Is it possible to combine non-dualist spirituality, revolutionary socialist politics, modern insights into culture and memes, a skeptical attitude and a sense of humour? Only one way to find out.
We hereby disavow the "Old Chaos Marxism"'s interest in "meme magic" for the following reasons:
The fascists got there first and did it better (or at least did it as successfully as possible).
We should have predicted they should do that, because as Walter Benjamin identified in the 1930s, fascism is precisely turning politics into aesthetics.
Meme politics are stupid politics. We announce Gresham's Law of Memetics: boomer memes drive out dank memes. Memes which appeal to the dumbest, grossest part of the lizard brain spread further and faster (as is being proved in practice by mainstream conservative media operators as we speak).
Communist politics are supposed to be about coming to consciousness. But with great consciousness comes great responsibility. Fascism is a fantasy of childish irresponsibility in which Great Leader allows you to do whatever you want in return for loyalty, and that is precisely its appeal.
It's no coincidence that when actual "communists" try meme politics, you arrive at tankie politics - politics which are identical to "channer fascism" in their nihilism, delight in violence, aggressive anti-intellectualism and bootlicking to the biggest bully on the block, only with swastikas being replaced by hammer-and-sickles, with racial nationalism replaced by a sick, Red-Brown "proletarian nationalism" (which is in fact lumpen-populism and majoritarianism, as shown in the cringing support for Han Chinese racial nationalism draped in a red flag in Xinjiang, Hong Kong etc).
New Chaos Marxism pivots to building consciousness, and therefore immunity to memes. Memes work by subverting the rational mind ("slow" mind) in favor of the "heuristic" mind, the "monkey" mind, the mind that works on like/dislike; Chaos Marxist aims to marry the two.
But how?
It can't be done on an individual basis because there is no way for an isolated individual to know whether she is a noble defender of The Truth who sees things that the slack-jawed yokels can't understand; or just a crank (the two look identical from the inside).
But it's difficult as hell to do it in a group because most groups are brought down by their own internal bullshit: ego-centricity and meme-based thinking feed off and are fed by clique politics and abusive/authoritarian leadership.
"Truth" (in the sense of learning to create change in objective reality in conformity with intention) can only be identified in a praxis group (a group melding theory and practice). The long-term goal of Chaos Marxism is to turn humanity as a whole into a praxis group, healing the split between theory and practice.
All groups are problematic but some groups are more problematic than others.
For a long time we resisted the idea of "prefiguration", the idea that groups that want to change the world have to embody their own principles. It seemed far too close to the hippie bullshit of change the world to change yourself: i.e. a recipe for doing nothing but jerking yourself off to your own saintliness for not actually doing anything. But we hate to say it, a group that doesn't embody reflexivity (being able to smell its own bullshit) and making its own desires and ego subservient to the search for Truth will not only degenerate into a circle-jerk, a cult or a money-making enterprise, but will actually degrade the consciousness of its own members.
A group aspiring to be a real praxis group will be able to smell its own bullshit, and must expect a commitment from its members that they themselves will at least make every effort to smell their own bullshit.
Much like B. B. Rodriguez, I only like mobs when I'm leading them
To sum up in a sentence, the project of Chaos Marxism was to try to build links between two of my main interests - classical Marxist politics and magick/mysticism - through materialist approaches to cultural studies, religion, the sociology of movements and transpersonal psychology, all filtered through a Church of the SubGenius style gonzo-rant aesthetic.
Early posts in this blog extolled the concept of meme politics - the idea that a liberatory anti-capitalist political project could be spread through something like the Anonymous internet mob phenomenon which grew out of 4chan /b/, the asshole of the Internet, and secondary websites like Encyclopedia Dramatica.
Well, the future is here, and it FUCKIN' SUCKS.
Do you guys know about QAnon? That's pure meme politics of the type I used to foresee. It's also a bloodthirsty fascist braindeath cult, operated by grifters and exploited by mainstream political operators. (The latter is the classic relationship, of course: the original Nazis were despised by mainstream German conservatives as dumb thugs, but were cynically used to bash the Left with.)
The main problem is that meme politics are stupid politics, in its current form. It's effectively precisely because it destroys consciousness - it encourages people to switch off their minds. YouTube is a hive of conspiracy theories and fascism not just because of its algorithm, but because studies have showed what Chaos Marxism always understood - that people will believe absolute garbage if it's in video form with smooth graphics and creepy music, that they would reject if they saw it written on the page. ETA: Memes are aesthetics; Walter Benjamin said that turning politics into aesthetics was an essential point of fascism. You do the match.
Some wiseacre on Twitter was recently saying that QAnon in particular is something like the Snow Crash mind virus, creating a "human botnet" which will do whatever the signals tell it (or, for the real nerds, the Remote from the Faction Paradox universe). So, Q can tell someone "$30 grand and I'll instruct my minions to stalk and harass that café down the road which gave you bad service". Tell them that they're harvesting adrenochrome from babies in its basement or something.
(As I've said before, Anonymous didn't have to wind up in
GamerGate, QAnon and similar fascist online mobs - but its
anti-capitalist, anti-systemic leadership were taken out when Lulzsec
was destroyed.)
So if Chaos Marxism still has a project, I suppose it'll be something like trying to create a vaccine (or a psychological anti-virus program) that will make socialist movements immune to meme politics. And it would have to be something like creating an intellectual culture in the movement, rather than some kind of individualist CBT thing.
Could memes be used to convey positive messages? Yes. But let's face it - it was always an elitist idea, the cynical idea of overriding people's conscious minds and appealing straight to the preconscious. Chaos Marxism now rejects that in favour of what Marx himself, as well as Sigmund Freud, wanted - bringing ourselves and the whole world to full consciousness, so we can no longer be worked like a puppet by cynical meme-lords.
Anyway, check out this lady, she seems to be working in a similar tradition.
...contemporary life is locked into a situation in which it can only see its magicians as isolated hermits who withdraw into the cultivation of a superior ego, when in fact the visionary is nothing without the pack, truibe, or band - in a word, the collective he or she servces. The becomings-animal, -woman and -molecular undertaken by the shaman are not self-serving, but ultimately for he purpose of the healing and transformation of a social body, and of the earth itself. Contact with what I would call the "shamanic virtual" - a plane of consistency populated by ancestors, totems, and spirits - is not primarily for the ecstatic enjoyment of the visionary. In fact, it is much more like a hallucinatory illness that the shaman sustains for the sake of the people. And the joy of the shaman's song comes directly from the pain of the people.
- Joshua Ramey, The Hermetic Deleuze (2012) p. 217
In The Adventures of Pinocchio, and the Disney cartoon based thereupon, our favourite puppet-lad is enticed away from schooling and upright behaviour to a place known as Toyland in the original (Pleasure Island in the film), where kids just bum around all day smoking big cigars, etc. And then they get turned into donkeys and are forced into slave labour.
It's a very interesting trope, that of children being warned of about the evil, substitute parent, who will promise them everything their little childlike hearts could desire... in return for enslavement and abuse. Yes, up to and including rape. And this trope is of course based on reality. Hey, remember that cute little song about "The Big Rock Candy Mountain"?
Originally the song described a child being recruited into hobo
life by tales of the "big rock candy mountain". Such recruitment
actually occurred, with hobos enchanting children with tales of
adventure called ghost stories by other hobos. In proof of his
authorship of the song, McClintock published the original words, the
last verse of which was:
The punk rolled up his big blue eyes
And said to the jocker, "Sandy,
I've hiked and hiked and wandered too,
But I ain't seen any candy.
