And when Hugo Chávez says things like this, they call him a communist dictator

We live in a meme pool. We should start fining those companies that are peeing in the pool.

Ben Mack's Poker Without Cards is frustrating me. The author talks about the glories of capitalism on one page, and on the next explains how everything which actually characterises modern capitalism - memetic terrorism by an ever narrowing clique of corporate oligarchs, alienation and exploitation of creative labour, the cancerous ideology of perpetual growth - is a disaster that needs to be dealt with. Indeed, I think the author has the problem which many Americans have - no idea of what "capitalism" actually means.

Capitalism is not "the free market". There have been markets in every single social set-up since we got out of hunter-gathering, and there will probably be markets in a classless society. What characterises capitalism is:
a) the ubiquity of the wage- or salary-labour relationship (i.e. someone owns resources, hires labour to turn them into saleable products at less than that labour produces, and pockets the difference);
b) the ubiquity of commodities - increasingly everything, not just goods and services but entire areas of human existence, is produced as a tradeable, for-profit commodity.

Here we are with the occultism of small businessmen again - the middle-class spoilt rich kids who write these psychonautic books understand that capitalism in the big sphere is wrecking the planet, but because they have the social skills necessary to operate as small capitalists and make a profit, then somehow that is all right. The comparison is a middle-class citizen of the Roman Empire deploring the barbaric state of the massive agricultural slave plantations, but considering it only right and proper that they should own a maid, a cook and possibly a tutor for the kids as their personal property. Oh, and that the legions should go on fighting barbarians who might want to take those things away.

Yeah, I don't have those middle-class entrepreneurial skills. I was brought up on what Americans would call "welfare" from a upwardly-mobile working class family background. I only learned these l33t memetic skills because I live in a country socialist enough that even proles can afford advanced university education. But I never learned how to operate in the market as anything other than a wage slave, and when I tried I was abused and brutally slapped down. Perhaps because I don't have the skills to be able to make the system work for me, I can see that the system as a whole is cancerous, not just the parts which don't enable a cruisy lifestyle for confident bullshit artists. And I really, REALLY don't get how people working in a craft which is supposed to harness and control the ego can possibly support a social system which rewards the most success to those who are All Ego All The Time.

Anyway, perhaps more later.

ETA: Oh, here we go:

The way I see it, cultural elites are defending their power and position against a less moneyed mass. The elites resentthe mass for not respecting their place, as dictated by The Law. The lessers accuse the elites of creating the law. Bothhave morality on their side. Both manipulate the law to their own agendas; the elites are just better at it. This is a war
for power that will be played out primarily on television. Those of us who oppose changing the foundation of our government to favor either group will have an additional burden placed on us. We have to find ways to influence public opinion that don't rely on the forms of manipulation we’re trying to stop.

As I suspected - another proud warrior for the Middle who despises the elites and the unwashed masses equally, and wants to work out a way we can all live happily together, the lion lying down with the lamb and not biting it too hard. This is, sadly, once again the grey area where libertarianism and fascism come together, in the shared delusion that society is a unity. It ain't. It's a contradictory unity and if you don't choose a side you're choosing a life of parasitism. Chaos Marxism is on the side of the "less moneyed mass" because that's the side that's going to create a properly human world. And in that world all those middle-class circle-jerks of marketing gurus, designer drugs, fashionable clubs and cosy internet cliques will suddenly become obsolete. It'll be like being a Freemason, two hundred years after that particular meme came to the end of its usefulness.

Art and politics

True art, said Gramsci, is about depicting life as it is now - whereas politics is always about some great future that is going to be. For that reason, he explained, the politician would always be at loggerheads with the artist.

(source)

Cleavage

Thinking some more about the basic division in radical gnosis, which can be summed up in the question: "Destroy the Matrix, or take control of it?" Overwhelmingly, the consensus among the bad-ass consciousness warriors out there is the latter. This is backed up with a mix of postmodernist ideas (any radical change is totalitarianism, only gradual spontaneous change is compatible with human freedom) and elitist ones (the vast majority of people couldn't handle reality and true agency if you gave it to them). Which is not surprising, given the middle-class basis of the currently existing psychonaut movement - as Orwell would put it, these are members of the Middle who hate the High because they're not doing it right, and fear and despise the Low who don't really count as human beings, and yearn for the day when they can either (a) take control of the system, for the Greater Good; (b) opt out of the system altogether to avoid both the idiocy of the Archons and the stench of the unwashed plebs.

To argue against this - as Chaos Marxism does - means relying on what you might call ontological arguments - the argument that there is a real, fundamental, physical (or even metaphysical) human nature which is warped, crushed, twisted and mutated by the overlay of consumer-capitalist-statist-individualist culture. The obvious refutation to this is: "All we can ever know about anything is the Matrix - we all live in a dream world which we can never wake up from, so best to make the most of it while we can. Whoever dies with the most toys - or the most cultists - wins." And that's great, for those of us who have learned the social and cultural skills which they can leverage into a position of class privilege as a "creative" in the global capitalist economy. Good for them. Until the damn thing collapses.

