpets through it, is not transmittable. If someone doesn't get there for themselves, then no matter how accurately a Master of whatever path explains it, they will inevitably fuck it up. You can't get there unless you get there for yourself. For spiritual teachers, you have to try to emulate how they got there, not just their teachings; for the masters of craft or political theory, you have to use their methodology, not only their conclusions. Gnosis - direct experience - is the only thing that actually works. Sucking the finger won't help, you have to go where it points yourself.

A couple of thoughts...

One by Llewellen Vaughan Lee:

What the wayfarer does not initially understand is that the real work on the path is not to have access to spiritual or mystical experiences: these are given through grace. The work is to create a container for them, so they can be alive in our daily life. Part of this container is to discriminate between a real inner experience and a spiritual illusion created by the ego. Without a container or discrimination the wayfarer easily becomes lost and wastes the energy and potential of her awakening.

To put it another way - the goal is not to get metaphysically high. That's far too easy. Certainly you can eat a few mushrooms, chant and breathe in unnatural ways or even hit your head against the wall and you'll see God, or something that is trying to look like God at least. The goal is to bring something useful back from that Other World into the Real World of Horrible Jobs. As Robert Fripp puts it, you can take the elevator up to the penthouse on special occasions, but you cannot afford to pay the rent to actually live there - except if you've been saving up for a long, long time.

Another important point from above is that you don't call the Spirits. The spirits call you. The best you can do is prepare yourself so you're at least at home and awake when the Ulterior World comes knocking. All the truly great spiritual masters have a truly astounding level of humility - coupled with a wicked sense of humour.

And an original thought: the rebirth of the polytheistic nature religions in the mid-to-late capitalist era has, I feel, far less to do with a reassertion of collective unconscious or the awakening of the Goddess, than the cultural fragmentation brought on by the consumer era. Monotheistic religion suggests a tightly organised Creation supervised by an ineffable but essentially benevolent God. Polytheistic religion suggests a confusing jumble of spiritual powers, spirits, loa etc. all feuding with one another - to tap into the world of Lawrence Miles for a moment, there's a War in Heaven and humans are going to get caught in the crossfire if they don't make powerful friends among the various Godfathers. Welcome to life in the era of mass media saturation.

But Marxism agrees with the mystical monotheisms in that it's all a unity behind the scenes. The various Brands which stalk our cultural landscape like alien gods are not real - when the Muslims say that shirk is the gravest sin, what they mean is by bowing down and giving your soul-energy to a cultural phantasm. Of course, you can create your own Brand, your own cult, your own small god, carve out a little niche in the World-As-Is where you can enjoy the illusion of your separate existence and your Special Snowflake status. But all power ultimately rests in the willingness or otherwise of the working class to allow their labour to be exploited. All those phantoms will disappear when we as a class discover the magic word. It's our destiny as a species.

ETA: speaking of Fripp, here's a good article.

The enemy is protest politics

I don't care whether, on paper, you're a rabid Trot or an unreformed Stalinist or Fidel Castro's best buddy or any kind of variation on the above. The method of small-group Marxism (aka "toy-town Leninism") is identical:

1) Protest politics: get involved in every campaign you possibly can against something - against climate change, against whichever imperialist war is on at the moment, against one or other evil boss exploiting a certain group of workers. Throw all your efforts into building the movements against a particular injustice of late capitalism, or in an inchoate way against "capitalism" or "the corporates".
2) Abstract propaganda: publish a newspaper or journal and conduct meetings, conferences and seminars explaining your particular "brand" of Marxist-Leninist theory as you understand it.
3) What passes for praxis: Use your popularity and contacts built up doing 1) to get an audience for 2). Recruit to your organisation.
4) An "upsurge in class struggle" will happen, one day.
5) ???
6) RRRRREVOLUTION!