I've hiked and hiked till my feet are sore
And I'll be d--ned if I hike any more
To be buggered sore like a hobo's whore
In the Big Rock Candy Mountains.
And there's another, much less funny song called "The Appleknocker's Lament" which tells a brutal story of a young boy being enticed by these ghost stories into a life of sex slavery/regular slavery.
The healthy parent sets boundaries and thus enables the child to develop boundaries of their own. The abusive parent, the abusive partner, the authoritarian political or religious leader, does not allow boundaries; and in return gives the victim/follower permission to act out their darkest fantasies.
We've mentioned before that what authoritarian parenting/politics/religion provides is an excuse for bad behaviour. You see these scumbags coming out of the woodwork as out and proud Nazi racist misogynists now that the Orange Goblin squatting in the White House has given them the signal that that's okay? Remember that Futurama episode where Zapp Brannigan tells his crew that as long as they're "loyal", they can sit around drinking beer in their underpants? And then later they find out that "loyalty" means going on a suicide mission? Exactly the same thing. Hitler took an advanced civilised nation on a goddamn suicide mission with him, in return for 12 years getting to push Jews and Commies around and feeling that they were making Germany great again.
It's no fun being one of the souls that tread the knife's edge, living in liminal space, never having a home to go to. Even the cliques of Weirdo Kids treat you like crap if you challenge the groupthink and the shibboleths.
A commitment to The Truth, to al-Haqq, to the Bodhisattva Vow means giving up on everything that either The Culture and The Counterculture offer you - no security, no permanent paid gig, no subcultural social capital, no fan club, no grovelling disciples punching out your enemies.
It also means living "without lust of result", as Uncle Aleister put it. You might never see Full Communism in your lifetime. You might live to see the end of bourgeois liberal democracy. Or even the end of human civilisation. You might see your kids or grandkids hunting cancerous rats for food in a "Syria gone global + Mad Max scenario". (Always remember that what happens in "those other countries where brown people live" is a testing ground for what they will do to YOU and your friends and family if you ever become a threat. There are not two places with a bridge between - there is only one place.)
Funnily enough, if what we're doing does become useful to "the normies", it will be because The Shit Has Hit The Fan and normal human reality has collapsed. We will have lessons to teach in that case. The good scenario is that we will die in anonymity, our struggle unappreciated by wider humanity.
The question as always is, short of The Revolution/The Apocalypse, how to live in The Real World of Ordinary Jobs - as well as we can - while not being of it. To combine having a family, a life, a career, all those normal human things with a commitment to a path of what Alice A. Bailey called Love In Action. If we don't feed our ego as well as but separately from doing The Great Work, then The Great Work will be sucked up into our ego and we'll become just another subcultural capitalist. You can't save humanity while investing your psychic energy in a little club of oddballs which thinks it's better than the rest of humanity.
You must learn to love your brothers and sisters who don't know The Law, while never ceasing to follow The Law yourself. Love is the Law.
One of the reasons for the year's sabbatical I took from this project - and for the rather depressed and mopey posts for a year or two before that - was that I had come to the conclusion that the goddamn fascists had eaten our lunch. It wasn't inevitable that *chan-based meme culture would become White Nationalist Boogie Wonderland. Anonymous - as came out of Chanology and went on to become a social movement which put the fear of the Lord into various governments and multinational corporations after that - was smashed by state action, with the help of various informants, in the 2013-14 period. Meanwhile, the culture was being deliberately infiltrated by meme-planting Nazi scum, co-ordinated ("marblecaked", as we used to say) from Stormfront. The vacuum was filled.
Bear with me for a moment while I go on one of my Abe Simpson-style long stories that don't go anywhere ("I tied an onion to my belt, which was the style at the time..."
Many moons ago I was rooming with a guy who was an Army Reservist, a generally decent character but a "bro" in every sense of the world. One night I was woken from a slumber because he'd gotten a bunch of his buddies around to watch porn. I got up and, being young and naive, had no idea what the attraction was. That's just gross, I said. Look at that guy, he's naked except for a false nose, glasses and a tie because he's ashamed to be in this. The sex is not erotic in any way, you can't actually be getting turned on by this. Why exactly do you watch this stuff?
He looked at me as if I was stupid, and said: "Because it's naughty."
THERE, comrades and friends, lies the central secret of meme culture. Being bad is its own reward. Lacan spoke of this as jouissance, the pleasure which turns into pain, the obscene pleasure which is commanded by the very Law forbidding it. The chief cause of crime is the criminal law, as R. A. Wilson might have put it.
And the problem with the modern Left is that we're too good for our own good. The glory days of social-liberal politics were the 60s and 70s Reichian hippies, making their stand for (a very masculinized) sexual liberation. Once they took cultural power in the early 80s, sexual libertinism became the new orthodoxy, which is why you had the Alex P. Keatons of the era rebelling against it and becoming Reagan Youth. Then the hippies came back as the neo-shamansand ravers of the 1990s and fought against the orthodoxy of neoliberal rationality/rationalism. Now we've once again swung back to the point where - as the noted asshole P. J. Watson puts it - "conservatism is the new punk rock".
What I'm saying is that the modern neoliberal-Left is aligned with the Superego against the Id. Liberal politics or conservative-left politics (as opposed to radical-left politics) are all about restricting how people talk, restricting how people can behave, setting rules of the type which are beloved by both neoliberalism and traditional SocDem statism. People keep saying this, or at least saying that the modern alt-right/neo-fascist movement is "the Id" come to life - in the case of the Dorito Mussolini now squatting in the White House, someone called him "a YouTube comments box come to life". Remember how everyone has been saying for the last 10 years don't read the comments? Well, that didn't work as a self-defence mechanism for the neoliberal orthodoxy of the mass media, because the repressed always returns. (The metaphor of anonymous Internet comments as being "below the lines" of the article is a pretty clear spatial metaphor of their psychic role, just like Jung's dream of successive sub-basements, later ripped off by Lovecraft in "The Rats in the Walls".)
To sum it up, the "Left can't meme" because it is clearly more fun to be a Nazi in the year 2018.
***
I raised this issue on the CM Facebook group and I got a lot of valuable counterarguments. One ran thus:
The left CAN meme. Just browse /leftypol/, or even some parts of leftbook.
Ha ha, but /leftypol/ is not the Left. At least, it's not the Left that Chaos Marxism wants anything to do with it. Those fuckers are mostly tankies.
(If you're a tankie, you've read too much already. GTFO OFF THIS BLOG!!!)
Now let me backtrack slightly and I do know some very decent comrades who do come out of the self-described Marxist-Leninist tradition.* A "tankie" is not just someone who goes carryin' pictures of Chairman Mao. A "tankie" is historically someone who believes in the Russian Tanks road to socialism - someone who not only sees nothing wrong with building a new world on the crushed bones of the Bad People, but actively sees that as a good thing. The "new world" they want is a properly organised one, not a democratic-egalitarian one. As Trotsky noted, the British aristocratic Fabian reformers Beatrice and Sidney Webb hated the Russian Revolution until it was thoroughly Stalinised.
* Note that Trots never call themselves MLs, but just "Leninists", or
"Bolshevik-Leninists" on occasion. Chaos Marxism is anti-Stalinist,
post-Trot and post-Leninist.
A tankie is someone who reuses the
iconography of the Stalin and post-Stalin/Warsaw Pact era, not in the
sad, half-ironic sense that another neo-Leninist might (as melancholic
reminders of a future which never happened), but in that they
actually think Joe Stalin, the Gulags, the Great Purge, barbed wire and
concrete walls right through the centre of Europe, corrupt rule by an
arrogant bureaucracy etc., were a good thing and they would bring them
back (or defend them, in the case of the DPRK or even modern China).