Chaos Marxism presupposes faith in humanity, and skepticism towards humans. It presupposes that the true nature of humanity is a collective identity, slowly groping towards self-fulfilment in some kind of Omega Point / God / N'Aton of perfect reconciliation between the individual and the collective. But it also presupposes that virtually no-one today acts like a real human being - their identity is interpellated from the necessity of having to survive in class society. Sufism speaks of the conflict between the divine nature and the nafs, the fallen ego - Gramsci spoke of the clash between "common sense" (based on ideology and culture) and "good sense" (based on actual interaction with ontological reality) in similar terms.

Marx and Engels' attitude to class society is very similar to that of many Christian and Islamic thinkers regarding the Garden of Eden narrative - a felix culpa, a fortunate fall, in that if we had never departed from divine grace / classless society, we would never have been able to grow and develop enough to return with the wisdom we need to truly fulfil our nature. Similarly, Chaos Marxism suggests that our destiny as a species is to form a collective consciousness which is no longer in conflict with the physical universe around us, and thus has power-with that universe (to use Starhawk's distinction from "power-over"). I'm sure you can have a great time in your dreamworld. But absolutely nothing counts for everything until you WAKE UP. And when you've woken up, you can't hope to stay awake unless you wake other people up, and then you can collectively decide how to stay awake so you can wake EVERYONE up.

An excellent aphorism

Despair is a black leather jacket that everyone looks good in. Hope is a frilly pink dress that exposes your knees.

- Rebecca Solnit. As all Catholics know, despair is a mortal sin, and as all vegans know, so are leather jackets. Don't read the rest of the article, though, it's too depressing.

The most important word: "energy"

Links in the tradition

[I]n the early fourth century, the christian Church began to change the way it did business. More and more, the encounter with Jesus came not through that deep, timeless opening of the heart but mediated by what might be called "doctrinal mantras" - saying the right things and knowing the right things about Jesus. The fourth century became the era of the great creeds (and the great credal controversies), as Christians attempted to hammer out and precisely nail down (pun intended? -DlaP) their understanding of the Jesus event... Underlying [the Nicene Creed] is [a] troubling message that the correct way to relate to Jesus is to believe and know the right things about him. But this is not how relating to Jesus was done in those earliest days, nor is it ever how it is done when a person actually comes face to face with Wisdom.

Cynthia Bourgeault lays it on the line. Shift "the early fourth century" to "the 1930s", "the Christian Church" to "the Marxist movement", and "Jesus" to "the Russian Revolution", and the story becomes familiar. Practice gives way to theory which gives way to scholasticism which gives way to rank superstition and the sectarian and downright meanness that goes along with it. This is how any tradition with real life and "juice" in it turns into a shambling, withered zombie.

Rev. Cynthia goes on to suggest that Muhammad (peace be upon him) was tapped on the shoulder by Universe Central at the point where mainstream Christianity had definitively turned a corner (marked St Augustine) where it could no longer carry the "juice". Is it too crazy to suggest that Karl Marx was tapped on the shoulder when religion in its totality, as it was known in the 19th century, had reached the same impasse? Is it too crazy to suggest that, in revolutionary situations around the world, real ones where ordinary people break free of the Matrix and begin to reshape their own world, we are seeing the same kind of phenomenon as we did in Galilee under Pontius Pilate, or Arabia in the early seventh century of the common era - the "underground stream" surfacing?

Wisdom is liberation is power for the people and music for the masses. It is the goal of Chaos Marxists to discipline ourselves to the point where we might be fit to be tapped on the shoulder ourselves - and, in the meantime, to at least learn to act as if we actually did hear the Voice of God or the Call of History. But if Marxism means anything at all, it means that the new era is virtually nothing like the old era, and old forms will not suffice.

We get criticism

Thanks to Episkopos Cain for spreading the good word on the Principia Discordia forums. Here is a friendly fellow suggesting why he doesn't think CM is a goer.

Brief reactions:

1) Yes, of course the very title "Chaos Marxism" confuses, discombobulates, and puts off people who have prejudices about both those concepts. As Cain rightly points out, the poster goes to great lengths to critique Marxism in general rather than anything we discuss here. Good! That's what we need at this stage - a kind of "filter" to make sure we don't get popular for the wrong reasons. Perhaps if I hadn't used the word "Marxism" in the title, we'd be as popular as Tim Boucher by now, but the last thing we want is to become a fan club. As our new colleague Komakino rightly says, though, actual public outreach to the masses will probably have to use different words for mass traction.

2) The poster is a huge fan of intellectual property. CM suggests that, while of course artists and memetic engineers have a right to earn a crust by any means necessary, intellectual property is an outmoded relic of a 17th century concept of "authorship" which has virtually no meaning in the modern era, and worse, encourages the sins of egotism and commodity fetishism. If you have intellectual property, as with any other kind of capital, you suddenly have something to lose apart from your chains, which ties you to THE MACHINE and if you're not careful puts you on the wrong side of the barricades. This is why monks take a vow of poverty. What is worse, digital technology has already smashed huge holes in IP's actual practical feasibility, so it's going the way of the Zeppelin and gas streetlighting already. I'm deserting that particular sinking ship as soon as we can find a new sustainable social model to replace it.

3) The poster says:

I see an objective reality where a huge amount of illusion is both necessary and sufficient to get earth to a place where everyone is fed watered high on good drugs and content. I see the goal as a matter of tweaking the illusions so they produce more happiness and less misery, rather than to dispel illusions.

