Back to the beginning again

The foundation of this whole blog / embryonic thought current, Liber MCMXVII, says plainly: "We declare that a cadre party of the Leninist type, properly understood, is a magical order." I think I'm getting a clearer idea of what that might mean.

The founder of the Jesuits, Iñigo Montoya Loyola, set out a truckload of Spiritual Exercises to give his order "a greater degree of freedom from his or her own likes, dislikes, comforts, wants, needs, drives, appetites and passions that they may choose based solely on what they discern God's will is for them." This is of course very close to what the Sufi orders claim for their own practice - only the name of God has changed - and, for that matter, the broad outlines of Buddhist practice as far as I can understand it. (Interestingly, there's a good article by a Jesuit priest pointing out that "oh, them Muslims ain't so bad, it's the same God after all" - and of course, the Jesuits were one of the main initiators of liberation theology, which should make our readers perk their ears up.) And of course most of you out there are familiar with the various psychic exercises used to strengthen the will in the OTO, traditional Wicca, and probably every other school of magick.

To some degree, where traditional Bolshevik organising has let itself down is that all the training formally given to cadres is either (a) practical political activism, or (b) academic-style learning of Marxist political economy and philosophy. That's the head and hands sorted out. Where is the heart? Where is the training for those who change the world to carry out the Greater Work of simultaneously changing themselves? All the current evidence suggests that this doesn't spontaneously happen, at least in the far-left sect milieu of Westernised countries. Probably in places like the Philippines or Nepal, where the rubber hits the road and if you don't do it right the death squads will whack you, and they'll probably whack you even if you do do it right, the cadres are shocked out of the bad habits of their personalities. But not around these parts.

Egotism = intellect + desire, and of course that's why capitalism is the most egotistical social system out there, because it really is all about a rational intellect which makes things happen and unbridled libidinal energy channelled towards for-profit entertainment systems (including, increasingly, sexuality). The Sufis and the Jesuits know that the part of humanity which taps into a more fundamental current - our own essential nature, or that part of our essential nature which may flower into a new improved humanity sometime in the future - has nothing to do with intellect or desire.

I suppose that, when I return to hard-core on the ground political activism, it will behoove me to start writing my own version of Psychic Exercises for Materialist Revolutionaries, and test it in practice. And that will be the point where my writings here start to mean something.

Self-sabotage

There was a weird plastic cyborg whose CPU finally gave out last week who had a song whose chorus declared: "If you want to make the world a better place, take a look at yourself and make that change". I always considered that a repulsive sentiment - the height of smug middle-class Beautiful Soul-ism, the idea that all actual struggle to change the planet was worth less than some clown Visualising World Peace while pushing buttons at their middle-management position.

The opposite to this contention would be the idea that one's personality is irrelevant to The Struggle to bring something better into actual concrete existence. Tony Cliff said that "you don't need a beautiful chisel to carve Michaelangelo's David" - that is, if you make yourself the instrument of a great struggle, it really doesn't matter what kind of an unpleasant person you are. Robert Fripp would heartily agree, making it clear that everything good he's ever done musically came despite his personality, rather than because of it.

However, the essential question in that case is: what current are you actually tapped into? To put it another way - what quality is manifested in your actions - all of them? Are they actually "Building It Now", bringing the spirit of a better way into conscious existence with every conscious act you perform? Or are things going wrong despite your best intentions? Truly, as I think another commenter here noted, there isn't just one Higher Reality / Source of Popular Energy / Magickal Current / Class Interest - to put it another way, I think Robert Fripp is wrong to say that any act based on principle makes the world a better place. (What if that principle is "no negros?")

There was a Jewish carpenter who said something like "by their fruits shall ye know them". Chaos Marxism would agree that it really doesn't matter whether an organisation or current's propaganda or theory sounds good. What kind of practical activity does that current manifest? What does it bring into reality? What do we do when - and I have sad practical experience of this - you see a group of people who you agree with 100% on paper, bringing about destruction and division by what they actually do in the struggle?

Such a contradiction is surely the result of a massive "blind spot". A blind spot is an area of activity, which your conscious mind is determined to be unaware of, which is actually tapped into some kind of negative current. People with a big enough blind spot will be aware that everything they're touching turns to shit, but have no clue why. Probably, we end up blaming some horrible people who are obviously trying to destroy us out of sheer meanness. Hmmm.

So, in that sense, the Greater and Lesser Works have to go together. Our political and cultural activism - our attempts to bring something from a better reality into the Real World of Horrible Jobs - has to be combined with enough introspection to make sure that we're not just automatically dragging up something horrible from the Qlippothic realms, just because we never checked ourselves closely enough to see where all our psychic/energy connections are leading.

So - if you want to make the world a better place, best to take a look at yourself/ves if you find that what you're creating in the world is actually contrary to your conscious intention. It is in this sense that the personal is political - i.e. personal change must go together with political activity (or some kind of outwards focussed activity, artistic, cultural, social, whatever), otherwise the two spheres will foul each other up.

I hate being right all the time.

I got in hot water for suggesting that - while of course the Iranian people's struggle for democracy deserves 100% support - the "Twitter Revolution" was in fact mainly middle-class Westerners jerking themselves off for TEH DEMOCRAZIES, combined with CIA/Mossad psyops. I think I've been proved right by the military coup in Honduras. No Twitter frenzy about that, except from the leftie usual suspects. Why? Because President Zelaya is a horrible leftist and ally of Hugo Chávez. Therefore, the Western mainstream media won't support him (and they make up arrant lies about what the non-binding referendum was supposed to be asking).

Therefore, there is no massive memetic push to drive the intarwebz into moralistic frenzy. The ensuing lack of anyone giving a damn about Honduras truly indicates how much the outpouring of showy grief over Iran was simply an artifact of a very sophisticated public relations campaign, by forces allied to the current global ruling class.

Hat tip in particular to BoRev, who points out that the protestors in Tegucigalpa are currently dodging bullets on the street, "which is like Twittering for poor people".

I haven't trolled the Bobbies in FIVE WHOLE MINUTES

I heard of Janor Hypercleats "Church of Don" pamphlet a decade and a half ago, but finally someone has made an online version of the final answer to wankstains who think they're cool because they dig the Church of the SubGenius.

The Church of the SubGenius is cool. People who bask in its coolness aren't.

Anon-tech just kicked in yo

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

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

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

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

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

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

A social revolution?

One of the basic ideas of Marxism is that all social relations, legal systems, property forms etc. originally evolve to encourage production and the satisfaction of human needs, but then turn into fetters on it, that only a social revolution of sorts can break. Anyone reading this no doubt knows that copyright, intellectual property and patents, which all evolved to encourage the production of (commodified) innovation, science, art and literature, are now used to prevent world-wide, zero cost dissemination of intellectual wealth.

Traditional Marxism looks to a future of the industrial workers seizing the factories and distributing their produce according to social need. While that seems further off than it did at the time Unca Karl talked about it, certainly a future of the infotech workers, writers, musicians, philosophers etc. seizing control of their fruits of their labour and distributing them according to social need looks like it's becoming a social fact. The only question remaining is - given that worldwide capitalism and the market economy aren't going to be overthrown any time soon - how can it be that the producers of cultural goods can continue to do so, and eat, given that the commodity model of production became instantly obsolete once broadband internet connections became common in households?

The big problem is that new "business models" which are evolving to ensure that publishing houses, universities and record companies (on whom I spit) can continue to make $$$, and screw the actual creative intellectual workers (who were actually screwed in the first place). But a retreat to the commodity model - don't put anything online, DRM, moral suasion trying to teach The Kids that torrents are just like holding up a liquor store!!! - won't work. Given that, it looks like Hugo Chávez and the Swedish Pirate Party should be teaming up to fight crime:

Chávez wants to end medicine patents
By Reuters | June 22, 2009
CARACAS - President Hugo Chávez has vowed to shake up the rules governing intellectual property rights on medicines and other products in Venezuela, the socialist’s latest move against the private sector.

“A song is intellectual property, but an invention or a scientific discovery should be knowledge for the world, especially medicine,’’ Chávez said late Saturday.

“That a laboratory does not allow us to make a medicine because they have the patent, no, no, no,’’ Chávez said.