Because Joe Stalin (Enver Hoxha, the Korean Kim Dynasty, etc) were tough guys, Big Daddies, who pwned the hated enemy.
Because that's the final argument isn't it? The Red Army chased Hitler
back to the Berlin bunker and therefore Stalin was just all right by me.
What exactly is the difference between this and a MAGA-hat wearing, Pepe-meme sharing Trumpist? You tell me.
"Horseshoe theory" is centrist bunkum. There is no inevitable identity between the
far left and the fascist right. Stalinism at least paid lip service to democratic ideals that outright fascism happily danced on the grave of. But there always has been an essential identity, a "dirty secret" shared between Stalinism and the fascist right. Stalinism is essentially red-brown politics,
not socialism but a disgusting parody of socialism which has a sneaking
affinity for actual fascists. Before there was Stalingrad, there was
the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, and before that there was the Third Period,
the German Communists actually lining up with the Nazis
against the hated social democrats and liberals. Sam Charles Hamad (who doesn't speak to me anymore) was the first to point out that this wasn't just realpolitik, "enemy's enemy" stuff, but that the Stalinists had a programmatic commonality with the fascists - against the alliance of the Western allies, for strong-state autarky and an "ordered" society. And we're going back
there, in the form of the Berners 4 Trump, "Lexit", Putin and Assad =
Cool Bastards "alt-left".
Meme-Stalinism, then, is nothing but *chan-fascism with different-colored memes. Just masochistic surrender to Big Daddy as a fuck you to a liberal establishment which COMMANDS you to be liberated and to think for yourself. Leonard Cohen said "give me back the Berlin Wall, give me Stalin and St. Paul", but that was irony. If that's your proof that "the Left can meme", I don't want any part of it.
Chaos Marxism stands against the tide, in opposing both neoliberal "don't read the comments" goodthink and red-brown masochistic authoritarianism. Give us proof that our Left can meme. Please.
... okay, I don't like to end on a down note, so here's a song the best Leftist meme of 2017:
As we have always said here, textual fundamentalism is the enemy. As any postmodern literary theorist can tell you, a text can bear any interpretation a reader puts on it. Textual fundamentalism - "if it's in X BOOK it's true" - either turns into solipsism, with every nutbar reading into the texts what she wants to see; or into crypto-personalism in that you need an Imam or a General Secretary to tell you what the text really means. And then you get into meta-personalist silsilas, or chains of authority - Lenin interprets Marx for us, Stalin interprets Lenin, Mao interprets Stalin, history of shaving.
Bear with me a moment - I heartily recommend the works of Michael Muhammad Knight in general, and Why I Am A Salafi in particular in the current juncture. Some of you may have a wrong idea by reading excitable "war on terror" screeds from either the crypto-fascist Right or the neo-Stalinist Left, that Salafi means "the bad kind of Muslim", House of Saud/al-Qa'ida/Da'esh style. In fact, as MMK explains, the term actually means those who attempt to follow the example of the salaf, Prophet Muhammad's original companions, and to critically appraise or chuck out wholesale the 13 or 14 centuries of Islamic civilisations and movements that followed.
Now, this may lead, depending on which authorities you follow as to what was actually being done in 7th century CE Arabia, to cutting off thieves' hands and selling concubines. Or, it may lead - as it has in the case of the followers of Rashid Khalifa or Edip Yuksel - to ultra-progressive Islam of the type which suggests that Muhammad's "true" message was similar to liberation-theology Christianity and all those verses of the Qur'an which are troubling to modern liberals were mistranslations by The Conspiracy. See, textual fundamentalism gets really odd-ball when you're not only interpreting the original texts but suggesting one, true, correct translations into other languages.
But any Marxist will see the similarities with our own tradition. The reason I didn't get into the Marxist or Leninist traditions until quite late in life was that my lived example, when I was young, were the kind of Trotskyists who solved every problem with appeals to the Holy Scriptures - the Gospel according to St Karl, the Letters of St Leon to the Schismatic Belgians, etc etc etc. And like the Bible or the Qur'an, the Collected Works of the Marxist Prophets are so voluminous that you can find quotations to prove anything you want to prove. Lenin, in particular, was an effective politician precisely because he was not afraid to practice exactly what he had been preaching against two years ago, if he thought it would work.
Anyway, I had enough of a background in fundamentalist Christianity that that method of arguing held no interest to me. It doesn't matter what anyone said or wrote, except to the extent that it offers a guide to action - and those actions can only be judged by their results. I enjoy reading Lenin of 100 years ago, for example, on why a "United States of Europe" would just mean a cartel of the existing colonial empires, as an argument made by a clever politician of a different era. But if you use that as an authority to argue for Brexit today, you are as brain-dead as any Saudi sheikh using hadith to argue that women shouldn't drive.
Anyway, here's MMK on "pamphlet Islam", which was supposed to be the point:
... one of the dominant themes of what I called "Islam" in my teen years was Islam's awesome clarity: The message presented itself as so simple that it could fit inside a pamphlet with large font and bullet points. For me to reconsider my teen Salafism, I'd have to reconsider what Omid Safi has called "pamphlet Islam": an Islam forged in the "serious intellectual and spiritual fallacy of thinking that complex issues can be handled in four or six glossy pages". These expressions of "pamphlet Islam," readily available at almost any Islamic center, bear titles such as "The Status of Women in Islam" or "The Islamic Position on Jesus" and thus rely on the assumptions that (1) there is such a possibility as a definitive "Islamic position" on anything, and (2) the author has the "Islamic position" on an issue nailed down firmly under his/her control, with no room for it to move...
Safi argues that we can and must do better than "pamphlet Islam" and I agree, but I'm also afraid that our efforts might only produce bigger pamphlets. Progressive Muslim reformism, with all its performance of theoretical sophistication, sometimes makes for its own counterpamphlet that's no less simplistic.
Some ex-Spartacists made a similar point about their former comrades in the late 80s:
the Spartacists have decided that Soviet
defensism is the "central question" at all times and in all places. Those who
don’t agree are automatically denounced as State Department socialists.
This travesty of the Trotskyist position of defense of the Soviet Union has one
advantage. It is easy to teach to new recruits. But if revolutionary politics
were so simple a moderately intelligent myna bird could learn the formula in a
matter of weeks.
Add to this the comment I say from some old "M-L" online saying that the best thing he loved about the works of Stalin was that "they were easy to understand and digest", as opposed to high-philosophical Marx or clever-clever Trotsky. I hope you can see the point I'm making. Especially re: Syria and now Iran. If the politics or the religion are straightforward and don't need you to think, it's probably not healthy.
It is said that the sport of rugby was invented in 1823 when a kid playing football at Rugby School, England, just decided to run up the field holding the ball, which was previously not part of the rules -
thus creating his own, new set of rules*. This is the same phenomenon as Nietzsche spoke about with the Übermensch. Those great Gnostic movies of the late 90s, Dark City and The Matrix, made the case that the Nietzschean Superman (in gender-neutral form, natch) is someone who can literally walk through walls or through hails of bullets, because they have realised that the Black Iron Prison we all live in is not real, that Big Brother is not in fact watching you at all, that the law of Karma/gravity is only a physical one, that There Is No Spoon. But shorn of the special effects, the real message is that the one who is "beyond good and evil" can simply ignore social rules and norms and thus do what they want.