Newsflash, comrades: although your intentions are sincere and noble, the above will not work and indeed has never worked. Here's why:

a) Since Marxism is the unity of theory and practice, and in the above schema the "theory" is not the distillation of the experience of practice, but of a set of pre-set attitudes and dogmas, the above is not Marxism - or, at least, it's not actually "scientific Marxism", but absolutely identical to the way in which any religious organisation attempts to gain converts by doing Good Works. Justified by a narrative that "we are in a downturn, so we can't do revolutionary politics, which only make sense in a massive upsurge", the above schema is nothing but left-wing reformist political practice sellotaped to abstract distillations of the revolutionary theory of previous eras. In this way, the theory is actually cordoned off from the practice, and ceases to be living.
b) A sect, no matter how large, has never developed into a mass party. Not never. The Bolsheviks were a mass party founded by a sect in an unprecedented revolutionary period - not exactly the same thing. Let's put it this way - readers of this blog, imagine the biggest and most successful Marxist mega-sect in your country. Then, imagine a 1917-style total breakdown of your country's social order. Can you imagine the mega-sect becoming the leadership of a mass movement for a new order? I am willing to predict that the prospect either makes you nauseous with horror or with uncontrollable laughter.

Of course, the schema above is perfectly good if your actual goal is to build a sect, because you like being in/leading a small religious group of people who share your version of The Truth. It's a good lifestyle, insofar as lifestyles go, and people in sects do plenty of good work. But their sect will not ever, ever, become the organic leadership of a mass movement that they dream of. At best, they will end up jumping on the mass movement once it's already gotten going and may play a decent role, but we are more ambitious than that.

Of course you can't play revolutionary politics in a non-revolutionary era. But you can engage in transitional politics wherever and whenever you are. Revolutionary theory is only useful in the everyday in the sense that it offers a road to transitional theory united intimately with transitional practice.

Credo

In a Chaos Marxism special for the holiday season, let me attempt a quick profession of faith ("faith" being defined as "hope backed up with experience)...

I do not believe in a "personal God" - or, to put it another way, I do not believe that the abiding and controlling force in human affairs operates in any way analogous to that of a human ego.

I believe that humanity as a collective being has a potential destiny far more rich, deep and satisfying than that of individual egos and self-interested alliances between them.

I believe that capitalism is a social system which selects for the worst, most self-defeating behaviour in human beings. It also selects for great material wealth, and at least the (illusory?) possibility of abundance for all.

I believe we have to build the future we have with the people we have. We have to build a world where we can all safely transcend our individual egos, with people who have been trained to think of nothing but their little egos.

I believe that individual solutions by their very nature cannot save our collective species-being. In the same way that buying organic vegetables will not do a thing to smash the system of exploitative agribusiness, mediation and purifying your own little ego will not do a thing to destroy the social forces which select for bad behaviour. Only collective struggle can dod that.

I believe that no god or alien or ascended master will save us unless we save ourselves. However, I believe that in some circumstances the idea of "God" or "benevolent Space Brother" or "ascended Master" might represent a source of psychic/cultural energy we can call upon to save ourselves.

I believe in the inexpressible benevolence of the creative impulse, as something implicit in human nature and therefore in Nature itself.

Follow me follow, down to the hollow

In an effort to get more of a community feel to this place, I've added the Followers widget. I've complained before about how most of the time I feel like I'm yelling into an empty void - or perhaps a darkened theatre where I can't see whether there's anyone there or not. Occasionally someone yells back, sometimes even encouragingly, and those are good movements. But what I really want is people to come up on the stage with me.

Oh, and for your daily dose of mysticism:

"Mistress, what is enlightenment?"
"Did you ride your bicycle here?"
"Yes."
"Then you should go adjust the brakes and gears."

Oh crap

When I made the intention to "lose my ego so that God / the current of the new Aeon / the inexpressible benevolence of the creative impulse could shine through", perhaps I should have thought more clearly about what that would actually mean in practical terms. For a start - giving up all your hopes and dreams of success, achievement, pats on the head, gold stars, groupies; and learning to embrace pain, humiliation, degradation, etc.

The price for seeking a clearer vision of reality is the possession of that vision. "Better to remain asleep", indeed.

Thinking about perfection will only screw you up

I think now I understand what Christians mean when they talk about being "humble before God". Essentially, it's giving up on dreams of perfectibility and potential omnipotence - it's internalising the bitter axiom that you will never, ever be good enough, but that doesn't excuse you from the continual struggle to get better. This kind of humility is essential for all wannabe teachers and leaders (although I'm not sure what an atheist equivalent would be - "humble before the vast universe"? "humble before the inexpressible benevolence of the creative impulse"?) - the knowledge that, just because you're the smartest or least fucked-up person in the room, that doesn't mean you're not still dumb and/or fucked up in some ways. No matter how enlightened you are, you will never have the right to throw your weight around like you speak for the Absolute.