Oh dear. This guy sounds a lot like Neo.

People working to 'dispel illusions' are fighting for a world where everyone is clinically depressed.

Funny, this is probably the first time in my life I haven't been depressed.

It really makes me nervous when people who don't get this last point play with advanced concepts in transpersonal psychology, particularly with other people's psychology.

My ego is flattered by the idea that CM is not useless (as almost all other critics suggest) but dangerous. I fully encourage anyone who thinks this poster makes a good point to stick around to watch what happens when we all go nuts.

Suffering

"It is impossible to achieve the aim without suffering" is pretty much the same statement as "all history is the history of class struggle". Simply put - the clash of opposites creates energy for transformation, as I'm pretty sure William Blake says somewhere. In the Lesser Jihad (political and social action), this is the struggle of the exploiters against the exploited; in the Greater Jihad (psychological transformation), this is the struggle of the animal/automatic/ego self against spiritual consciousness, of common sense against good sense. The ego is, then, like bodily fat - a source of energy for action. But it must be burned to be useful, like any fuel.

In other words, spiritual exercise (and political action) works on the same principle as physical exercise. No pain, no gain - although not all pain is gain. We must distinguish between "false suffering", where the ego turns on itself and attempts to bite itself to death, producing no useful energy (otherwise known as neurosis), and "real suffering", where the ego is transformed, softened, melted by a source of energy from somewhere outside itself, and consumes itself in a controlled chain reaction, producing useful energy. (Call the exterior source the submerged 9/10 of the brain, or God-However-Defined, or your Holy Guardian Angel, or the 12 Step Higher Power, whichever works for you.) The ego can not only be burned for energy, but it is softened, becomes malleable, in the process. Jill Bolte Taylor talked about how her experience of pure right-brain consciousness meant she saw herself as "a liquid, rather than a solid" - so perhaps the personality can even melt altogether. (Or perhaps vaporize, under exceptional temperature and pressure?)

And I just realised that the creation of Dr. Manhattan in Watchmen - the light is taking me to pieces - is, in fact, a depiction of a hyper-accelerated version of this process. (Yeah, big surprise considering the author.) The Thelemites call the final melting or vaporisation of the personality "the crossing of the abyss" - Sufis call it "dying before you die". But then you put yourself back together again on the other side, after your encounter with spiritual death and The Absolute. Will you have kick-ass superpowers at that stage? I honestly can't say. Probably the tradition of alchemy is talking about this, but those who know those texts better than I do can comment further.

A final word for warning, though - the process of "melting the ego through suffering" produces energy, but the energy can of course be used for good and evil. Anyone who went through an old-fashioned Catholic education can probably testify that living an ascetic life of devotion and prayer doesn't necessarily make you a channel for good into the world. Which is why the intellect must rigorously examine the source and outcome of the "spiritual energy" involved in this process. And that applies to political action, too. "Social revolution" = "crossing the abyss", but what awaits you on the other side? Not something necessarily better, if the process is aborted, or the consciousness leading the process is too attached to its own existence and privileges. Which is why the Greater and Lesser Jihads must MUST MUST go together, and a revolutionary party should probably disband itself in the process of the revolution.

(Is the revolutionary party or magickal order then the "ego" or "store of memetic fuel" of a social revolution, which must burn itself to be useful? That puts into perspective recent debates among Marxists about whether it's best to stay in small groups and "keep one's powder dry", or to gamble the future of your group on the chance of spreading revolutionary memes in a broader pool. I suppose the essential point is that if your ideas aren't "starting a prairie fire", then ditch them and get some new ones which work.)

The cult of No-God

The British Marxist tradition in which I received my political training has historically had a sneering attitude to religious belief (which goes along with the cultural philistinism which Ben Watson complained of, where all art is judged by its utility as agitprop and agreement with the Marxist worldview). I am reminded of Rick from The Young Ones: "There's no ghosts, there's no God! There's a perfectly rational explanation for any phenomenon you might encounter!"

And then the British SWP found itself on the same side of the barricades as the British Muslim community, when liberal secularists decided that the Church of England wasn't as tempting a target as immigrant women in hijab to indulge in a little Voltaire or Galileo-before-the-Inquisition roleplay. I don't need to argue on this blog that Western secularism is increasingly used to rally support around an imperialist and racist project - and that, behind the Enlightenment verbiage, the content is "worship of consumer goods and lifestylism". It is the enemy of what Chaos Marxism stands for.

Anyway, good to see that the British SWP has come from this to having a serious debate on religion in their theoretical journal, based on the principle that you have to interpret all religious belief (like everything else) not by the words or concepts it uses, but by "its fruits" as the Prophet Jesus would have said - its actual social contents. John Molyneux is responded to by Roland Boer. Comments?

Seriously, the more serious arguments against the cold sterility of the "unreconstructed" Marxist tradition, the better. Read the comments on this post in a Marxist blog from a slightly different tradition, and decide whether you really think the self-declared defenders of fundamentalist secularism are on our side or not. I've pointed out in the past the same sterility in a traditional Marxist attitude to psychotherapy - that apparently it's cheating and copping out to try to be happy under capitalism, and the only real fulfilment possible to anyone is hard political work in a Leninist cadre party.