That's what you're really talking about here, expanded from the playing field to the social field. As the noted screenwriter John Rogers, a man who has written a lot of entertaining stuff on criminality and is something of an expert on it, notes:
6] The ability to lie, WITHOUT SHAME and SUFFERING NO SHAME WHEN CAUGHT, in American culture is a superpower. It's Neo in the Matrix
The man who will literally say anything and is impervious to being rebutted or shamed or called out is the bad kind of Übermensch who can only be brought into line by force alone.
So what is the difference between a Nietzschean Superperson, a cartoon supervillain, and the Gnostic/Buddhist/Sufi enlightened one / qalandar / Holy Fool? Old comic books offer us the example that Superman and Batman both live by a code (eg: they don't kill anyone, not even if they desperately need killin'). Superman, in particular, was created by two left-wing Jews and spent his early comic book adventures beating up on slumlords and other predators upon the innocent.
It is therefore possible to live outside of the Law, beyond good and evil, beyond what anyone else thinks about you. But if you don't write your own law, and live by it, you become a monster, a "Black Brother" (not to be confused with a Funk Soul Brother). The problem with being able to walk through walls is that ordinary people kind of rely on those walls to live their lives. Otherwise you're just a giant in the playground kicking over people's sandcastles, and people themselves for that matter, not even because they deserve it but because you no longer give a shit. This is of course why a liar - who knows what he says is false - is much less dangerous than a bullshit artist - someone who just doesn't care.
* Much like Jedidiah Springfield, this may only be a legend, but the point still stands.
=== ETA: How could I forget? Far too many on the Left are forgetting that the difference between us and the Right is that we are aiming at building a new collective reality, a True Mass Enlightenment - not just allowing some Giant in the Playground to kick ass on our behalf, an authoritarian Daddy who will kick over the walls on people we think should be hurt. These are the people who suckle at the teets of every personality cult, turning flawed leaders like Lenin or Chávez into religious icons, metastasizing cancers on socialist discourse; these are the people who think that criticisms of the Corbyns or the Sandersersers is treason. These are people who would flip to fascism in a heartbeat if they thought the company would be pleasant enough.
Valis's will was not fully realized on Earth. This was the adversary's realm, the Prince of this world. Valis could only work within this world, work with a small remnant of men; he was the minority party, here, speaking as a still small voice to one man or a handful, from a bush, in sleep, during an operation. Eventually he would win. But not now. These were not the end times after all.
- P. K. Dick, Radio Free Albemuth (1976/1985)
God is definitely on the side of the Revolution; God is the minority and the Revolution is always about the minority. As one of my heroes, the late liberal Muslim scholar Nasr Hamed Abu Zeid used to say, "The majority never brings about change - it's too invested in the status quo."
- Mona Eltahawy, introduction to Adam Bucko and Matthew Fox, Occupy Spirituality (2013)
This side of the revolution, the revolutionaries are a minority.
- Tony Cliff, sampled on Neither Washington nor Moscow (The Redskins, 1986)
... a minority composed of weirdos, oddballs and the differently sane. If we were popular we would have already changed the world. The idea of being a vanguard implies there's someone following you. Going along with the majority is a dumb idea, as is yelling "screw all y'all" and storming off into the woods all on your lonesome. Live in the Real World of Horrible Jobs but don't become part of it. Always look for a way to bust the prison house down, and be prepared to stay in prison if your people don't want to leave. This is the path of the Bodhisattva Vow, the way of learning how to love our brothers and sisters who don't know the law.
- Doloras LaPicho, commentary to the above
SPECIAL NOTE: This is not only the 11th anniversary of the CM Project, but our 420th post. Smoke 'em if you've got 'em.
Take a look at how it was great when it all began (I was a regular Lenin fan), and what remains of those grand hopes that we were going to work out how to save all the movements for human liberation? Possibly only this: Nietzsche's old saw about "battle not with monsters lest ye become a monster". Replicated in Marx's "the ruling ideas of society are the ideas of the ruling class", and L. Ron Hubbard's (!!!) "if you fight an enemy and do not defeat it, you will assume its valence" - i.e. "turn into it".
I think we can boil down all we've usefully learned here to groupthink and tribe-against-tribe logic is the enemy, even if you're the good guys. This is all the more important in the social media era when it's the work of mere seconds to assemble a lynch mob to harass the bad guys into silence or suicide. It is our nature, having grown up in class society, to behave like this. The plus side of this is that reflexivity, humility, and opening to non-ego motivations of action are the only defence, and we must learn them and teach them to each other. And by "ego" we mean the collective ego of being the Good Guys, as well. Tony Cliff was wrong - the only way to actually overcome our enemy is to be asymmetrical to them.
Here are some very recent materials on the subject:
I hope this finds you, Monique and your kid well. To introduce myself, I've been a watcher of the wacky world of Scientology since the early 1990s; on one hand I found some of the ideas plausible enough at one stage to dabble with a "Free Zone" group at one stage, but on the other hand I was very active in the initial phase of Project Chanology in 2008/9 and I've never had any illusions that the Church itself is a totalitarian organisation which is either an oversized abusive relationship or a mini-North Korea.
I've watched your progress with interest since 2009 since you emerged from your career as "enforcer" for Scientology's dictator David Miscavige, to your career as a spokesperson for the "Independent Scientology" movement, to your eventual break with the Indie community. I must say I have not been 100% sure what to make of your current phase of seeking to transcend the Scio/anti-Scio fight altogether. However, I must say that anyone who is extremely surprised by your family's decision to exit your lawsuit against Miscavige, or your critical reviews of Ron Miscavige and Louis Theroux's recent anti-Scientology works, has clearly not been paying attention to your regular blog posts over the last few years where you ponder the futility of getting involved in an endless fight with something (example). Very Zen, quite convincing. I totally understand why you are doing your best to end your involvement with the whole subject.
In this regard, I have been most distressed by some of the wild abuse recently thrown at you by anti-Scientology activists (let's say "Scientology critics" to be polite); not just the "TRAITOR, WHORE, JUDAS" stuff from the lunatic fringe, but the slightly more sophisticated stuff which suggests that, when you criticise Ron's book or Theroux's film for distorting the facts in the service of a good story, you are now "agreeing with David Miscavige" and are therefore no doubt in his pay once more.
There's another movement where telling the truth as one sees it gets a wave of abuse for "forwarding enemy lines" or accusations of being in the pay of the bad guys. It's called the Church of Scientology. In fact, it's a major hallmark of any toxic group that sticking with the group's story is more important than the truth. The story of Br'er Rabbit and the Tar Baby clearly shows that "you are
attached to what you attack"; or, as Nietzsche would have put it, if you
battle monsters you risk becoming one yourself.
I think that Tony Ortega's "Underground Bunker" has done good service over the years exposing Scientology abuses, and I read it every day (not the comments, though...). But I've always thought he has an issue with you personally, for some reason, even at the time when you were working closely together. Now, it seems, he seems relieved to be able to "release the hounds" in your direction. One thing I find extremely interesting was that when he reviewed your book Memoirs of a Scientology Warrior, his main criticism was that you were "self-alibi'ing", to some degree - refusing to admit your share of moral responsibility for the abuses conducted by the Church while you were its enforcer. Now, at the end of your review of the Theroux movie, you note that the movie's depiction of Miscavige's abusive behaviour is actually closer to your own of the time. Ortega's response? "Good on Marty for 'fessing up"? No, you are now chided for agreeing with Miscavige, "forwarding enemy lines"! You really are damned if you do and damned if you don't.