Chávez, who has nationalized many Venezuela industries and is critical of the private sector, ordered his trade minister to analyze the patent rules in the OPEC nation.

“Patents have become a barrier to production, and we cannot allow them to be barriers to medicine, to life, to agriculture,’’ said the minister, Eduardo Saman, who previously headed Venezuela’s patent agency.

“We are revising all the doctrines and laws related to patents, which should be compatible with the international treaties that we have signed and respect and honor.’’

Chávez recently criticized Swedish packaging maker Tetra Pak, saying its patents on cartons were limiting production in Venezuela.
© Copyright 2009 The New York Times Company

Intellectual work benefits us all, but can't actually be eaten. Given that, how can those sectors of the economy which do actually produce food, shelter, clothing etc., best be used to support those who make everyone's existence better in other ways? The commodity/copyright/patent model is crashing around our ears and can only be imposed with brute force, which means a minor social revolution is underway. But what will replace it? Or are we looking to a future where there will no longer be any professional musicians or writers? Will they all have to get day jobs? Is that a good thing?

A word of warning...

...to anyone tempted to take this blog full of bright ideas too seriously:

When we live in the basement, it is probably impossible to conceive of what life might be like were we to live on the garden floor (American first floor, English ground floor).

On the garden floor, we might venture out through a patio door, over the threshold, and into the garden. But, whether within or without, we wouldn't be able to see over the well-established yew hedge into the countryside beyond the garden. So, as far as we know, from the perspective of a ground floor dweller, the extent of the world is the end of our garden.

[...]

From a cellar-dweller's point of view, were we to imaginatively project or extrapolate what the world could be like beyond our cellar, beyond our own direct experience, we might conclude that it is dark, damp, and that the earth is covered in concrete.

From a garden-floor dweller's point of view, were we to imaginatively project or extrapolate what the universebeyond our garden might be like, we would probably conclude that "it's like our garden, but bigger".

Until we move upstairs we don't / won't have a broad enough area of vision, seeing, or simply enough data, to be able to venture anything more than an underinformed & seriously compromised subjective projection / opinion.

If I live in the cellar, and haven't visited upstairs, I will probably conclude that a garden (if I have somehow learnt of such a concept) is just like my basement floor, a stretch of concrete, but greener. The sun is like my spotlight, but much brighter (I hope not too much brighter, because it'll hurt my eyes). The wind is like a fan, but with a greater variation of speeds.

In my cellar, because I have spent a lot of time thinking about all manner of important things, I have some valuable opinions about gardening and how to improve the operating procedures of gardeners. After all, they've been too busy gardening to learn what I know, just by thinking.

Perhaps, in my basement, I have a cellar-dweller's computer. I log on to several gardening sites and know lots and lots of Latin names for plants. I may never have known the fragrance of a rose, but I know long names for several of them! Like, Rosa Gallica Officinalis & Rosa Dopus Pratticus.

But a gardener knows the fragrance of a rose, with eyes closed. This fragrance is impermanent, yet eternal. A nose knows a rose knows a rose.

(source) Once more I give my thanks to people who've gone "there" before and have helpful advice for those prone to dreaming that they're awake.

Twitter, other people's revolutions, vigorous masturbation

Let us be clear. Chaos Marxism disapproves of the "Islamic Republic" regime in Iran, although we should point out that the Shi'ites in Iran are significantly less cruel and crazy than the Wahhabis in Saudi Arabia. Although we have no sides in the quarrel between the unpleasant reactionary clown Ahmedinejad and the unctuous blood-on-his-hands-from-when-he-was-PM-in-the-80s neoliberal Moussavi, we are at the same time heartened by reports that working class forces are getting into the action in the current uprising in Tehran, and distressed by the many similarities to the CIA/NED-funded "colour revolutions" that have overthrown inconvenient regimes in Ukraine, Lebanon, Georgia etc. just to put an oppressor pleasing to the West in charge. The obvious slogan should be "Neither the Mullahs nor Imperialism, but International Socialism, Peace and Brotherhood", if you can fit that on a placard.

But that's not the point, since it's being well argued in many places elsewhere. What I want to point out is this article, puncturing the nonsense about there being a "Twitter revolution" in Iran. While there seems to be a real-life battle going on on the streets and workplaces of Iran, the whole Twitter thing seems to be overwhelmingly about:
- feeding disinformation helpful to the US and Israel to the people on the ground in Iran;
- giving plump Westerners the ability to fap themselves off by identifying with someone else's revolution. All that "TURN YR ICON GREEN 4 FREEDUMZ!!1!" nonsense - it's about as much actual use in the scheme of things as turning your icon black to support the NZ rugby teams. Sadly, it's much more destructive. The real goal of this construction of "pre-fab identities" by the marketing geniuses at the US State department is to reaffirm the collective identity of the middle-class voting and consuming public "the West" as "the good guys, supporters of freedom", which will be very useful next time our leaders want support to invade somewhere and kill brown folks.

So, the whole point of the Twitter revolution is to confuse and demoralise the actual martyrs on the ground in Iran, and the opinion-forming layers in the West, into identifying with the forces of world capitalism and imperialism. Let's hope they don't succeed. Actually, to hell with hoping, let's make sure they don't succeed. Bring up the points raised in this post every time someone brings up the events in Iran as if there were some kind of glorious morality parade, with "pro-Western" being used as a substitute for "good guys".

...but first you've got to THROW IT

Your willpower, or intent, is like a boomerang. Project it the wrong way, and you will waste time and energy. Project it the right way, it will come back to you and you will have a gain in results for a net zero in expenditure. If you're losing energy, feeling run down or wasted, you should ask yourself whether you have any "open-ended" commitments, things that drag on forever with no clear way to end the cycle and get your boomerang back. Then, figure out how to put an end to them properly.

The turn to the mystical

Psychic nomad made a useful comment on the 1 Key / 9 Commitments post in that I seemed to be prioritising the Greater Work (the struggle against the false self / nafs / Ego) over the Lesser Work (the struggle against injustice and mass brainwashing in the real world), when really they should go together. He (please correct for gender if necessary) was right, in principle. However, as VI Lenin said, one has to bend the stick to the needs of the present moment. And this ties in with the face that my political mentor (who's obviously kind of enlightened in his own way, although a traditional Marxist and therefore a hard-core atheist) told me ages ago I needed to be "more humble and less sensitive".

The essential reason for the shift of emphasis is the shift of emphasis on real life. It's a combination of two things:
- the actual political experiments I've been involved in have been, to use a Spinal Tapism, quite "selective" in their success;
- the realisation of what my mentor meant by humility; i.e. that so much of my political activism had not, in fact, been motivated by an intent to make it work. Rather, it had been motivated by Ego as we have been discussing it - the desire to be a "bad ass revolutionary" so that people would think I was cool and sexy, carrying with it the concomitant desire to never be wrong about anything, which led to avoiding criticism (and therefore accurate feedback) at all costs, which is obviously certain death to a political project which means actually talking to real people in the real world who don't share your assumptions and whom you can't control.

So I've negotiated a brief leave of absence (certainly not a resignation) from the Lesser Work to put serious effort into the Greater Work for a while. So this means that I need you the viewers at home to give more feedback on whatever you might have been doing in the actual real struggle against injustice. Me, I'll be sitting at home for a while, listening to my Ego screaming at me and waiting for it to be quiet for a little while.

Ego: What It Is And What It Ain't

Well, if we are to speak of egos, then mine just got a boost with the first ever real comments-box debate on this blog. Doctor John Zoidberg speaks for me on this matter:



*ahem* Anyway, to address the subject of the controversy. In the little maze of words I have developed to express the idea-complex I call Chaos Marxism, "ego" is defined as that part of you which has developed with the express goal of survival in the Real World of Horrible Jobs. (See Aphorisms 2:123 and 2:132) Ego is the part of you which:
- can have relationships with other people.
- can acquire the goods and services necessary for survival and personal fulfilment.
- has opinions on politics, sport, music, the weather, other people, etc.

If anything I've said here could be taken to read that I advocate the annihilation or "amputation" of the ego, I've done something terribly wrong, because as you see above, the ego is bloody useful for many things. If you don't have an ego, then you have to be locked up for your own protection and people have to feed you pre-chewed mush so you don't hurt yourself with cutlery. And if you have a weak ego, you will be dependent on any weird identity, religion or other memetic device which will prop your ego up to be able to face the world. This is especially true under capitalism. As I mentioned a couple of days ago, ego is more necessary under capitalism than at any other time in history, because this is the time when the isolated individual is supposed to look after themselves independently of social networks.