Fundamentalist materialism not only leaves no room for religion, but art, culture and psychotherapy are all devalued, or relegated to some irrelevant realm called "the personal". It splits the life and consciousness of the revolutionary cadre into (a) regimented political activism; (b) "leisure time" which is based on personal preferences and worldview which have nothing to do with column (a). That is precisely the same split which you find in everyday life, between the world of the office and the world of the hedonistic consumer. This is a travesty of the Marxist world view, which like the Sufi and Buddhist worldviews, is essentially non-dualistic.

A real revolutionary political practice must include Greater as well as Lesser Jihad - if you're not changing yourself and your immediate environment, you're not changing the world. At best you're just jerking off - at worst, you're well on the way to becoming the pigs who overthrow the farmer just to wear his old clothes. Fundamentalist materialism is non-dialectical, in that it does not understand that the spiritual world is real because it is based on the material world and there is no real distinction. To simply assume that once we've got the politics and economics right, human freedom will flower, is the same repulsive seed of determinism, mechanical materialism and "ends justify the means" from which Stalinism grew.

Nature abhors a vacuum in the spiritual half of the consciousness - "fundamentalist Marxism", much like liberal secularism, has an idealist undertone which often blossoms into some pretty nasty crypto-religious worship of idols and corresponding cult behaviour. When you have state power, you end up worshipping at Lenin's tomb, or Mao's, or Kim Il Sung's - short of that, you just bully and act like an asshole to "heretics" in your own movement. And then you wonder why you're irrelevant.

On peut pas arrêter le signal

Not only did Operation Chanology [sic] get some of the more serious /b/tards organized, it got their minds more organized as well... [and] gave them the idea that they could do stuff that doesn't involve spamming the Fox News forums with "DESU DESU DESU".

- darksumomo and seiberwing@journalfen, in response to a post on Anon's successful facedown of AT&T. Whole communities of people can learn through practice what they would have never been interested in in a billion years in theory. As I have been predicting here for years now, "the self-organization of intarwebz nerds" is capable of more and more as the years go by.

This happens regardless of the success or otherwise of various individual projects - and it seems at least that Chanology gave heart to some pretty senior Clams to break with their cult. Many commentators correctly predicted that 4chan et al. would quickly lose interest in the "moralfaggotry" of trying to do good in the struggle against Scientology. What I think they didn't predict is what the consequences would be for the evolution of consciousness of the people who did learn the right lessons from their Chanological experiences. Was Project Chanology for the Intarwebz what May 1968 was for French students?

Reiteration, or: Back to politics

Principle number one of Chaos Marxism is that, when understood properly, revolutionary Marxism proposes a reform of consciousness on a collective, social and planetary scale that transpersonal psychology / mysticism / magick proposes on the individual or small-group scale; and that a way of understanding that makes these two horses run as a team is a vital step in the struggle for the liberation of this species. But don't take my word for it; read a couple of recent articles by people on the cutting end of Marxist thought:

Instead of putting emphasis on introducing theory into the workers’ movement, in worrying especially about theoretical formation, we ought to be very creative in taking advantage of or creating situations that allow people to learn through practice. - Marta Harnecker

Real, liberatory reform of consciousness can't happen on an intellectual, book-learning level alone - generations of Gnostics and Sufis would agree with Rosa Luxemburg, who said "You cannot learn everything from pamphlets, it is necessary to carry out a process of learning through practice." The reason Marxism has been slowly dying for seventy years or more is that the cutting intellectual wave was Trotskyism, a tradition which made up for practical impotence by building ever more elaborate fantasy theoretical structures. (Absolutely no disrespect to Lev Davidovitch intended, only to his idiotic acolytes.)

Marxists have to learn that a rationalist, scientific thought structure cannot understand, let alone resolve, deep psychological barriers based on a lifetime of living in the heart of the MACHINE. Sure, people change for the better during revolutions, but Petrograd 1917 didn't make the entire working class enlightened overnight - and it would be even worse now that corporate propaganda is so much more efficient and persuasive, as Michael Löwy understands:

How to distinguish the authentic from the artificial, false and makeshift needs? The last ones are induced by mental manipulation, i.e. advertisement. The advertisement system has invaded all spheres of human life in modern capitalist societies : not only nourishment and clothing, but sports, culture, religion and politics are shaped according to its rules. It has invaded our streets, mail boxes, TV-screens, newspapers, landscapes, in a permanent, aggressive and insidious way, and it decisively contributes to habits of conspicuous and compulsive consumption. Moreover, it wastes an astronomic amount of oil, electricity, labor time, paper, chemicals, and other raw materials - all paid by the consumers - in a branch of "production" which is not only useless, from a human viewpoint, but directly in contradiction with real social needs. While advertisement is an indispensable dimension of the capitalist market economy, it would have no place in a society in transition to socialism, where it would be replaced by information on goods and services provided by consumer associations.

Again - any Sufi could tell you the difference between the needs, wants and compulsive desires of the false self, the Ego, the "special and unique snowflake" which is in fact an extension of THE MACHINE, of the memetic apparatus of control and manipulation; and the real longings of the body and soul, which are an extension of God-However-Defined. Imagine what might be possible in a world where the social forces of culture and persuasion were under the democratic control of enlightened beings, as the spiritual master brings his/her ego under the control of the more holy parts of the personal. Imagine if the Demiurge repented and learned to serve Sophia. As below, so above, in spades.