(Interesting, parenthetically, that you criticise Ron
Miscavige for trying to whitewash his own responsibilities for his son's development and behaviour in his memoir - which, in turn, is taken by the Bunkeroos as proof that you are now a traitor-judas-whore in the pay of Darth Midget. The acceptability of the argument seems to be based on whether the person making it is on the "good guys" or "bad guys" list at the time - a sure sign of toxic mob mentality.)
However, Ortega's insinuations and apparent interest in putting you down personally are nothing compared to the mob mentality whipped up in his comments section. Let me emphasise that honestly I don't blame Tony for this. This is a pretty standard feature of all groups or communities which band together against a common enemy. Groupthink and mob mentality are occupational hazards.
The Sci-critical satirist Jeffrey Augustine rightly compares the Church to
the Stalinist USSR and North Korea. In the 1930s, the followers of Leon
Trotsky were expelled from the global Communist movement for opposing
Stalin's increasing tyranny. But sadly, history shows that the various
Trotskyist movements globally often ended up becoming just as internally
oppressive as the official Communist Parties they were supposed to
oppose. The British "post-Trotskyist" radical Tony Cliff explained it
like this: "if a man is locked in a room fighting a mad dog for long
enough, eventually you won't be able to tell the difference".
The proper analogy to the Trotskyists, of course, would not be Ortega's bunker (who might be more like anti-Commie witchhunters) but the Independent Scientology movement, who of course cast you out a few years ago once you noticed that they were in fact building their own little scale-model replicas of the official Church's oppressive apparatus. And not just the fanatical "Milestone Two" mob, either. The critic who goes by the name "Alanzo" suggests that Mike Rinder and Karen de la Carriere - two ex-Scientologists whom I have the utmost respect for - ran something of an informal "Indie OSA" back in the day. I really crave to hear more details about this.
I certainly don't begrudge Tony Ortega of making a living by being a professional Scientology critic. That organisation needs to have its shenanigans dragged into daylight at all times and - despite my distress at his animus towards you - he does that job well. But I also suspect he rather likes being the Fearless Leader of an angry mob and has nonot much interest in curbing some of the negative tendencies in his fan club. (ETA: apparently Ortega read the Riot Act on some Bunker denizens' more heated personal attacks on Rathbun - good on him.) Mentioning Alanzo above reminds me that, when he spoke out against some of the Bunker's more heated speculations about why you and Monique dropped the lawsuit, some people actually suggested he was an imposter sent by OSA. That is not a healthy way to approach difference of opinion.
The Bunker and the rest of the Scientology-critic community really has to check itself before it wrecks itself. We should all take a good look at ourselves and be honest if we see ourselves starting to act like OSA agents or Squirrel Busters. There is no need for paid Scientology agents infiltrating and destroying Scientology-critical movements when the natural process of groupthink/mob mentality will often lead to critics taking on those roles themselves, free of charge.
Once again, Mark, good luck to you and your family in whatever you choose to do in the future. Sufi masters say that the true sign of a beloved of God is that 1000
trustworthy witnesses will all declare him to be a lost heretic, so
being "shot at by all sides" is probably a sign that you're on the right
path.
Aleister Crowley, the Great Beast 666 his own self, died penniless in a boarding house on the south coast of England on 1 December 1947. There is an urban legend that his last words were something along the lines of "No, no! It can't end like this!"
Two of his more infamous disciples fared little better. John Whiteside "Jack" Parsons blew himself up (probably accidentally) at his home laboratory on June 17 1952. A slightly more trustworthy hadith suggests that his last words were "I wasn't done." His magickal brother, Lafayette Ronald Hubbard, on the other hand, died living as a recluse and a fugitive in a trailer on a rach in remote California on January 17 1986. Very strong traditions (for example from his attendant Steve "Sarge" Pfauth) suggest that Hubbard - although he had amassed a personal fortune estimated around $400 million, was worshipped as a spiritual leader by thousands, doted on by celebrities, even created his own goddamn paramilitary force and a machine of oppression which outlives him and wrecks people's lives to this day - repeatedly commented in his last days that his own had life ended in failure. Certainly failure to exercise his own demons - which was, underneath all the grifting, no doubt the true motivation behind Scientology.
The classical scholar and reactionary racist politician Enoch Powell is credited as saying "all political careers end in failure". Do all magickal careers do so as well? Or all artistic careers? Or anything at all where we try to change the world? Hazrat-e-Pir Dr Javad Nurbakhsh (ya haqq) commented to the effect that most people who set out on the Sufi path fail because they started with the wrong motivation. What is the wrong motivation? Virtually anything. Because all motivations come from the Self (I want spooky powers! I want social status! I want to conquer my inner demons! etc etc etc), and the Sufi path is all about transcendence of the Self and annihilation in the Absolute. If God or the Machine Elves or "Bob" or whoever wants you to die penniless, burned to a crisp or on the run from most of the governments of the globe, who are you to say otherwise, pinkboy. (Why, certainly, should you expect a happy ending to your character's arc when Aleppo is burning and the oceans are rising, etc etc.)
It's getting close to the 10th year anniversary of this blog, and I have to question whether the Chaos Marxist project, itself, ends in failure. Successes? I met some nice people and got some nice zines in the mail. Some friendly Discordians made a "greatest hits" package of the earlier stuff. Some of the stuff is literally true and still useful - although I don't think "I" really wrote that stuff, in the same sense that ibn Arabi maintained that The Bezels of Wisdom were written by Prophet Muhammad himself. The real stuff is always a transmission from Universe Central. To some degree, also, the world has caught up - since Anonymous became a real thing, the post-1968 toy-town Marxist groups are splitting and falling to pieces, and the "Lacanian left" (the good ones, like Jodi Dean not that racist fucker Zizek) have finally managed to start taking the subjective factor in ideology seriously. (There is a whole book to be written on the similarities between Lacan's approach and what a Sufi master or a Zen Buddhist teacher do, "holding space" for the ego to confront itself and what Gurdjieff called "the real horror of the situation").
But I never managed to start my own community or lineage or wherever. There is no Chaos Marxist current, community, party or international. I have allies; but it's just me, like it's always been. And certainly I never hit upon the Magickal Key that would unlock every puzzle of the movements for global liberation, peace and happiness, etc. Because that's what I was going for. Really big magick. But that was ego. It wasn't just enough that the world be saved, but that I, or at least ideas which originated in this particular brain-pan, should save it. And - hopefully - not be so messed-up on a personal basis any more. Or it wouldn't matter that I'm socially anxious and crippled by toxic shame, if I was freakin' Noam Chomsky crossed with Kate Bush crossed with Buffy the Vampire Slayer or whatever.
But here I am, still pursued by nightmares, still afraid of, and unable to love, my brothers who don't know the law.. The ideas have ceased to come - the new ideas, at least, the old stuff is still perfectly valid and useful. The God Hercules has left me, that had loved me well, to use another metaphor. Perhaps the illusion was that doing something good would make me good, or at least be able to make me believe in my own right to exist. But you can only get that in a real community, and perhaps I can never be part of a community which would have me as a member.
So say goodbye to Alexandra leaving, then say goodbye to Alexandra lost.
It's certainly precisely the kind of thing that would make poor old George Orwell cough up another lung. Remember, Nineteen Eighty-Four was a satire on the wartime BBC as well as Stalinist Russia/Nazi Germany. Orwell knew perfectly well what Chomsky put into academic language decades later - that democracies use propaganda where dictatorships use brute force. Or as Gramsci, decades earlier, understood more clearly, the difference in the two is just a matter of proportion.