However, a vital tenet of the CM approach - which doesn't appear to be in the Aphorisms yet, which probably means I need a third volume - is that since a successful ego is one which enables you to live well and comfortably in the world-as-is, it is not fit for the purpose of changing the world-as-is. This of course will explain why revolutionary parties are full of flakes and weirdos, i.e. people who haven't got that kind of well-rounded ego, so they're a bit outside the whole system. Like "Rowdy" Roddy Piper in They Live, if you're not the people the ads are speaking to, you can see the true horrror in what they're actually saying.

However, as said above, the weaker the ego, the more Ego Comes First. What this means in practice is putting the practical needs of the movement (changing the world) behind the needs of the ego (finding a niche where people like you and you can feel good about yourself). And so the party becomes a sect, a substitute religion, a lifestyle choice. So many people who escape the clutches of Big Brother just end up falling for the first Little Brother/Sister who tells them the lies that they want to hear (usually some variation on You Are The Chosen One). So the opposition to the system is recuperated, because the essential problem - the dominance of the Ego and its needs for an identity, for a place to call home, for attention - is still the same.

So what is the way out? Simply put - to have a strong Ego which is under control. This is the purpose of the Greater Work/Jihad which I outlined in "One Key and Nine Commitments". It requires the essential insight that YOU ARE NOT YOUR EGO. Your ego is a tool. It's something that you created for a purpose, and your job is not to look after its needs. Quite the opposite. What you really are - let's call it "True Self" until someone suggests a better term - has nothing to do with ego, which, as we've explained, is all about your physical and social survival and wellbeing, identity, and place in the world. "True Self" is... well, what really moves you, irrespective of all those social games.

Robert Graves, professional poet and amateur theologian, suggested that the true test of poetry is whether it makes the hairs on the back of your neck stand on end. For "poetry" substitute whatever gets you metaphysically high. It might be BDSM play. It might be the first thirty seconds of "Squonk" by Genesis (1975) (fuckin' brilliant bass line). It might be petting your dog. WHATEVER. If you can find that source of "poetry" - the language of your soul - you have a way of looking after yourself irrespective of the ego. Look, even bloody Weight Watchers has figured this out - that so many people become fat because they are eating, not for their bodies' needs or even for pleasure, but to plug holes in a fragile ego, or at least to numb the pain. Anything that you do for its own sake, for the joy of being there and existing, is the voice of your True Self. Feed that as much as you can. Anything you do because it gives you some kind of identity or place in the world or plugs a psychic gap is feeding Ego. Put it on a diet. No, that does not mean starve it to death.

I do like the metaphor of the ego as a dog. I don't want to hurt the friendly dog, but he and I will be much, much happier if he learns to stop begging for food and humping my leg.

===

Also, Christopher mentioned in the comments:

that sort of dancing nascent insight on this blog that really does seem to come from a stream of consciousness singing about a great deal of interconnected ideas that haven't been systematically joined, and perhaps never will be.

Yeah, that's about right. Posts on this blog are as spontaneous as anything I ever do. I get a Burning Thought - oft-times during prayer or meditation - and rush to this blog to put it in vaguely presentable form before the buzz wears off, which really is a kind of verbal "dance". This is a problem for the medium-term project of putting this into a book. I write for publication as well, and that's a completely different style of writing, and I'm not sure how well it will translate.

Reprogramme self now, ask me how

A neuroscientist had a massive stroke which pretty much wrecked the entire verbal/cognitive part of her brain, and then over the course of the decade she put her entire personality back together from scratch. The best bit is how she did so while specifically not re-activating the bits she didn't like.

I've read the full interview, which isn't online anywhere I can see, but she does go on to say that this is basically mindfulness, "remembering yourself", realising that you are not identical with your ego, your personality, or whatever thoughts or images are running through your head, like all those Buddhists and Sufis and Gurdjieff fanboys and Robert Anton Wilson and now the CBT crowd have been talking about since Adam was a cowboy. Dig her full website.

I am always shocked and pleased when science confirms the insights of theory/philosophy/religion that stepping up to RAW's "sixth circuit" - metaprogramming, learning the difference between You and Your Ego and learning to get the latter to do what it's told - is not only possible but there are recognised and predictable ways to get there. In other news, Terry Pratchett is questioning his atheism because of some personal gnosis, although I'm sure the hardcore atheists will say something uncharitable about his illness.

I suppose where all our paths diverge is the question of what exactly is the real you under all that ego crap which can do the reprogramming. Mystics would say it's God his/her own self. Buddhists (I believe, please correct me if I'm wrong) would say it's the essential nothingness at the heart of everything. Gurdjieff called it a new type of Man. Perhaps a scientistic way of putting it would be pre-conscious neural circuits. Chaos Marxism says it's the seed of a new world.

Atheism, egoism, capitalism

All three of above evolved at the same time, and contain the same socio-economic content - the revolt against feudal authority, of king, priest, and (crucially) the whole network of social obligations which is the very basis of feudalism. And this meant a revolt against horizontal obligations to the local community, as well as vertical obligations to one's lord on earth and Lord in heaven. From this point the basis of all social relationships becomes, as Ayn Rand put it, "men must trade value for value" - value here of course meaning exchange value, "use value" being dismissed as some kind of mediaeval fanciful notion, like phlogiston and the King's touch curing scrofula. The individual, the bourgeois subject is now the only real reality from which everything else is extrapolated.

(It's of course no coincidence that the one exception to this is the nuclear family - kind of the "dirty secret" of capitalism, as the unpaid labour of housewives and mothers in the marriage or de-facto-marriage relationship is probably the last remaining vestige of feudal traditions of fealty and fiefdom. And of course Ayn Rand had absolutely nothing to say about the raising of children, which is kind of a gaping flaw in the Objectivist worldview. But anyway...)

If you believe in "God", as traditionally defined, it is impossible to argue that humans do not have some kind of obligation to God. Of course, the first step away from traditional religion was not atheism as we know it, but the Deism of Thomas Jefferson and the French Jacobins - that there is a fundamental order to the Universe, called God for convenience, but that "God made Nature and then Nature made everything else" (to quote Zora Neale Hurston), and therefore no feudal-style relation of vassalage applied for humanity, and we can do what we like. After a hundred years or so, science had advanced enough that "Science" replaced "Nature's God" in the radical bourgeois imagination, and thus atheism replaced deism.

But, you may argue, wasn't the 19th century famous for the most saccharine forms of official religious piety? Well, of course it was, and that was the retreat from radical liberal ideology - because radical liberal ideology couldn't justify slavery or imperialism. But religion could - if you replaced the divine right of kings with the divine right of Western Civilisation, and the ruling class which embodied Western Civilisation. It's also very handy for keeping the plebs in line, in the traditional "opium of the masses" sense - as long as we remember that the ruling class were high on exactly the same opium, which kept the essential contradiction between professed values and actual actions suppressed.

Religion was the opiate of the masses because the bourgeoisie had no direct way to influence the peasantry, the poor or the nascent working class. The local priest or minister or preacher was the main channel through which ruling class ideology filtered to the masses. In the Catholic countries, of course, there was a long drawn-out struggle against the Church hierarchy, with its hung-over feudalist values - which, crucially, involved not only the absolute authority of the Pope, but those pesky feudal mutual social obligations, which is where that whole tradition of Catholic Centre / Christian Democratic politics comes from (and, in the Anglophone countries, the phenomenon of One Nation Toryism / Red Toryism). So "social conservatism" competed for the hearts and minds of the masses with bourgeois liberalism, and in many countries it was a pretty good struggle for a hundred years or so.

That's all over now, because the mass media and mass psychology evolved, and now the forces of bourgeois liberalism have an "in" to the home of virtually every worker, peasant and poor person in the world. Now there is simply no need for God to keep the proles in line, because "Western Civilisation", "Democracy", "Freedom" and "Liberty" have become substitute Gods impressed firmly into the mass psyche. Bourgeois conservatism - in the sense of a single organic "body politic", and obligations for the wealthy to protect as well as discipline the underlings - is dead. Everyone believes in the idol Free Trade now. And in the absence of an actual mass working class movement (i.e. in most of the world at the moment), the competition to bourgeois liberalism comes from one of two middle-class ideologies - social liberalism (the ideology of the Hollywood actors, tenured academics and computer programmers, which has more or less taken the place formerly held by Catholic Centrism and social-conservatism), and reactionary mass movements up to and including actual fascism.