But conversely, the faithful and the psychonauts have to understand that capitalism as a concrete set of social relations, and the ideology/mythology/culture/meme complex associated therewith, pretty much ensures that most of the planet will remain in ignorance, squalor and self-hatred when they don't have to. Elitism is dead. In previous eras there might have been an argument that only a minority could achieve enlightenment or altered states. And that was because there was a limit to how many people could have that much leisure time and freedom from the needs of biological existence. Spiritual elitism is no longer needed for exactly the same reason that poverty, disease and lack of education are no longer needed. Anyone who tells you that "the True Path" is only open to a special minority of people, and most people can only hope for being happy, well-fed animals or slaves at best, is not your friend, or the friend of humanity, no matter how much else they might have going for them.

The great paradox, or contradiction of modern capitalism, is that it has memetically enslaved us at precisely the same time that it has created all the physical requirements for our total liberation as a species, or even as a biosphere. There is really nothing holding us back now but "the subjective factor" - our mental chains. One huge problem is that existing radical groups, at least in the Western quasi-democracies, are treating their politics as a religion or a lifestyle. The absolute last thing they would want was to leave their identity as "rebels and outcasts" behind, and join hands with a victorious mass movement.

I am not sure that I have anything original to add to this theoretical mix. My job is probably just to point out the connections, and then see what people (including me) can make of them in practice. Is there even anything that CM can offer to actual political practice? Or is it just "transpersonal psychology and spirituality for dialectical materialists", or an argument for gnostics to take Marxism seriously?

All of my words are secondhand, and useless in the face of this

An absolute torrent of posts on this blog came to an end earlier this week. Basically, what happened was that I was going through a particular set of spiritual exercises, and my verbal circuits were going nuts trying to keep up with the flood of sudden insight. And then I realised that that was probably getting in the way. As the author of "Punk Rock Vedanta" put it - anything that adds words to your world is making things worse. So, perhaps a short break from writing, to leave more time for doing. Feel free to ask me questions if you get bored with waiting for updates.

Revising the manifesto

We may have been under a misapprehension about Chaos Marxism all the way back to the beginning. This is not, I think, really about "magick" or "memetics" in the way we previously thought - of "word viruses", or even something like Phillip K Dick's logos plasmate, spreading from a single point of revelation to set off the entire world. That's not gnosis as I understand it. It's left-brain thinking, it's religious thinking, and elitist to boot. It's behind all the nasty, smug, we-are-the-illuminati bullshit you get from virtually every socialist or anarchist group out there.

No, let's go back to the basics of the Marxist tradition, in which it makes clear that consciousness begins in matter and biological life and is not in any way separate from it. Everyone already has the gnosis, Gramsci's "good sense", some little seed at the bottom of their consciousness which sees this world for what it really is. To use a religious metaphor - God talks to everyone, all the time. The Prophets are those who not only listen, but tell people about it and try to put it into practice. Our job is not to slavishly follow the Prophets, but to learn from their example.

What distinguishes the revolutionary class is the combination of a) consciousness; b) the power to transform reality in the light of that consciousness. The two must go together - power without consciousness is the very essence of capitalist society as it stands, while consciousness without power descends directly into "religion" and "academia" considered in the pejorative senses. Middle-class radicals are allowed to develop critical thinking skills through which they can discover what's really going on, because they will have a huge built-in blind spot around the question of preserving their own class privileges and thus will be prone to "dreaming that they're awake". The workers, traditionally, have nothing to lose but their chains, and the whole system relies on their consent to even exist.

The consciousness that will change the world is defined as critical thinking skills coupled with an immunity to the illusions (identity, material privileges, other forms of ideology), that THE MACHINE uses to keep us docile. One big problem is that the working class in the advanced capitalist countries has been incorporated far more into THE MACHINE than it was back in Marx's day, by (paradoxically) the universal education and universal suffrage that previous generations thought for. When we began to become aware, the Prince of This World offered us a deal - subservience in return for material gifts and Not Being Responsible.

You can't teach someone else "the truth". If they don't work it out for themselves, it's not actually true for them. Middle-class radicals and outlaws see the nature of the enemy but they don't see in detail how the enemy works, because if they were close enough to see it, they'd be too close to even know it existed. That's the essential paradox. We can't wake the global proletariat up. They have to do it for themselves - and when they wake up they'll wake everybody up. Hell, we can't even be sure that we're awake. So best to do that first, because you know what happens when the sleepwalker leads the sleepwalker.

Peace be upon them

Moses, Muhammad and V. I. Lenin. What did they all have in common? They were leaders of a movement of the oppressed and downtrodden that actually won - if only for a little time, before the new state became corrupt or civil war broke out or whatever. We contrast that with the historical tradition of Jesus, whose story (I simplify for the sake of argument) is about losing as totally and completely as possible, and getting up again.