Anyway, for those of you who don't get the point, the eminently punchable Senator from Texas, Rafael "Ted" Cruz, was born in the Province of Alberta, which - I'm sorry to inform some of the Wildrose Party - is not in the United States. As he makes no secret of, to his credit. Perhaps a couple of that 40% figure above are sincerely ignorant. But I wager that most of them know perfectly well otherwise, but say different because he is one of their tribe and being "born in the US" is a good thing. Same for the tiny coterie of Obama "birthers", to the left.
Slavoj Zizek, before he became a professional contrarian/troll, understood that "ideology" (which Terry Eagleton described as "imaginary solutions to real problems") could also be called "what you believe even though you know that it's false". "Believe" here means "act as if it's true". Or, in Newspeak, doublethink. Liberals react to factoids like the above by saying "lol, those lumpenpleb teabaggers are STOOPID". No, they're just doublethinkful. Which is what everyone is in civilisation-as-we-know-it; Lacan would say it's the price of entering into language. You - yes you, gentle reader - have your own blind spot, something that you do or believe even though you know that it's wrong or contradicts your values, and if you even know you have a blind spot you're in a tiny minority. So don't be so quick to mock someone else's, as I think Jesus said once.
So this is why, just like you don't win friends with salad, you don't win arguments by appeals to the truth of the Marxist analysis. It's so much easier to go for the easier option. Trotsky bitingly points out in The Revolution Betrayed that the British chattering classes hated the Russian Revolution until it became a dictatorship under Stalin. A big boss man creating a new order by force of his mighty will? That was understandable, not this crap about every cook learning to govern. Some of us hoped that when the Eastern Bloc collapsed, so would this perversion of Marxism - actually authoritarian developmentalism/nationalism which killed Marxism in the gulags and the Ukrainian famine, then wore its victim's face in ghastly mockery. But it goes on. Those other imperialists are always preferable to our own. And sadly Trotsky fell into this campist logic himself by never being able to admit that the Revolution had not only been betrayed but had come to an end.
We've discussed the appeal of ganzer macher (Yiddish: "big man") politics previously - and pointed out that Trotskyist and post-Trotskyist politics (because of their incomplete critique of the Stalin counter-revolution) tended to fall right back into this trap. Yes, even the Third Campist ones (look at the careers of such British political entrepreneurs as Tony Cliff or Sean Matgamna). But that's only one possible short-cut. Appeals to emotion or nationalism? Coddling bigotries or conspiracy theories? Anything to get the masses in motion. Once they're in motion, a cunning manipulator finds it easier to hoosh them in the direction (s)he considered appropriate. And that is what certain dime-store Machiavellis out there think revolutionary politics really is.
It is ironic that Marxism - which, as the old song says, is supposed to be "reason in revolt" - has been turned by some into its opposite: cynical realpolitik and its younger sibling, just plain being a manipulative bastard. It's not enough to say the masses make history - the masses make history for themselves. They're not your personal army. It's interesting that this hollowing out of rationality in favour of gang warfare also happens among the followers of Ayn Rand (who love emotional abuse and anathema towards their opponents) and the New Atheists.
But you don't even need a manipulator. Groupthink will do the job, especially among those who really need the group. Paul Zimbardo showed us that. And James Cannon - whom I hold responsible for bringing Stalinist methods into American Trotskyism - correctly said that small groups of people can talk themselves into the wildest ideas. Was it him who decided that "democratic
centralism" meant that the Centre not only got to instruct the locals
how to act, but how to think, and how to talk? No better way to
brainwash yourself into something you don't believe than being forced to
pretend that you do believe it, as Althusser rightly put it.
The Marxist phrase is "being determines consciousness" - Chaos Marxism might refine that to "activity and patterns of identity determine consciousness". You think what you do, and you are what you repeatedly do. And - among the kinds of social flotsam who find themselves attracted to revolutionary politics in non-revolutionary times - the desperate, burning need to find somewhere to belong ends up an open door to allow an unreflective group or an unscrupulous group leader to install Groupthinking-Zombification software in their brain.
Reflexivity and positionality are of course the answer. An activist or group which strives to compensate for its own blind spots (get better wing mirrors?) and be aware of its/their actual position in the capitalist socio-economy can begin by enacting Marxist praxis for themselves, and holding conversations with other groups of the broad masses. Walking into someone else's struggle with the idea that you can give them "the leadership they need" and "teach them how to win" is, once again, a hollowing out of the critical and dialectical core of Marxism, turning it into nothing but power politics aimed at a different constituency. Screw that.
Anyway, the point is: political arguments usually have zero to do with philosophy or practical action, and boil down to ape-against-ape territorial posturing. Which is why the wrong people almost always win them. Only praxis can win the day for communism.
Reflexivity! It's what's for breakfast in the bourgeois academy at the moment, as well as in professional training for nurses and other care-workers. The idea that the scholar or the professional worker has to make an effort to be aware of their own biases, bad habits, and unconscious assumptions, in order to be more effective at what they do, is simple common sense to anyone involved in ego-dissolving practices such as Thelemic magick, Sufism or Zen Buddism, and of course the cheap knockoffs thereof to be found in the "New Age" or "Human Potential" movements.
Surely the same should be the case for Marxists? Uncle Karl discusses "the ruthless criticism of all that exists", after all. The whole basis of the Marxist method is the material positionality of all the makers of theory. There is no "God's eye view" or Platonic realm of ideal forms. All ideas come from the material position of those who have the ideas, who discuss them and who propagate them. So a Marxist scholar-activist should be reflexive in practice as a matter of course. And a Marxist organisation, in turn, should encourage different points of view within itself, to welcome debate on its very existence and ways of organising.
... but they don't, do they? Because questioning organisational routines is the first step towards dissolving the organisation. Because habitual adherence to authority and routine is an "opiate" or "painkiller", which provides a feeling of security, which holds back the unpleasant feeling of actually having to deal with the howling menace of neoliberal globalised capitalist commodity culture and the total failure of the actually existing far left to do anything about it. Some organisations actually forbid self-reflexive discussion of the organisation - either because it's "navel gazing" irrelevant to "the workers", or out of honestly admitting that if we stopped to think about what we were doing, we wouldn't be doing anything. Which should make anyone who was honest think: then is it worth doing at all? Is mindless activity better than honest befuddlement?
Incidentally, check out the rhetorical move about "the workers" above. The sheer fact of the matter is that the actually existing Anglophone far left tends to be composed of white people with high levels of formal education and thus often a mildly privileged class position. But the essential dishonesty lies in refusing the very basic form of reflexivity involved in accepting this, and instead either claiming to speak for an imaginary "Worker-with-a-capital-W" subject who is in manual labour and has a very low level of cultural capital, or indulging in a guilt trip of not being a Worker-with-a-capital-W, or attempting to somehow become one by adopting a fetishised version of the culture of that layer of the class.This kind of "cultural guilt" is just as cringeworthy and destructive of a real politics of solidarity as "white guilt".
An honest position for cultural-capital-heavy Marxists would be based on being in solidarity with other sections of the working class while not denying one's own positionality. The romantic fiction indulged in by some groups that they are "declassed intellectuals" is precisely a refusal of the self-awareness of their real class position which would be step 1 of a real Marxist praxis.
Incidentally, when seen properly, the insistence on spiritual traditions of having a "master" or "guru" is an expression of reflexivity, in the sense that when you're just starting out, you have NO WAY to actually "look at yourself". Eventually, you can find the "master inside yourself", but only after internalising that very external viewpoint on which you have originally required. You can call it God, if you like.