None of these have any real need for God in their memetic arsenal. Reaction in the United States usually drapes itself in the Cross, and in Saudi Arabia in the name of the Prophet, but (for example) in the Netherlands you've got reactionary secularism/atheism, which declares Muslims the new homo sacer who cannot be tolerated because they don't tolerate the same groups the idol Western Civilisation declares should be tolerated. (Save a gay, beat a towelhead.)

To sum up: the new oppressive ideologies all worship "Western Civilisation" - and his mighty servants "Democracy", "Free Markets", "Individual Choice" and/or "The Nation" - as their central idols - with or without the traditional Judeo-Christian-Islamic God propped up beside them. The social liberals embrace atheism because the bourgeois liberals and reactionaries use religion as a weapon of social control. But then the bourgeois liberals and reactionaries declare themselves opposed to the religion of the Dark Scary Others. So all three main ideological forces support attacks on the religion of Those Guys Over There. And so the "centre-left" of modern capitalism becomes complicit in the imperial project - just as they did 70 years ago, when the French Communist Party argued for colonialism as a boon and gift to benighted savages.

Face facts, militant atheists. So many of you believe in idols which have taken more blood and human suffering than all the Gods ever invented - of which "Western Civilisation" and "Capitalist Accumulation" are the worst. So either be a consistent skeptic - "question everything", as Karl Marx and Aleister Crowley agree - or admit you've just declared a new religion.

The ideologies of our enemies have this in common - a belief in the idol "Western Civilisation" as the strongest god in the actually existing world (whether or not they believe in the Christian God as well); that the current levels of relative economic prosperity are proof of the divine favour of this bloodthirsty idol; and that the bonds of common humanity only extend to other believers in this idol. In this sense, what the memetic complex really can't handle is people who "don't share our values", i.e. worship some other god or idol - even the Christian God, in a way which does not identify the supreme being with "Western Civilisation".

Chaos Marxism does not share the values of Western Civilisation. We hold to the values of the next era of humanity, an era of internationalism, of unity in diversity, of both science and religion as liberators of the human spirit and not oppressors. We do not use the rights of women or queers as a stick to beat the religious with, and certainly not vice versa. We recognize that the choice is not between Jesus or Allah or "Science" - it is between the forces of empire, violence, compulsive accumulation and accelerating global destruction on one hand, and the forces of a new network of social responsibility between all humanity and the ecosystem we are part of on the other hand. We don't care what you believe, only what you do. A Jehovah's Witness or New Guinean animist who fights for justice is worth ten atheists who just eat chips and watch TV.

We reject all idols, or at least realise that no God or abstract concept can help you or harm you - except in that it is useful for you to invoke in yourself your real identity as a human being living on planet Earth, and bring to heel the ego which has evolved to make you a docile servant of "Western Civilisation". And as Marxists, we have faith (i.e. hope backed with evidence) that those who work in the bowels of the system have both the motive and means to overthrow that system, and build a new one based on solidarity, on individuality finding its true self in the bonds of community, on the overthrow of the almighty Ego.

Vill! I mean, Will!

The mystics say: every time you fail to complete a cycle of action or fulfill a commitment or an intent, a part of your will dies, and part of you dies with it. That can clearly be expanded to political action, in that a real political force is like a shark, or a bicycle - if it's not moving, it's going to fall down. Every time there is a political question in your reach, and you don't intervene in some way, with the effect of striking up a conversation or otherwise getting ideas across to one person, your organisation dies a little - or worse, starts the process of zombification. A zombie group is what we call a "sect".

It is becoming increasingly clear to me that a real Movement or Current - political, artistic, cultural, religious - as a collective consciousness obeys quite similar rules of development to an individual consciousness, and so the various disciplines for controlling the ego (the "Greater Work") shade over nicely into building "the party" or other force for collective action (the "Lesser Work"). And it's also becoming increasingly obvious that you can't really learn this from a book (or a blog for that matter, *ahem*), you have to learn by the personal experience of doing. Which is why, once again, we call for your reports on how you have attempted to put CM ideas into practice in your area and time zone.

===

Open thread for comments on what the European Parliament elections mean from the viewpoint of those interested in CM ideas. I'll start: we see once again that the far right can only get a mass audience when the far left is pathetic. The fash get totally pushed out in Germany or France. But the left don't defend the Islamic community in the Netherlands, and we get Geert Wilders; and the left can't get over themselves to build a united party in Britain, and we get Nick glass-eye closeted-homo Griffin.

It's as simple as that.

When you boil it all down, all magick is, really, is finding something nice to distract your ego with, while your subconscious and/or transpersonal Self does the real work. Which presupposes, of course, knowing that your ego is not your real self, but a "program" or "structure" developed to enable you to survive in the world as you have experienced it to date.

===

I promised a while ago to start posting reports of my own personal work, to give readers an idea of what this might fee like in practice. And finally, I get around to it:

I have been doing some hard and serious work lately, which has been quite painful. To summarise: my own ego is very, very much bound up with the idea that I have to impress the hell out of people. (I am a wannabe guru, politician and academic, in other words - but careful readers will have worked that out already.) But that presupposes a view of the world in which other human beings are divided into (a) docile puppets of my ego; (b) threats. And then I wonder why I have problems with actual human relationships.

So I think I've finally managed to get across to my ego that peace and fulfilment are not to be found that way, because other people are fundamentally not mine to control. But I don't yet have the clear connection with the broader Current of which I have been speaking on this blog - the world-changing, world-invigorating, current that you can call God, or Revolution, or Ourselves In The Future - to find an alternate means of psychic sustenance yet. So I've been sleeping and crying a lot.

Much more prayer/meditation is called for. I am currently backing off from most of my external commitments - both to make this possible, and because quite simply I have been engaging in politics and art for improper, egotistical motives, rather than letting myself be available as an instrument for the higher realities. No wonder my concrete success has been limited.

Oldthinkers unbellyfeel Ingsoc

Just had another little epiphany about Nineteen Eighty-Four. You know, what they do to Winston in the Ministry of Love doesn't make him love Big Brother. It just smashes all his self-esteem and any previous sentiments and attachments he might have had. In the last chapter, he's sitting there in the Chestnut Tree Café, completely empty. What changes everything is the triumphant news over the telescreen of a (presumably fictitious) massive Oceanian military victory in Africa. It's then that he loves Big Brother.

You see, I think at that point Winston sees the point of what he's been doing with his life. The continuous falsification of history and reality itself, torture and oppression, etc - they are all worthwhile in that they actually make people happy. He who really believes in Ingsoc and loves Big Brother will never be unhappy again because there's an entire mechanism set up whereby the good guys always win - no matter what objective reality might be saying. The Ministry of Truth creates a world where Oceania is always winning (but never wins) the War, the chocolate ration is always going up (from 30 to 25 to 20 grammes, etc), where traitors are always ferretted out and nothing ever goes wrong, where increasing psychological joys are produced for continually minimising real costs.

The big difference with what we have now is that of course there's no ideological or economic competition in Oceania. In the world-as-is, on the other hand, the individual campaigns and firms want us to continually be unhappy, to make us keep consuming the right products (or voting for the right candidates) rather than the competition. You will see that, when people are actually stirred to mass political action in the real world, this continuous low-level hum of anger and dissatisfaction rises to the surface.

But on the other hand, this continual pressing on the nerve of dissatisfaction requires a compensating need to be told that Everything Is Really Just Fine. Which is where the other side of propaganda - propaganda on behalf of the whole system, of "free markets", "democracy", "the consumer is king" - comes in (and of course the various religious cults). And this is why masses of journalists had no interest in exposing the lies of the rush to war in Iraq in 2002-3. They wanted to believe because a war would make them feel better about themselves. They wanted certainty amidst chaos. They wanted to create a Big Brother they could love. (ETA: This side of the memetic complex, much like Ingsoc, is essentially solipsistic. It only exists if you believe in it, perception is reality, if people suffer it's through lack of faith and belief, etc.)