Slavoj Zizek discusses the "Beautiful Soul" tendencies of middle-class liberals, whose preoccupation is winning moral victories rather than real ones. This leads directly to sectarianism, to lifestylism, to politics which isn't really politics, it's just gesturing to make yourself feel warm and fuzzy. Contrast that to the tradition voiced by New Model Army in "The Charge" - no-one needs morality when there isn't enough to eat. This latter tradition is the one that Chaos Marxism stands with.

The fact is, to win anything in the World-As-Is, you have to compromise, make deals with the Prince of This World (the Great Deceiver, the System, etc). So anyone who wins by necessity will be morally impure. The only question in the end is was it worth it to bring something new into the world. Was it worth wiping out the entire Banu Qurayzah to make sure the Muslim community would be safe, or backpedalling on the equality of men and women to ensure the unity of that community? Were all the horrors of the Russian Civil War justified to prove that it was at least possible that every cook could govern? Is Hugo Chávez justified in congratulating the awful troll in Tehran on his most probably fraudulent election victory, to keep diplomatic and economic ties with Iran strong? Did three fifteen million people need to die so that Adrian Veidt could stop World War III?

Perhaps there are no answers to any of the above questions. The fact is, to do anything in this world means going up against all the forces which want us to remain quiet. It means doing bad things, it means sinning. A sin is always forgiveable, never acceptable... sometimes excusable.

Multiple bodies

Just quickly - I think it's quite interesting to compare occultist doctrines of the various subtle bodies with the now-universally recognized idea of the body image. One possible starting point would be to say that Chaos Marxism recognizes three bodies: the physical body, the left-brain body image (how the individual sees their body in interactions with the physical world, society and the mediasphere), and the right-brain body image (how the "inner voice" sees itself embodied, and the "astral body" or jism asli haqiqi that the Fourth Way and Sufi are doing exercises to bulk up ). The latter two have an existence only in the sense that we act as if they exist, which I suppose is the only sensible way to talk about ideology and/or the astral plane.

Now, how can we make that useful? Does a community, a nation, a class, a species, have one or more "subtle bodies"? Here's some dude discussing things a bit more, although not materialist enough for my liking.

Non sola scriptura

The hallmark of braindead fundamentalism is literalism. For those of you who haven't had the pleasure of both sides of the story, arguing with braindead Marxists is very similar to arguing with braindead Christians - only the name of the scripture has changed. Epistle to the Hebrews on one side, What is to be done? on the other. Argument by quotation is especially stupid when the source matter contradicts itself - Lenin, as I think I've said elsewhere, was a very good politician and changed his mind on a regular basis when a more convincing hypothesis came past, so anything you find him saying you can find him saying the opposite elsewhere.

You can learn neither magick nor revolutionary politics from a book, any more than you can learn to play violin or do aikido. Only by personal experience - gnosis. And the only book you can get gnosis from is a book of poetry, or other literary art - that is, something that conveys an extra message behind its surface meaning, in its very words, shape, and method of transition, that can only be experienced by the subtle and animal sense rather than the logical brain.

So - all "religious scripture", in the real sense of the term, has to include poetry. A reasonably pure example of this is the Qur'an, based on the refusal of authority to any translation, which means that there's something special about the language of the original classical Arabic. It could just be that it's excellent poetry in the sense that Robert Graves would understand, and recitation in the original brings about specific and predictable psychic events. Some Muslim scholars - operating of course on the belief that it's a direct transmission from Universe Central - have even suggested that it's like the art of the Great Houses in the fiction of Lawrence Miles, in that it is designed to change its meaning and its effect a couple of millennia down the track. Some people make similar claims for the King James version of the bible, even though its translation is crap, its poetry is pretty damn impressive - to the point where people think it's a distinct and superior revelation to the Greek and Hebrew originals. And let me put it right here that all the great Marxists were great writers in the artistic sense of the term.

If art is intimately related to gnosis, one way you can tell who the monsters are is the quality of their art, presuming of course that art is objective. Someone once suggested that the difference between Trotsky and Stalin's writings is the difference between a clear mountain stream and a sewage outfall. You can say similar things about Mein Kampf, or anything by L. Ron Hubbard. Crowley was by some regards a great poet, although your mileage might vary. And the poetry of Ezra Pound retains its power despite the fact that the author was a fascist scumbag. Trust the tale, not the teller - truth is truth whether it comes from the mouth of a saintly prophet, a drunken bum, Michael Jackson, or someone disingenously hiding behind a pseudonym. All real, useful, bone-level truth comes from the same Source, common to all of us.

Philosophy!

1. The world is a contradictory unity, which evolves under the pressure of its own contradictions. [ETA: That is, that's how we perceive the world, since our consciousness is a contradictory unity. We refuse to speculate about any ontological reality.]

2. Life evolves from matter, and consciousness evolves from life.

3. Consciousness in its basic form is based on the struggle for survival. "Higher" states of consciousness are simply meta-consciousness, and meta-meta-consciousness, and possibly more "meta" above that.

4. The sphere of consciousness is "relatively autonomous" from the field of matter, and thus plays by its own rules within limits.

5. Consciousness in humans can be divided roughly into "left-brain" (logos) and "right brain" (gnosis).

6. Logos is logical, verbal, analytical, sees patterns, and communicates. It is the seat of the ego. Gnosis works in images, themes, and gut reactions. It is intimately tied in with "the Real" - physical reality and underlying themes in the world around us. It is the closest thing you are ever going to get to "God" in a concrete sense.