You can see how this is necessary in radical politics as well as spirituality. A sure sign of a cult is a leadership which does not have this kind of humility - a leadership which sees their ideas as The Truth (rather than a better-or-worse approximation thereunto), and therefore claims throwing-weight-around rights, and interprets opposition and dissent as ipso facto invalid due to ignorance or even malice. We're supposed to be scientific Marxists, right? So for Uncle Charlie's sake let's start acting like science - where everything we believe is a hypothesis about reality which is continually open to challenge via the test of practice. No infallible programmes, not now, not never - programme fetishism is the Trotskyist equivalent of mediaeval scholasticism (aka "everything we need to know can be looked up in the Classics").

Several seekers after Truths spiritual or political need to internalise the opposite end of this axiom - that they will never but never find a Perfect Master or Uniquely Correct Leadership. You get people out there who will refuse to commit to any cause which isn't run by perfect saintly geniuses who never do anything wrong and don't have any weird personal quirks. Which great leader throughout history hasn't been some kind of weirdo? Karl Marx had an unpleasant personality and picked pointless fights. Lenin, Trotsky, and rumour has it Martin Luther King couldn't keep their hands off of teh ladeez. Hugo Chávez doesn't get enough exercise and has unpleasant habits picked up from being a military commander. Robert Fripp could be described as passive-aggressive and nitpicky. So freakin' what. You have to serve someone, as Bob Dylan put it - or, to put it another way, you have to make a commitment to something to make any change in the World-As-Is. You can always change commitments later, but the ability to make a commitment and stick to it (even if it's a mistaken commitment, as long as you learn from that mistake) is sign one that you are capable of acting as a channel for something better.

So, if you want to be a Chaos Marxist - and I'm not sure anyone does, including me - the first step is find a political party and a spiritual/psychotherapeutic group and make a commitment to them. I find that so difficult myself, of course. Part of the problem is that I hate anyone being critical of me, opposed to me or even disinterested in me, and all of those come with the territory of any serious commitment. For example, handing out leaflets on the street is terrifying because of the voice in my head which tells me that people despise me for doing this and I'd be better to run and hide. It doesn't help that radical political circles in most countries have been trained in a kind of sub-Leninist "hate speech" approach to opponent organisations. But... the question is, do I want to be able to make a difference, or do I want to protect my fragile ego? To ask the question is to answer it.

Life is so much easier when you realise you're not real

Dion Fortune came up with a line which as most of you know has been misused the hell out of by fluffy-bunny wannabe-pagans since Gerald Gardner was a cowboy; All gods are one God, and all goddesses are one Goddess, and there is only one Initiator. Now from a CM viewpoint I don't think we can agree with that. Gods and goddesses are individual memetic/cultural entities which are all subtly different from one another - even from one group of believers to another. (I doubt that the Christ worshipped by Quakers is the same as that worshipped by the snake-handling churches, for example.) Dion's statement is, I fear, almost the kind of thing that the phrase "monotheism is imperialism in religion" was made for - like when the Romans went around translating "Woden" as "Mercury", etc.

But, on the other hand, I think Chaos Marxism can safely say: All mysticism is one Transpersonal Practice. Let's face facts - if it works, it must be founded on some material principle, reproducible in practice, and therefore all those different words and concept systems must point to the same essential technology. For exactly the same reason that when Edison and Swann both invented the lightbulb, it was not possible that the two bulbs could have worked in fundamentally different ways. The laws of the Universe are the same whereever you stand, thank you Einstein.

We distinguish between, on one hand, scientific study of what actually works in practice, drawing commonalities of technology between all the different ways of "changing consciousness at will"; and religious/sectarian warfare. The latter is nothing but arguing about what words and pictures you use to describe something. It's not science, it's a territorial pissing contest, in which the piss is different pet symbol systems. A prime example of this in leftist political discourse is the people who have rendered the words "fascist" and "socialist" almost inoperative by indiscriminately apply them to Stuff We Don't Like. One of the aims of this blog's practice is to work out a kind of neutral, scientific vocabulary - but also to point out that the place where the rubber hits the road is the place where language breaks down altogether.

The Zen guys know this very well, as does Terry Pratchett (your best wishes for his continued health, please), and of course Uncle Karl. Things are what they are, not symbols for something else. Destroy all words, destroy all symbols, only direct apprehension of material reality irrespective of any abstractions leads to a sustainable practice. "What's real, what's not real, and what's the difference", to quote Esmeralda Weatherwax, is the content of enlightenment.