One reason why capitalism is unstable is precisely because the ideological-media apparatus wants to make us unhappy so we'll purchase and consume, but also happy so we won't rebel and will go to work on time. This is the area in which we've got to work. One big problem with Marxist attitudes to mental health is the idea that anything that actually makes you happy (eg. psychotherapy, religion, your own private lifestyle or leisure pursuits) is bad because it distracts you from the need to overthrow the cause of all unhappiness, capitalism. And then they wonder why the only people they can recruit to their groups are the severely psychically disturbed who can't be happy whatever they do.

The approach that "no-one can be happy until we overthrow capitalism" just means that the freaks and weirdos who would be taking drugs or joining religious cults end up standing on street corners selling papers. Which is good for the survival of sects, but not for the project of transforming humanity. Chaos Marxism's approach - as we've said before - is that political activism motivated by the need to feed or bolster the ego is doomed to failure, in that the ego is itself formed by the needs of hierarchical capitalist society. True happiness - as well as effective political action - lies in the submission of the ego to the deeper Self (which the religiously inclined might see as God-however-definied) which is, in its very nature, part of a broader network of humanity rather than an isolated, monadic entity.

If you find Big Brother within yourself, in other words, you will be free from anyone else's mythology, and free to truly be of help to something apart from your own self-image. Not submission to the Party or some abstract concept, not submission to the lies and myths that your culture tells itself to stop from falling to bits, not submission to the lies that if you consume enough of the right sort of goods - or hang around with the Cool People - it will fill the yawning gap that you feel all the time. The Christians are probably right that there's a God-shaped hole in everyone. But fill your own hole in the way that it needs to be filled (oo-er, sounds a bit rude), and then you will see where you actually fit into the symphony of human existence.

The One Key and Nine Commitments of Chaos Marxism (amended draft)

We can sum up in one word the core of the Chaos Marxist approach. Mindfulness. Or, if you prefer, consciousness, or even Gramsci's good sense. Or Gurdjieff's "Remember yourself". The Sufi tradition, Buddhism and modern cognitive-behavioural therapy agree - being able to step back from compulsive thoughts and the compulsive feelings they evoke, to recognize them as not real, is the essence of psychic health and enlightenment. And Marxist theories of ideology insist that the way our rulers impose their control over us is by reification - mistaking illusion for reality, social relations for concrete things, narratives or memes for actual laws of existence. You can't live without an ego any more than you can live without money, but you must remember that it's not real, it's a convention, it only exists if you and others believe in it, and that it's a great servant but a hideous master.

On the micro-level, Chaos Marxism stands for the ruthless "obedience training" of the ego. Imagine that your ego is a badly trained dog - it barks when not necessary, it requires far more attention than it really needs, it humps your leg or otherwise annoys you when you're trying to do something. But you don't need to take it out and shoot it, you just need to teach it that its perceptions are not reality and it should submit to rationality and discipline. You'll all be happier that way. Indeed, your ego is the way it is because it evolved to help you survive in capitalism as it is; and one of the main ways that capitalism makes money in this day and age (and fosters obedience) is by selling pre-fab ego-identities to people. The ego cannot change "what is" because it has adapted to work with "what is". The "Greater Work" of Chaos Marxism, therefore, consists of the following commitments:

1. to learn how your ego works, and how it fits in with the broader culture, the media-industrial complex, the "identity industry" and mechanisms of social control;


2. to discover what your own physical, mental and spiritual needs and joys are, independent of the ego's needs, and to learn to provide for those needs;


3. to commit yourself to the service of Something Greater than your ego - humanity, the biosphere, God however defined, etc.


4. to bring the ego to the service of this Something Greater by discipline and rationality, rejecting all irrational beliefs, compulsions and pre-packaged identities as a snare and a delusion for the ego;


5. to "tune up" the ego so that the needs of Something Greater and your own personal needs can both be served. (If they appear to conflict, then you have misconceived one or both of them.)

On the macro-level, Chaos Marxism acknowledges that capitalism pollutes the cultural/information space, and therefore the psyche of all those subject to it, just as badly as it poisons the ecosphere and thus our physical health. Therefore, we encourage any and all social or political activity which increases consciousness of objective reality and dispels illusions. We suggest that would-be social activists combine their activism with the work of disciplining their own ego. Only that way can you get actual real objective knowledge of the World-As-Is, and what needs to be done, rather than prejudices reflected back off the inside of your skull. And also, only that way can you teach people by example that their own egos are part of the problem rather than part of the solution. This "Lesser Work" consists of a commitment to:

6. serving the Something Greater, as above, by concrete action for a better world where it will be easier for everyone to live free of illusion and slavery, physical, mental and spiritual;


7. practicing compassion for all living things, including yourself, by helping whoever wants to be helped in whatever way you can;


8. putting the lessons learned in the Greater Work into practice, by creating propaganda, art, and magick however defined that calls to awaken the "good sense" of the broad mass of people over the top of the "common sense" of ego and the cultural-ideological apparatus of oppression;


9. keeping the ego out of this Lesser Work by refusing the role of "guru", "leader", or in any other way trying to submit other wills to your own rather than liberate them on their own path to Something Greater.

I'm no guru or shaikh. I can't claim to be doing any of the above with anything other than fitful success. This is a path that I hope might be useful as a framework to others, but it's something I'm struggling with myself. For example, I will know that I have humbled my own ego when I feel free to use my real name on this blog, i.e. when I am no longer afraid of ridicule or abuse. So please, your comments and criticisms, please. This only becomes real when it's real for someone else but me.

Fripp says and I agree...

Discipline is never an end in itself, only a means to an end. Discipline always has an aim. In that way, a discipline is different from a lifestyle.

Many so-called disciplines are in fact lifestyles, in that the "aim" is vague, nonsensical, impossible, or pointless. The accepted wisdom in small Marxist groups, for example, is to "build a routine to cohere the cadre" - in other words, get new members used to doing a particular ritual by rote, to build their allegiance to the group. But that means the purpose of the ritual "political activity" (selling the paper, branch discussions etc) is not actually real politics, in the sense of spreading liberatory memes and getting involved in struggle, it's the continued survival of the group. One can justify selling the paper on the grounds that it gets you used to talking politics with real people, but the problem comes when sales figures become the goal, rather than the conversations.

Look, I'm working with the Sufi tradition at the moment, which includes salaat. That's specifically meant as a habit-breaker and a way to bring you into a regular relationship with God. But this is a mystical, spiritual tradition we're talking about, in which inculcating beliefs and weakening the ego is the purpose of the process. That's not the purpose of politics. And I say here and now, Marxism is fine politics but it's absolute shit as a lifestyle or a religion. The vast majority of "Leninist" groups around today exist as sects based on religious-style practice rather than serious political players. Stay away from any "political" groups that in fact act as religions - or vice versa.

Sectarianism: stone it to death

Those individuals who adopt fill in the blank because they need an identity will be condemned to wander the sectarian and factional hall of mirrors, constantly looking for the perfect group that will give them their desperately needed sense of specialness and superiority. ... People with confused identities are attracted to totalitarian solutions.

The original article filled the blank with "Islam", but as you can see if you throw "Marxism" in there it works just as well.

(Yes, there's been a lot of Islamic talk around here recently. My current personal work has reached the point where I feel the need for a religion again, and being bored with neo-paganism I'm exploring the Sufi tradition.)

If you've enjoyed this diatribe...

For those interested in what Chaos Marxism might look like if I were talking to Muslims rather than Marxists and modern magickians, watch Kabir Helminski do his thing, and marvel at the similarities even in words ("Islam is not an identity, Islam is not a fanclub!"). I am increasingly happy that I am part of a real Current - "one Faith, many Belief-Systems".

May Day

Chaos Marxism stands for separation of church and state; and of the personal and the political. Not in the sense that they have nothing to do with one another - on the contrary, there's a strong dialectical interrelationship between the social microcosm and the social macrocosm, because that's what we're talking about on this blog. But don't confuse the levels.