7. Gnosis "speaks" in emotions, psychosomatic symptoms, the hair standing up on the back of your neck, "religious experience", psychosis, etc. Freud started the modern science of trying to understand it, but much like Marx, bourgeois social science fled in panic from the implications of his research, and come to think of it, so did Freud.

8. Gnosis generally has a much better idea of what's really going on than logos, but becoming a responsible adult in modern culture means learning to live almost entirely from logos rather than gnosis. Since logos can't understand the language of gnosis without special training, gnosis is either repressed, ignored or put into a kind of "apartheid of consciousness". Gnosis is like the proletariat - it makes things happen even though the ruling part of consciousness makes itself deliberately unaware.

9. Creativity, in the concrete sense, is logos getting a hint from gnosis and acting accordingly. In that sense, creativity comes from "above" or "somewhere else".

10. Logos can be taught - gnosis can only be experienced. For this reason, once humans had invented speech, written communication, media etc, logos-based ideas and patterns spread much further and faster than those based on gnosis. Also, logical patterns are far more useful for day-to-day survival, which is of course what left-brain consciousness evolved for. However, it's not only pro-survival logical patterns that stick - it's also patterns which don't contribute to individual survival, perhaps even work against it, but find some kind of echo in gnosis - i.e. in subconscious perception of actual reality. This is what successful art and ideology have in common.

11. Gramsci's "common sense" is logical patterns which contribute to daily survival in the world-as-is, but which contradict objective reality, personal experience, and gnosis. Gramsci's "good sense" can be defined as logos based on gnosis, and most importantly, on shared gnosis from common activity and real situation. (This is the way in which we can understand Gnostic ideas, without having to literally believe in literal archons who are screwing humanity over for the lulz. If there are archons, we invented them subconsciously in order to sustain class society, which was - let us never forget - a good idea at the time.)

12. The fact that there are so many archetypes and common themes in human culture suggests that certain experiences are common in essential form among large groups, or even universally. In that sense you can talk about a "group gnosis", or "collective unconscious", of any group which has a common reality and experience. A class in the Marxist sense, by definition, will have the strongest group gnosis short of that of humanity itself. (Probably you could say the same for traditional tribal cultures.)

13. Chomsky pointed out that intellectuals fall far harder for propaganda than anyone else. Not surprising that if your left-brain consciousness is ruthlessly advanced, you'll fall for any plausible-sounding crap that comes through the logosphere (shall we use that word for the sum total of cultural/memetic patterns, or noosphere? Both are good.) In contrast, the lower orders of society are prone to act in "irrational" ways - crime, social deviance, riots - which are simply forseeable reactions to their real situation of alienation. Gnosis has an outlet in violence to self and/or others, lacking any logos-approved ones.

14. As long as Marxism remains only in the sphere of logos - i.e. a kind of "counter-academia", working on the same principles as existing academia and media, only with good guys changed for bad guys - it will continue to be irrelevant.

15. The enemy is philistinism. Without a real understanding of gnosis, and its outgrowths - religion, individual and group psychology, art, culture and memetics - any project for changing reality is doomed to fail. "Revolutionary art" does not mean art with revolutionary themes or slogans. It means art that revolutionises the soul - art which is appropriate for the next aeon of human consciousness, and points the way there to right-brain consciousness.

16. We can train ourselves to understand the promptings of our own gnosis, in logical terms (psychology) or in narrative, symbolic terms (religion). We can engage in communication with other humans on a gnosis-to-gnosis level (art). We can learn to change our own personal gnosis through symbolic and practical action (magick). We can learn to change collective reality through a combination of logical planning and gnosis-to-gnosis communication, and to spread "good sense" at the expense of "common sense" (politics). However, this last presupposes that we have any idea what "good sense" is ourselves. Let us test our ideas in practice before we proselytise.

===

POSTSCRIPT: As a suggestion for practice - Marxism suggests that the central reality of human experience under modern capitalism is the workplace. Your closest colleagues-in-gnosis are the people doing the same boring, retarded thing as you do every day of the week. If you're not able to do magick and political activism at your workplace, we humbly suggest that you're not really going to be able to do it anywhere else, except in the privacy of your own basement.

Our friends

Chaos Marxism is comprised of a "Greater Work" of reform of the individual personality to subjugate the ego (or "bourgeois subjectivity"), to enable the expression in the Real World of Horrible Jobs of current of human/planetary transformation. The practical work of this social transformation - political, cultural, artistic - is the "Lesser Work". Of course, it's not just us. Chaos Marxism is part of a broader current which we could call Social Gnosis - the esoteric answer to the "Social Gospel", or liberation theology.

The Alexandrian Gnostic Church specifically declares itself in favour of "social gnosis", as does the Reclaiming Collective. The Center for Tactical Magick was there way before us, and some Sufi organisations (example) are also clearly in favour of social justice activism. And if there aren't similar Buddhist groups I'll eat my mystical witch's hat.

I think we should all start talking to one another, with a view to expanding our horizons and encouraging practical action. Blogrolling? A Social Gnosis open webforum? Any ideas? Remember that I'm a total shut-in and I don't like talking to people, so this might be difficult, but it does need to be done.