The late, interesting-if-not-great Palestinian-Jewish-British socialist Tony Cliff said that the essential contradiction of Marxism lies between "the emancipation of the working class is the act of the working class" and "the ideas of the ruling class are the ideas of society". Can I add another very vital contradiction, for those of us who understand Foucault, Lacan, Crowley and Robert Anton Wilson on the link between language, reality and power:
Thesis: "Every identity within capitalism is constructed by capitalism, and there is no outside to capitalism." Antithesis: "Capitalism is an internally contradictory unity prone to ever-worsening crises which can only be delayed, not avoided."
If only the first were true, there is no point to anything and we might as well have a good time until the oceans rise. If the second is true, there is no need to do anything and we only need to wait until the thing falls over. But since BOTH are true, we need to find a way to operate IN capitalism while realising that the identities it gives us are social relations and are NOT REAL, and finding ways to sharpen the contradictions in such a way that the next world-system is socialism rather than barbarism. Actually, that might be another contradiction:
Thesis: "Capitalism alienates human labour and requires us to play identity-games of oppression, exploitation and psychic injury." Antithesis: "There is no outside to capitalism except death and insanity."
The Chaos Marxist jury is still out on whether Jacques Lacan was the most original and useful psychoanalyst since Wilhelm Reich, or whether he was simply a bullshit artist who wrapped Freud's insights up in impenetrably flighty jargon to sell himself as a new guru/master; in other words, the French L. Ron Hubbard. But we are finding his central concept of The Name of the Father (which, in French, can also mean "the Name given by the Father", as well as a pun on "the NO! of the Father") very productive.
To put it in the rather quaint and patriarchal language of the Freudian Oedipal complex, the Father draws boundaries for the Son by saying NO!you've had enough snuggle-time with Mummy, it's my turn now. But when you grow up, if you're a good boy, you can have a woman of your own. In exchange for the sacrifice of undifferentiated infant bliss, the Son gets a Name of his own and a place in the Symbolic Order - aka a role to play in the Real World of Horrible Jobs - plus the promise of a replacement Mother (Wife) sometime later. Of course, where the hell does this leave women, the queer or the genderqueer; but perhaps Virginia Woolf gave us the answer to that one, in saying that since beforra dawna time women have been looking for A Room of One's Own in the symbolic order, alongside those carved out for their brothers.
Lacan argued that the Name of the Father is not only the Law of Society, but the master signifier in the Son's system of meaning, in the way he makes sense of the world and his place in it; and also (and this I think is quite debatable) that the failure to provide the NO! of the Father leads to very vague and provisional ego boundaries prone to collapse into psychosis later on.
But the Name of the Father is also, to put it in the terms of Neil Gaiman's Delirium of the Endless, "something you know that I don't that makes everything you do okay". It is privilege; it is an excuse for harmful behaviour towards self/others/nature, at the base of that claimed by all religions or cultish ideologies. It is a demand for sacrifice and obedience in return for deferred pleasure; or, alternatively, the obscene pleasure of enforcing the Law on the nonbelievers. It is the 72 virgins or the tree covered with a million leaves each showing a porn film which is the reward for the faithful martyrs in Paradise. It is the seed-faith donation of $5,000 to the IAS or your local megachurch pastor which will turn into untold riches maybe in this world, maybe the next. It is the coming classless utopia in the name of which we can lie, cheat and steal in the here and now. It is the line between us Real People / revolutionary cadre and the brute beasts / homo sacer over there who don't belong to our Symbolic Order and thus can be ruthlessly exploited, or exterminated, and our Big Nobodaddy doesn't care either way.
===
Lacan is reputed to have told the 68ers "you are hysterics looking for a new Master, and you will get one". And that certainly happened; the libertarian movements of that era, born from the generation in the West who had decided that their Fathers who fought the Second World War didn't know what they were talking about and deserved no more obedience, after a few years substituted new Names at the head of their symbolic orders, for whom they were expected to sacrifice and die. Trotsky, Mao, L. Ron Hubbard, Jesus Christ (an oldie but a goodie there), Jim Jones, Aleister Crowley, Ayn Rand (women can be The Father if they act like one), Hare Krishna Hare Hare... But the most powerful new Master Signifier, and the one which overwhelmingly dominates the world today, was - as befits reification in late capitalism - not the name of a man or a woman, but of a social institution or abstraction: The Market.
The Thatcher/Reagan revolution was twofold. One
part was a neoliberal "negation of the negation" of 1960s radicalism,
which encouraged ex-hippies to become yuppies and fulfil their dreams of
A Room Of Their Own within the globalising market system. There was plenty of money sloshing around, now that profits had been restored at the expense of the workers; why not cash in? That succeeded triumphantly. The other part was a neoconservative rollback of 1960s radicalism, aimed at restoring Western imperialism (aka the Defence of the Free World) and Traditional Family Values as the Name of the Father in the global symbolic order. This was only half successful.
The Market as the new Name of the Father, unlike the more traditional ones, demanded no personal sacrifice in return for A Room Of One's Own; except in the sense of having to pay the mortgage on it, if you follow the metaphor. You need not accept any personal/sexual discipline, only market discipline. Hedonism was good for the economy now; savings were less important in the era of easy credit; you could have as much sex and drugs and rock'n'roll as you wanted if you were a successful yuppie (the Drug War was only on the poor/black homo sacer). The yuppies decided that "you could be a socialist and still have
staff", that a Cadillac was just as good as a VW Combi van for putting
Deadhead stickers on and smoking weed inside of. You could follow any bogus guru who would condone your mega-egotistical lifestyle and yet tell you that you were better than anyone else. And you would vote Republican/Conservative because Daddy Ron or Mummy Maggie (the Market in human form) would guarantee your freedom, at the expense of the Others standing in the dole queues, lying in the gutters or in pools of their own blood in foreign parts.
Eventually, of course, the yuppies grew up somewhat, left Mummy and Daddy behind and chose their cool big brothers Bill and Tony (a sax player and a former lead singer, yet!) to lead them instead, who relaxed authoritarianism on the moneyed middle classes while intensifying it on the poor, the neo-colonised and other Others (you know what I mean). Biological racism was increasingly replaced by a cultural racism
directed against the working poor, welfare beneficiaries, prisoners, and
unruly racial/religious Others threatening Western interests in foreign
parts. Cheerleading imperialism and scapegoating refugees meant no personal sacrifice for the middle classes, even more so when fought by armies based on an economic draft among the poor rather than a social-wide draft. Financialisation means that wars can be fought on credit, and resulting inflation of the military budget can always be blamed on whoever you'd decided to blame social problems on anyway.
However - with the exception of a brief explosion of moralism during the early AIDS crisis - "traditional family values" (aka the patriarchal nuclear family and the sexual codes thereof) have been fighting a losing battle. Partly this would be due to the newly liberated yuppies not seeing the need to make their kids go through the metaphorical castration they themselves struggled against. This wasn't necessarily great for the kids, as New Model Army sang in "A Liberal Education":
Be yourselves, please yourselves,
Express yourselves so more!
It's your right to do what you like
Because we can't really be bothered with you at all.
But it may well have made the future possible.
Partly, also, this would be due to the same socio-cultural processes which led to the original crumbling of the peasant nuclear family during the Industrial Revolution and a kind of abortive original women's/children's liberation - i.e. the need for all family members to work to survive in the crisis-ridden globalised neoliberal economy. Partly, it was because of the Pink Dollar - gays and lesbian yuppies were just as important as consumers and skilled workers as straight ones (hence the eventual triumph of same-sex marriage worldwide).