Frank Zappa said "You can't run a country by a book of religion". Well, it might be objected that the early Islamic ummah did reasonably well for a few centuries, but that wasn't being run entirely on the basis of the Noble Qu'ran, but on the personal authority and example of the Prophet, peace be upon him and all that. That gave the system an essential flexibility and humanity that is lacking from all dogmatic structures - and from arbitrary personality cults, at the other extreme. There are good forms of religious-inspired political activism which realise this, and bad forms that just want to show a particular legalistic interpretation of the Bible or the Qu'ran or the Collected Works of V. I. Lenin or Quotations from Chairman Mao down your throat. That crap will last a few decades and collapse, at best. (Unless, sadly, it's sitting on a buttload of natural resources. We need to understand exactly what the House of Saud have been up to for the last few decades - simultaneously schmoozing with the worst scumbags among Western capitalists, and spreading an interpretation of Islam which is pretty much all sword and no heart on a global scale.)

At the other end of the scale of trying to use your personal religious beliefs or identity as a means for social organisation or activism, of course, lies the trap of using your political activism as a substitute religion or identity. This is of course what we've been cursing out on this blog for ages - the essential solipsism of sitting at home polishing your soul while the world falls down outside, while engaging in "play-politics" to make yourself feel better. One way lies heartlessness - the other, uselessness. Marx and Lenin never gave any indications for how you should live your life, nor should they have. Find one that works for you and is consistent with the principles of the new world they wanted to build.

The poet Rumi said: "Faith is one whereever you go, but beliefs are many", or words to that effect. So, a social movement which might have a chance of actually building a new world has to be completely firm on certain basic principles of action/communal effort, but completely tolerant on exactly how those principles might be expressed. The middle road - the best combination of the rational and irrational, personal mildness and firm principle, ends and means - is what any healthy and progressive social system needs. If you ask me, modern capitalism has gone all the damn way towards the irrational, which is why it breeds dogmatic cults such as fundamentalist Islam and Christianity as a counterbalance.

This is the principle of the united front applied to macrocosmic social organisation as well as to how we get on with our neighbours and friends. In Islamic terms, it is the fusion of the "greater jihad" of personal ethics and the "lesser jihad" of striving for social justice. From the Thelemic standpoint, we might distinguish the "lesser magick" of fighting back against the memetic bombardment of the current industrial deathculture and creating symbols and egregores that will serve us, and the "greater magick" of becoming the kind of people who will be fit of living in a new and better Aeon. The Prophet Muhammad and V. I. Lenin both got the job done because they knew how to make this combination, which is why they changed the world, each in their own way.

A musical interlude below....

In a post last year about the late great Robert Anton Wilson, I had this to say:

to survive as a "stand-up guru" full-time you have to enter a Small Businessman's Reality Tunnel

I just realised that the same could be said of Robert Fripp. I have a lot of respect for the guy. But I realised that I find his most interesting and exciting stuff comes out of the late 1970's, when he still had a major-label record contract and his business affairs were run by managers who he trusted. So he was much more free, paradoxically, even though he was being financially used and spat out.

For those of you not familiar with the world of prog-rock, of course, Robert Fripp discovered the hard way that the music industry = "slavery and theft" (his words) when he realised that his managers had been methodically ripping him off for decades. He had to take seven years out of his musical life to sue the bastards to a standstill. After that, he set up his own record label. He had a belief that it should be possible (and therefore would be) to operate a record company in a way that would make a profit and act like a responsible citizen at the same time. He was, sadly, wrong, in that he couldn't actually make money without exploiting his artists. So he let them go and the label continues as his outlet for his own projects and those of close buddies.

But if you read his more recent blog, I don't enjoy it as much as the interviews from the late 70's. A lot of angry and frustrated comments about attempting to get major record labels to pay him for downloads of his work. Well, he's allowed to be angry about that. But to succeed as a self-employed person you have to act like a small capitalist and react to the world as if it were made of money rather than people. At that point, the ideas suffer.

I always thought, parenthetically, that the big problem in Fripp's analysis is that all productive labour under capitalism is "slavery and theft", not just music. In music - and other forms of intellectual property - it's more obvious because of copyright et al. But copyright in the modern age is simply a way to give privileges to memetic / cultural workers which physical and service workers don't get, which makes them think of themselves as entitled to certain privileges and gives them a stake in existing, exploitative class society. I think Fripp backed himself into a dead end because he didn't expand his absolutely correct insights from the music industry to all of society.

In summary: I really think you can't operate in the market place and not be corrupted by it. But on the other hand, sticking with the major labels is also brain-death of a different kind, in that you are playing on someone else's agenda. A look at the career of the guys in Yes - a band which did the precise opposite of what Fripp did at every juncture - shows that they lost their soul precisely because of their reliance on big corporate bux and an inability to come up with schemes and visions that could be put into action without corporate backing.

And that's how I justify it to myself that I never made it as a big rock-n-roll star. Fripp himself said it best years ago: "The business of a musician is music. The business of a professional musician is business. Best not to be a professional musician unless you have no choice."

(Heh. Cue Fripp writing a snide blog post about me if he ever reads this, like Ivan Stang did.)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

===

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

horror

"... in the Church of the SubGenius you are allowed to believe that you are not going to hell, but first you must face the fact that you are IN HELL NOW! Are you not?" - Ivan Stang

"If we knew what a number of people are actually dead and what a number of these dead people govern our lives, we should go mad with horror." - G. I. Gurdjieff

"Though I'm pretty sure of the importance and usefulness of what I'm saying, I have to admit that I don't really know what I'm doing." - Doloras LaPicho

"Remain in hell without despair" - J. G. Bennett

The aim

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

An introduction presents itself:

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

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

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

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

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

Communities

Communities of faith are not healthy. Healthy communities are based on real things - like social fellowship, work, common struggle, and play. But once you start drawing the defining lines around you on the basis of abstract concepts of belief and professions of faith, you are in the sect mentality. Nothing comes out of a sect except more sectarianism - it is a dead end of the spirit. Of course, a community can be part a sect and part a healthy community, in which case our struggle is to maximise the proportion of "healthy".

ETA: Yeah, and that goes for identity as well as faith. Chaos Marxism declares struggle against the idolatry of faith and identity.

Truth is always concrete. The world has had enough of religion - that is, the drawing of lines around us on the basis of how we think or even what words we use rather than what we do. However, we must also realise that a religious or spiritual impulse is built into our species being as humanity. Our challenge is to (a) accept all spiritualities (and anti-spiritualities like atheism) which reveal themselves in healthy and positive action in the World As Is; (b) work towards the unity of humanity around a new way of life which will abolish distinctions between the material and spiritual realms altogether.

I humble myself

In essence, everything I ever wanted to say on this blog is summed up in this article. Why could I never have heard of this guy before?

Never to a god made in the image of man.

What's wrong with this picture?



Opening of the Congress of People's Deputies of the USSR in Moscow, 1989.

Richard Dawkins and evangelical Christianity agree that the human brain has a God-shaped hole in it. And as Terry Pratchett put it in the excellent Small Gods (which you should all read), if people don't believe in gods they might believe in anything. So we've got to learn to live with them.

The Church of the SubGenius has proved by experiment that it is possible to fill that hole successfully with any insane shit - including clip-art from the 1950's Yellow Pages - and Ivan Stang has made a living off it for 25 years now. As the photo demonstrates, Stalin filled it admirably with the icon of poor Lenin - I can't find an image online, but I've seen a postcard from the USSR with Lenin as goddamned Santa Claus, bringing toys to good children. (While I have affection for Lenin and consider his example and teachings worth studying, he was just a flawed human like the rest of us and they should give him a decent burial.) And no-one on this blog needs to be told what ersatz gods and saints the prayer-mills of the memetic-industrial congress have successfully implanted in the brainpans of virtually everyone we know.

The Islamic term shirk can be translated as either "polytheism" or "idolatry", but essentially means "worshipping or fearing something other than God". Chaos Marxism appropriates the concept of "idolatry" (because there's nothing wrong with a little polythesism) to mean worshipping or fearing any god/idols/icon/meme defined by our own human brains - i.e. attributing independent existence and good/ill will to them, in any sort of "insisting that it's actually physically real" way. As the Prophet Muhammad said, idols can neither help us nor harm us - they are not real things with independent will, but projected-off parts of our own species-being. They are also programmes for behaviour - and it's a sin against yourself to be following a programme written by someone else which you didn't carefully debug yourself.