A shout-out to Bishop Langley

I've been reading some good Gnostic-Christian material recently, which seems to complement the insights of my recent work in the Sufi tradition quite well. Especially good is this thing from a Gnostic Monsignor in Canada, which replicates the CM insight that if people don't believe in Gods, they might believe in anything:

1) The God you grew up with doesn't exist. 2) God exists. Duh. You just need to think bigger. 3) If you don't have stories with God in them, you go crazy.

I should note that the author also makes his living from coaching creatives, and if you have $1500 to throw around perhaps you should try it. However, I must say that one of my usual rants about "the occultism of small businessmen" is on the tip of my tongue - especially since, if you look at the material with knowledge of the author's vocation, you can see that this coaching is very like a mystical initiation into the Greater Work as we have defined it here. Does "The Work" automatically lose its value when you try to make a living from it? The work of Robert Fripp would suggest the answer is "no, but suddenly 99.9% of your time and energy gets tied up with bullshit, so best to be an amateur unless you have no choice". (As the Threshold Society says: "give freely".)

The "Juice"

One of the insights that is the real beginning of wisdom is that rewards do not go to the deserving, in this world at least. The Hollywood megastar is quite possibly a shit actor, and of course the big bands are probably not nearly as good as, say, your own band. Once you realise that the universe does not work that way, you can stop gnashing your teeth about it.

But more pertinently, why do certain creatives get swept along on the path to fame and fortune? Marxist economics is superior to bourgeois economics because the former treats value as a real, tangible thing, intimately related to labour, rather than a totally subjective phenomenon which you can track with superstitious nonsense like "marginal utility functions". One of the basics of Chaos Marxism is that we want a real Marxist cultural/psychological/memetic science, not the obscurantism of po-mo cultural studies or the black alchemy of PR/advertising. So we need to discuss - is artistic value a real thing, like use-value and exchange value are?

Let's toss that "eye of the beholder" stuff out the window immediately. Of course, G. I. Gurdjieff also talked about the concept of "objective art", so that's a clue that we're onto something here. T. S. Eliot - whose stuff I love even though he was an awful reactionary - said that "all great art is impersonal". Let us put it into the language of Chaos Marxism this - "objective art", for us, is art which enables a real psychosocial/memetic current to reveal itself in the Real World of Horrible Jobs. This is totally distinct from "self-expression". Who the hell cares about whatever your emotions are? Unless your emotions are shared by everyone and you've just found a way to put it into words, sounds, images, whatever. Then you're cooking with gas, as they say.

That's not as mystical as it sounds. It's a commonplace that great art and great social movements go together. Beethoven's Fifth and Ninth sum up everything that was grand about the world in which the French Revolution could happen. Similarly, why do you think rock music reached perfection in 1975 (or 1969 if you're an awful hippie?) Because after the mid-70's the social current which it embodied - the radicalised middle-class youth of North America and Europe - ran out of steam, or got bought out. Same with US hip-hop in the early 90's.

It's time we got serious and precise about what we mean by "current". This isn't some kind of metaphor we're working with. It is essential to Chaos Marxism that a "current" in the Crowleyan sense corresponds to real social forces in the real world. And one current (at least) is the version which, if we grab hold on it, leads to the better world to come in which humanity fulfils its destiny and brings itself to an end properly, rather than killing everyone or just bumbling along doing the same crap forever. Humanity is a process that can either finish (when something is lost), conclude (in which nothing will be lost or won), or complete (which will mean a new beginning). Chaos Marxism wants to surf that last mentioned wave.

That triad of terms up there is, like a lot of stuff on this blog, swiped from Robert Fripp and Guitar Craft (aka the Fourth Way applied to the acoustic guitar). Fripp brought about GC because he felt it necessary to combine the Greater Work of evolving the individual personality with a Lesser Work of bringing music into the world. He has made the point repeatedly that, when a huge heavy Current like we've been talking about above hits the world, it will find people to express itself through, and if those people aren't ready for it, tough. They will get burnt the fuck out. Why did all those rock stars die or go massively crazy 1966-71? Fripp says, because their human personalities just couldn't handle it when something big started speaking through them. It is up to the reader to decide whether this is what happened to Aleister Crowley. (Something similar has of course always happened to poets and artists through history - especially the really good ones.)

So - Chaos Marxism's pretensions to a cultural science will be fulfilled when we learn to predict exactly where and when the Current of the Next Era will hit, in not only political but cultural, artistic and even sexual forms. Our Lesser Work is to be able to express it in this world and to help others to express it - our Greater Work is to prepare ourselves so it won't fuck us totally up. This is not idealism. "Currents" do not exist separately from actual physical human consciousness expressed in actions, words and cultural activity. But Marxists who talk about "reformism" (for example) as if it were an actual real thing that needs to have battle done against it should have no problem, in theory, with the concept that the post-capitalist future begins to reveal itself in embryo every time a crack in the system appears, and that we can begin to predict how it will take shape in not only political and economic but cultural form.

The big problem we have to fight against, sadly, is Marxist philistinism - the idea that art and music only matter when making agitprop for whatever the revolutionary cause of the day is. By those standards, Beethoven's Ninth sucked because you couldn't chant it while marching in the Napoleonic Wars.

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.