Oh, and by the way: you are one of those things which is not real. "You" are a series of habits, associations between things, and behavioural patterns. You're probably less real than a computer program, because at least a computer program is designed to have some internal consistency. Sorry, but once you grasp that, you can actually realise how little of "everyday reality" is actually real.

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PS. Philip K Dick and similar gnostics talk about the Good Divine Principle infiltrating and subverting the material world of the Demiurge. Marx talked about the spread of rational working-class consciousness - Gramsci called it "good sense" - overthrowing the illusory reality of capitalism - Gramsci called it "common sense". Freud said "where id was, ego should be". All the same things.

I feel I owe you guys an explanation.

The last month or two I've been desperately (and I belive that's the correct adverb here) engaging in the Greater Work, attempting to strip away whole layers of my personality, so as to facilitate the merging with the emerging implicate order of the New Aeon which I keep talking about here.

It's extremely difficult. I am actually trapped, at the moment, by massive feelings of shame and personal inadequacy, based on experiences in my past which will be of no interest to you. Oh, and I've been reading a lot of Phil Dick. That never does wonders for one's grasp of reality.

But, the upshot is that I don't think I have anything to say I ain't said before ("I've bled all I can, I won't bleed no more...") It may well be that my work right here is done. It may well be that this blog now contains all the information which is going to come out of the Chaos Marxist meme - or rather, out of my consciousness on the basis of that meme. I wonder whether any other "social gnostic" activist will pick up the ball and run with it. And I wonder whether I will ever find ways to turn these ideas into action.

I've said previously that all the best stuff on this blog comes from "somewhere else" - that is, it is inspired literature, written in the voice of someone or something far more powerful and wise than Doloras. No, I haven't seen any pink light, and no, my cats haven't died of brain tumours.

In a sense, the essential problem (as the Muslims know well) is forgetfulness. Once you're up to your ass in alligators, it's difficult to remember that you were going to drain the swamp. Once you're in the Black Iron Prison, the MACHINE, the inferior creation of the Demiurge, exploitative class society, the Real World of Horrible Jobs, it seems that everything that you've ever experienced which suggests that this is not, in fact, real was just a happy dream of some sort.

I STILL ATEN'T DEAD

A new aphorism for you:

Any group, religious or political, which puts its internal workings higher in priority than its intervention in the Real World of Horrible Jobs is a sect going-on-cult.

Predecessors

And there I was thinking I was all unique and cool because I realised that the "activist lifestyle" was the enemy. Some French libcoms got there already 40 years ago:

One cannot help being struck by the innumerable resemblance's which bring together militancy and religious activity. The same psychological attitudes can be found : the spirit of sacrifice but also the intransigence, the will to convert yet also the spirit of submissiveness. These resemblance's extend to the domain of rituals and ceremonies : sermons on unemployment, processions for Vietnam, references to the sacred texts of marxism-leninism, the cult of emblems (red flags). Don't the political churches also have their prophets, their great priests, their converts, their heresies, their schisms, their practising militants and their non- practising sympathisers! But revolutionary militancy is only a parody of religion. The richness, the insanity, the excesses of religious projects are beyond it; militancy aspires to seriousness, it wants to be reasonable, it believes that in exchange for this it can win a paradise here below. It doesn't even achieve this much. Jesus Christ is resurrected and ascends into heaven. Lenin decomposes in Red Square.

Although the authors hilariously demolish the pomoposities of the activist culture of the time, both Leninist and anarchist, the problem was that their organisation (the OJTR) never actually managed to perpetuate itself or play a role in the class struggle. So let that be a warning - here's an aphorism for you, the only valid criticism is constructive criticism. Anyone who offers criticism without offering a practical alternative is working for the forces of inertia and despair.

Here's some other anarchists talking about the problem with the "activist lifestyle". I am particularly intrigued by an argument that "radical activist" is an identity produced by capitalist society, just like being a cop or a priest or a teacher. I suppose "Magus" or "witch" is as well - the counter-culture is always-already implicated in the dominant culture, which of course could be seen as a source of strength and connected, if "activists" and "magickians" weren't too busy trying to persuade everyone that they were speshul li'l snowflakes.