What goes along with this concept is that "idolatry" also consists in attributing to ultimate reality any of the characteristics of daily reality - trying to insist that God Herself (the Supreme Being, the Ultimate Spirit, the Creator of the Universe, the Omega Point, etc, etc.) is like a human with all sorts of petty human emotions and motivations, or indeed believing that anything you see and experience in the Real World of Horrible Jobs is "real" in an objective sense. Everything is fire; everything flows away; A is not A. The materialist dialectic teaches us that nothing we experience - including and especially our "selves" - is ultimately solid.

What the Muslims call idolatry, I think Marx called "commodity fetishism". Worshipping the works of one's own hands and deliberately forgetting that we made them, we break them, and they have no power apart from what we give them. Interestingly enough, this ties in with my previous reflections that commodity fetishism is closely tied to individualism - sometimes, the idol we worship is our own damned ego / identity.

Because that's how they control you. We can control ourselves by consciously, collectively and creatively creating our new myths, new icons, saints, angels, myths, folktales of the struggle to unfold ourselves, to become fully human. And these myths will act as programmes by which we can discover our own power, if we do it right. As long as we remember that we should never, ever worship or fear or seriously believe in any of them (unless as a deliberate experiment in mindfuck which we include safewords in).

The only religion I feel I would ever be enthusiastic about following would be the community rituals of a classless people's republic of the future. The Roman religion is meaningless without the Roman Republic in existence, and the same goes for the rituals and cults of the next aeon. Which is why we talk about the God/dess of the World To Come.

I am increasingly thinking that the Qabalistic or Sufi model - one single absolutely ineffable God, but with many levels and paths and emanated intelligences and angels etc. between there and here - is fitting to where I'm going with this. Although I don't place Kether / Ain Soph / God Herself in a rarified plane of existence, but far in the future of humanity. And it's only one of many possible futures.

Godforms

The creed of monotheism, as clearly set out in the Noble Qur'an and elsewhere, can be expressed as: "Nothing is worth worshipping or fearing but God." It may come as a shock to some of our readers to hear me expressing approval of the least politically fashionable of all the Abrahamic religions, but here's an article from a rather heretical branch of Islam, suggesting how that insistence on unity above all things ties into an almost Buddhist-style "non-attachment" to worldy possessions or the good opinion of others. Which I think is something we can get behind. Not only is it psychologically healthy, it's even politically revolutionary in potential - as the Catholic and Islamic Anarchists could tell you.

Now I doubt that I, or anyone following my ongoing monologue, is going to start believing in a superhuman personality which cares for us as if it were human, which is what most people think of when the word "God" is thrown around. At least, if we do start believing in such a thing, it will be in the spirit of experiment and there will be escape hatches! However, if Richard Dawkins is right, and spirituality / believing in something more important than everyday human survival is hard-wired into our consciousness, it's best to use that correctly. Which brings us back to a question I've asked elsewhere on this board - what might a "godform" of Chaos Marxism be like?

The Ma'at crowd talk of N'Aton, a future perfected and unified human consciousness who is projecting important mystic info backwards in time to enable us to turn into him/her/it. Although I cringe at the Star Trek-style random apostrophe in the name, the idea that our equivalent of "God" is something we are working towards becoming speaks to me. In contrast to those who would use "no other gods before me" as an excuse for self-abnegation of our human nature to some frankly scary abstract being, let us imagine our equivalent of "God" as being our growing consciousness of ourselves as humans and as humanity, seen as a unified entity, with power over our whole world for both good and ill. In that sense, certainly nothing is worth worshipping or fearing than "God".

Perhaps this is religion for the new millennium. We are in a position where - collectively - we-as-a-species do have power over our whole ecosphere. This renders old-school localised polytheism and abstract monotheism both obsolete. But are we going to be a blind idiotic Azathoth, a nihilistic and indifferent Doctor Manhattan, or something more like the Earth Mother or Santa Claus that most of us would prefer to believe in?

I've used the phrase "Unborn Goddess" before. I now prefer God/dess of the World To Come. One of the big problems with humanity at this stage is our attachment to the gender binary. Attempts to go beyond that, like the Ma'at crowd, tend to look a bit creepily inhuman, just like (sadly) people of not-man-nor-woman gender identity are today. Perhaps a different model can be One Power With A Thousand Faces, All Of Them Us. I look forward to artwork and storytelling.

The next step

"The capitalist economy presents itself as a vast accumulation of commodities" - Karl Marx
"Life under capitalism presents itself as a vast accumulation of spectacles" - Guy Debord
"The memetic environment under consumer capitalism presents itself as a vast accumulation of identities" - Doloras LaPicho

Identity-as-commodity is, Chaos Marxism insists, fundamental to explaining the ideological effect of capitalism. Social identities have always been based on participation in a social network. The novelty of late, Fordist/post-Fordist capitalism is that in every other era, identity-networks were based on one's place in relations of physical or memetic production. In the modern era, they are based on consumption. Which is why they proliferate, because they expand along with the dizzying consumer choice offered by the debt-driven monopolistic competition model. There are of course "mass market" identities sold to virtually everyone as race, nation, religion, favourite sports team, and if you're an American, "liberal" or "conservative". And then there are the niche market identities, which most readers of this blog will buy into. The important point is that adopting an identity based on consumption means that - unlike the proletariat of the 19th century - you do have something to lose apart from your chains if capitalism comes to an end, that very thing which (we argue) is fundamental to existence as a human being.

Just a brief note that what seems most ludicrous about the popular culture of the late '80s - late '90s (i.e. the high water mark of consumer capitalism) is the whole "neo-tribal" bullshit. It was the era in which wearing a subcultural uniform really took off - the more outlandish the uniform and the more "unconventional" its choices of entertainment commodities, the better. That is the dark future of total fragmentation predicted by Ken MacLeod in The Star Fraction. To some degree, the collapse of this economy (begun with the dot.com crash, accelerated by the War On Terror in which once again a position for or against the Powers That Be became important, and perhaps finally ending with Depression 2.0) is the collapse of the idea that fulfilment consists of finding the right clique to hang with. Now can someone tell this to the Marxist and anarchist sects? Or the Paultards, for that matter.

An even briefer note that no-one had better be thinking that stripping someone of their identity forcefully, or even challenging it directly, is a good idea. If it doesn't work, you've made an enemy for life, and if it does, they will be rendered useless. Of course, if you run a mind-control cult, the second is precisely what you are hoping for so you can reprogramme them according to your whim. You have to get the goose out of the bottle without breaking the glass - that's Trotsky's transitional method. Proposed political action has to be consistent with currently existing mass identity, while following a logic which leads out of them.

Special note: we have abolished pre-approval for comments, although we reserve the right to delete anything we consider retarded, or not retarded enough.

More on identity

As an introduction: if you're not watching Joss Whedon's Dollhouse yet, you should be. It will make a lot of the following post a lot clearer.

Maslow's hierarchy of needs is missing a bottom rung. Because humankind is a social animal (in particular a troop animal, like the other great apes), self-actualisation, esteem, love, safety and even physiological integrity are based on fitting into a social order in some way - in other words, having a social identity. If you're an ape living up a tree, then if you don't have a place in a troop of other apes for mutual self-defence and food gathering, you will starve to death or get eaten by a lion. And with our big sexy walking-upright brains, our place in our "troops" is based on identities constructed through social discourse.

The need for a social identity is therefore absolutely fundamental to human nature - which is why some people would prefer to destroy themselves physically than have to give up their social identity. If people are prepared to kill themselves if they lose their partner or their job or even some kind of social status, you have to re-examine exactly what is important in human nature. This is why, especially in the states, they've started handing out cellphones to homeless people - having a number where you can be contacted is more important to being "part of the social order" than having a house to live in or a job to go to, and is in fact a prerequisite to either of the above.

Slotting back into a Marxist approach to political economy, a given politico-economic structure will interpellate (that term (c) a notorious French wife-killer) the identities it needs. The reason why pre-WW2 Marxism is increasingly inadequate is that, while "working class" as a socio-economic category still clearly exists, as a social identity it's been more or less wiped out. The mass consumption economy needs mass consumers - people whose identity is based on what they consume rather than what they do. "What they do" to get the $$$ to consume with is a dirty little secret that is actually consciously repressed.