So, while neoliberalism rolled back the social gains of the working class which had built up during the era when "we were all Keynesians", and led to a rebirth of imperialism (especially in its sickening social-liberal "humanitarian" form), it preserved and actually promoted a market-libertarian form of feminism, gay rights and multiculturalism, not attempting to prevent changes in family structure and child-rearing which would have been seen as breathtakingly radical even in the 1960s. The "Millennials", as the generation brought up in neoliberalism, might be spoiled and egotistical/ individualistic, but they don't see any reason why women shouldn't work/have reproductive autonomy, why gays and lesbians shouldn't get married, or even (increasingly) why gender boundaries should be policed at all. This may be the Achilles' heel in the neoliberal utopia.
There's a joke that the real front-runner for the US Republican presidential nomination, if people were to answer honestly, would be Zombie Ronald Reagan. This is very similar to the way that Zombie Kim Il-Sung is still President of north Korea. Like Moses or Obi-Wan Kenobi, the authoritarian Father is more powerful dead than alive. But the Republican base (unlike the British Conservatives, who've been smarted in adapting to social liberalism) are growing old and dieing off. They may run the state legislatures but I doubt they'll elect another President any time soon. As a broad rule, the younger generation just don't need the Name of a human Father any more. Can these pure children of neoliberalism both realise and suppress neoliberalism's utopian promise?
===
A revolutionary counterhegemony will also come with a new, revolutionary symbolic order - a new way for people to belong, to participate, to be in community. Can we build a symbolic order without a Name of the New Adopted Father? Can we hope for something better than having a Mao or Lenin up there on the wall where the Holy Icon or Granddad's portrait used to be? Certainly there is no going back. Nostalgia is simply nostalgia for having a human authoritarian leader to fight against, and may well lead into a bloodthirsty yearning for killing authoritarians elsewhere (war on Da'esh, anyone?)
Well, I think I mentioned last year sometime that Anonymous might be the first forerunner of that. Refusing to have "a forename, a hind-name and an address", while accepting the techno-commercialism of modern globalism, they opt out of the Symbolic Order altogether. Why opt for a Room Of Your Own in the Father's house when you've built your own space-age yurt on a vacant lot across the street? Of course, this certainly doesn't mean to say that the defiantly racist/misogynist/queer-baiting social norms of various Anon formations are utopic. But they show that it is possible to opt out of the Father's Symbolic Order without the kind of mass psychosis which American Lacanian analyst Bruce Fink fears.
The global egalitarian/libertarian economic mode of production of the future communist utopia will surely come with a global egalitarian/libertarian symbolic order; in which "the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all", that is, there will be a symbolic place for everyone, no matter physical status or social occupation, as well as a physical Room of One's Own. It will mean the end of homo sacer, the sovereign or the despised outcast who is exempt/excluded from the Community or its Law. In future communism, you will no longer need to be real, or have a face, or a gender for that matter. Perhaps the only Law in the future will be the Golden Rule of antiquity, most memorably recently rephrased by nerd-culture hero Wil Wheaton: don't be a dick. Which in itself would be a telling blow against phallocentrism.
===
It is said that the best way to understand Scientology as L. Ron Hubbard's own attempt to find a way out of his own private psychic nightmare while keeping his narcissistic ego intact. Similarly, Chaos Marxism is clearly my (Doloras') attempt to awake from the nightmare of my personal history.
Brought up with an absent father and a mother with very insecure boundaries, my only ever "place" while I was growing up was being the smartest kid in the class, something I did quite easily. I didn't like the social exclusion that this engendered, but a place in the symbolic order as the Golden Child who would one day redeem humanity (DON'T LAUGH) wasn't nothing. Later on, my mother attempted to bring various stepfathers into my life, who did their best to crush my infantile dreams of omnipotence, but never offered me a place in the Symbolic Order in which I could live in a million years. That could not even begin to start happening until I realised that a heterosexual lifestyle could not be mine, at the age of 25.
But until very recently, I was still yearning for an authority figure who would give me the keys to my future kingdom. Which meant - in my professional, emotional and political life - offering myself up as a servant to some exploitative or authoritarian authority figure who claimed to know "the way out". They were all lying or bullshitting, every one of them. And they didn't understand why I should have been so resentful - they never actually promised anything, did they? And I suppose, at this distance, they were right.
Finally I learned that only I can build a Room Of My Own in community with others who have accepted responsibility for fulfilling their own drives, for not being a dick despite how much easier life becomes if you do act dickishly. Paradoxically, a responsible egotism requires a humility which comes from "spirituality" - not necessarily any supernatural belief, but a belief in something which is more important than your own wants or needs. As the Russian soldier in the 1987 Doctor Who serial "The Curse of Fenris" demonstrated, this can be The Revolution; but only in the sense of a real commitment to a true utopia, a new social and symbolic order without the Freudian castration complex or bowing to any God made in the image of Man, where we can all live.
I've have to explain to people over the years that I am not nor have I ever been a member of the Church of Scientology. So why have I been fascinated with it for so long? Obviously there was a bit of disavowed desire in there, and I think I've pinpointed it.
I began reading about and becoming interested in Scientology (in 1991, the time of the TIME magazine exposé) because - even though it was clear that Hubbard was a cynical scam artist - there was something in his gobbledegook that I "wanted to believe". (In fact, that's precisely how LRH invites you into his mind-control circle. "Read the book until you find something you actually can believe, then go with that." They shove the rest into your brain "on a gradient", aka like a frog boiling as you slowly turn the heat up.)
What really resonated with me was the concept of the reactive mind: that my negative emotions and triggers were a bad, worthless part of me that could and should be expunged to turn me into an Adrian Veidt-like superhero. With crippling self-doubt and self-esteem issues, anyone with certainty sounded good - and, of course, is also the appeal of such movements as Objectivism and orthodox Trotskyism.
Of course I never became a believer because, no matter how much I read on the subject, written by Freezoners/Independent Scientologists who were much better writers than their guru, (a) I could identify that the basis of belief was exactly the kind of "collective solipsism" described in Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four, so I was held back by my determined materialism; (b) it never quite made sense. The pieces never "fit" in logical order. My brain kept yelling "citation needed".
And of course that was a feature rather than a bug. I've mentioned before how accepting texts as authoritative is in itself authoritarian, because only a dictatorial Reader can impose a single interpretation. You can see how the Bible, the Qur'an and the Complete Works of Lenin are internally contradictory and can be used to justify any damn thing, given enough ingenuity. The same is true of the Scientology Tech, and LRH did it that way on purpose. Confusion, as Jon Atack notes, is a hypnotic technique. Make the logic centres shut down so the childlike mirror neurons kick in.
But after years going from textually-based belief-system to textually-based belief system, I learned to spot the similarities between all of them. Case in point: the Spartacist League wrote an article on their splinter group, the IBT, titled "Garbage Doesn't Walk By Itself". The argument made that any sensible person who leaves a group which wasn't right for them gets on with their lives; therefore, the way the IBT continued to try to politically engage the Sparts only proved that they were motivated by ulterior forces, possibly COINTELPRO. Change COINTELPRO for "the psychiatrists", and that's exactly the same accusations that the "orthodox Hubbardian" group Milestone Two make against other ex-Scientologists who make the gentle suggestion that M2 are exhibiting exactly the same paranoid authoritarianism as the official Church.
Liberation must be based on praxis, theory put into practice and refined by practice, not the authority of texts. The works of Karl Marx are only as much use as his method is of use in helping us work out solutions to the problems of today. Past that, they are historical documents and literature; past that, they are nothing. Nothing at all. Just bits of paper, or electrons.