The Media Priests as I call them (the middle-class intelligensia in charge of memetic engineering) are of course perfectly placed for this, since they produce nothing but memes and consumption is their main function in the real economy. Therefore, they create a memetic environment where consumption is the basis of all social identity. We are in an era where people will riot over shortages of their preferred brand, even if perfectly equivalent alternatives are freely available, because mess with their brand, you mess with their identity.

The existing left is useless because it itself is trapped in niche-market or subcultural ways of thinking. Changing the world is increasingly a platonic goal at best - the real goal is perpetuation of "the scene" and of one's own preferred monkey troop within that scene. Apart from the serious ground-level business of helping build workers' resistance to attacks on capital, for real radicals of the new millenium, our overriding strategy must be: DESTROY ALL IDENTITIES. Actually existing personal and social identities do nothing but ensure that you will stay in your box forever. And that includes the identity of "revolutionary" or "magus" or whatever.

I don't think we're in the business of trying to build new identities, because (a) that's just another trap, (b) that ends up in a kind of "social psychology / mind-control cult" trap, where people get to play "more enlightened than thou". We have to smash the doors on our own cages open, while helping others smash their own locks. Only a self-sustaining chain reaction and collective action can actually achieve any social-wide change.

Cognitive behavioural therapy states that exorcising demons, smashing mind-forg'd manacles, whatever you call it, is best done by challenging those bad things' right to exist, and by practical experience doing something different. That should be the goal of all political activity -

1. challenge the dominant paradigm with memetic flair backed up with logic;
2. encourage practical activity (which can actually be done by the vast majority in their lunchbreaks and weekends) which proves that it's only real if you believe in it.

Here's some examples of memes that need to be destroyed with great urgency if we want the planet to continue to support an advanced technological society:

- I am what I consume.
- Money is real.
- People different from me in race, gender, nationality or sexuality are my enemy.
- What I do is of no value and the boss pays me out of the kindness of their heart.
- The individual is the only reality - collectives are powerless and useless.
- The current social order is fixed and natural and can't be changed.

A word of warning: some very, very dodgy things come up when the repressed return. That's what a revolution is all about. A terrible danger is "radicals" still stuck in a middle-class-intellectual identity freaking out when the awakening masses come up with memes they don't like the look of, and decide that they'd prefer living under oppression to the rule of the uncouth, un-PC mob - as if enactment of a particular programme was the determining factor. Eg - mass strike breaks out in the UK, some leftists freak out because the workers are raising the wrong slogans (i.e. different from those that the wannabe memetic engineers in the leftist groups worked out in advance.)

But human liberation is the only determining factor, our only real goal. Programme is only a means to an end in that regard. We must be fanning all oppositional, anti-consumption, pro-production-for-use activity, while combatting any attempt to build up new identities, especially those around creating new niche identities, or more particularly in beating the crap out of people with a different identity.

A couple of other words of warning:
- A good way to make sure nothing ever changes is to require perfection. In the political sphere, this translates to "I don't get out of bed for anything less than full-blown revolution in the streets". If we set achievable goals for shifting society's memes one tiny step away from "money is real" and towards "production for people and planet, not profit", then we can be happy. Note that this is not the same thing as "recruit one more member to my ridiculous little fan club" - in fact, quite the opposite. We need to be spreading ideas wide, not creating a cult.
- A new sustainable world will of course create its own web of identities which will of course need to be overthrown in their turn, but let's burn that bridge when we come to it. Suffice to say that if your identity is based around changing the world, then when the world is changed you will suddenly be out of a job and might want to kill yourself, so you might even end up subconsciously preventing yourself from success.

Games and economic behaviour

"Cognitive-behavioural therapy" is, at core, the idea that you can exorcise a demon by arguing with it. Funnily enough, it seems to get results. In that sense, how much of "mass magick" (aka politics, marketing and advertising) is simply CBT aimed at an entire demographic/population/society/planet? INVOKE OFTEN is the core of magick, and our enemies certainly have the big battalions of memetic artillery lined up at their own citizens to do just that. In contrast, we can only win if our memes are more useful for everyday life.

We should be aware that our enemies know all this stuff and are putting it into practice already. The Israeli army, for example, trains in the works of Foucault and Deleuze to think up strategies to not only defeat the Palestinian nation militarily, but to disrupt it on the memetic/social level and render its members docile and obedient. The main problem with "radical" politics, as we know it today in the West (i.e. small cliques of middle-class dropouts playing toy Bolshevik or pretend Emma Goldman), is that all the strategies in it stem from the Situationists at best, and the early 20th century at worst. Science has marched on here, guys. We need to be applying the most modern memetic theory - including CBT - to our political work.

And that's why I haven't been posting much recently - certain political projects in the Real World of Horrible Jobs have fallen into my laps, and I've been struggling with the task of making the Chaos Marxist approach useful for practical action. The Aphorisms as they stand are about as much use as "the Thoughts of Chairman Mao" - they're inspirational and fun, but can be interpreted in so many alternative ways. But here are some more ideas to be going on with.

We need to do more work on the idea that the "individual" is interpellated by consumer-capitalist society. To put it in CM lingo, the corporate infosphere is in the business of selling an identity. And having an identity is like having a job - if you don't have one you drop out of society altogether. Losing one's identity is even more terrible a prospect than losing one's job, and of course for many working people they're virtually the same thing. The problem is that for the middle-class cliques that call themselves "the left", their identity is "vanguard of the proles / future cognitive elite of the planet". Even though in theory they want to liberate the planet, in practice what they end up doing is building the walls higher around their private universe. Someone on a very good blog elsewhere suggested that the typical sect leader has exactly the same mentality as that of a sweetshop owner - they know they can't actually expand their little empire, but they can dominate what they have and build a higher wall around it every day.

Becoming aware of how your favourite identity is pieced together from bits sold to you by the capitalist infosphere is much like a fish becoming aware of water. But is that fish able to crawl onto dry land, having that knowledge? No, it will instantly drown in the air, unless it has a reverse scuba suit (and we'll assume he doesn't). But what if it can spur the process of evolution, so that your children's children might have lungs?

In any case, I give you the Ideology Tropes wiki - the beginnings of a noble attempt at a Hitchhiker's Guide to the Actually Existing Infosphere. It's part of the solution, and I'm guilty that I haven't participated in building it much yet because of the aforementioned projects. But a Chaos Marxist has to be ruthless about deconstructing their own identity as part of their mission to understand the memetic miasma which surrounds us. So maybe "psychology tropes" is next, who can tell - I know that the CBT people have done some work on this, but there are also Jungian archetypes and Freudian complexes, so the question can only be which map gets us somewhere useful.

*ronch* *ronch* *ronch*

I think Alan Moore is a pretty cool guy. Eh is serious about magick for the masses and doesn't afraid of anything:

There is the Bumper Book of Magic, which I am working on with my friend and inspiration Steve Moore—no relation. We are hoping that when we get it finished, in probably a couple of years, that it will be the most lucid, most beautiful, and probably most informative and funny grimoire that anybody has ever produced. It will be the first time a book of this nature, a huge compendium of magic which explains it in theory, in practice, which explains its history, and which includes all sorts of other wonderful features—it will be the first time this has ever been done for a mass market.

All of the previous magicians who've published grimoires have done it for an esoteric elite, and it's mainly been done in fairly opaque language that would only be comprehensible to people with already a fair amount of arcane knowledge. What we are trying to do is to make this, as I say, completely lucid, to demystify it, and at the same time to restore it to the position of reverence that we think that it should be in.

This is a venture entirely in congruence with the principles of Chaos Marxism. Of course, we want to construct an open-source wiki-style grimoire for the new millennium, but I can't blame Old Beardy for taking every opportunity presented, by the release of a movie he never wanted produced, to try something a bit different and daring.

(DISCLAIMER: I am going to see Watchmen and I fully expect to love it to death, because I'm one of those shallow zombies incapable of real thought who Alan and Mad Larry are always going on about.)

I'm the goddamned Batman.

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

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

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

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

Vows

"Rise with your class, not out of it" - saying of English proletarian socialists
"To not achieve Buddahood until every sentient being can reach it together" - vow of Mahayana Buddhism

Yeah, that sounds kind of like the path I've chosen.

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Doing some heavy magic/political work at the moment. Will keep you posted.

Ten wins on the gay circuit

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

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