Oh, this is excellent.

I just found this blog, and serependitiously its author comments on one of our major themes:

The ego tries to remake the world according to its own self-perceptions. The ego will expect others to be friends with the same people we perceive as good and stay away from folks we see as bad. The ego will try to convince others of religious, political or other viewpoints. The arrogant ego will try to force others to be complimentary. The negative ego will see every bump in life's road as proof of their unworthiness.

Perhaps killing the ego is more along the lines of killing the desire to create 'proof' of personal perceptions. Perhaps it is closer to killing the need to force the world to fit within our parameters.

I know, for example, that my own ego - or nafs - is intent on being the greatest genius in the room, and spends its existence in bitter, ranting anger that the Real World of Horrible Jobs doesn't conform to its desires, bowing down to acknowledge its mistress.

Parable (after Idries Shah)

There was a certain potentate who had taken to stockpiling chemical weapons - mustard gas, sarin, you name it - in the cellars under his city.

This took up a lot of the city's budget, and in consequence the city was kind of run down and unattractive. Also, over time these chemical nasties had begun seeping into the water supply, causing all manner of health issues for the citizens.

All of this, thought the potentate, was worth it, in that now any enemy who tried to attack the city would get an extremely nasty surprise. For the potentate kept this stockpile secret - if anyone knew of his weapons cache, he thought, they would instantly retaliate with deadly, possibly nuclear force. So it didn't even have the deterrent effect that such WMDs often do.

All that the city's neighbours knew was that this city was run-down and dirty, and the people who lived there seemed suspicious and unwell. This, as you can imagine, did nothing for the tourist industry or for inwards investment, so things in general did not get better.

The potentate would wake up screaming in the night, occasionally, with terrible nightmares of his city being destroyed for lack of WMDs. Or because his neighbours found out about the WMDs. As he saw it, he was damned if he did and damned if he didn't change strategies.

The moral of the story is: You know where you stand in a hell hole.

Things are not hopeless...

... but if anything is hopeless, it's the media priesthood's endless masturbating to its own coolness. An incredible exposé of the culture of addiction to crisis, not only all over the mass media but over the professional blogosphere.

Also of note, from the author of the above, including the following:

I renounce this statement: "The use of the term 'revolution' should not imply that this well be a class-based effort." What was I thinking? I was trying too hard to recruit the already existing members of the Media into the project. Venezuela has proved this original premise to be wrong: I now believe that only a class struggle can beat the Media. This is the most vital change in strategy and thinking since 1997. And it changes much about the project as it begins anew in the Summer of 2002.

A very good point too. April 13 2002 should be the final proof that - despite all the magick spells weaved by the media priesthood and the creative class, who think themselves not only enlightened but all-powerful - filthy, unwashed, uneducated cleaners, busdrivers, street vendors and stay-at-home mums are not only the only ones who can really change anything, but who indeed have any interest in doing so.

We educated specimens are so unbelievably addicted to our self-image as the enlightened élite that we become part of the problem. An unrecognized genius is still a genius; a fallen angel is still an angel. Anyone who really hopes to speak for the voice of The Masses has to stop thinking of themselves as anything but The Masses.

I hate being right all the time.

And I thought I was the only one crazy enough to use the metaphor of the media priesthood:

The cultic aspects of corporate consumerism have been evident as far back as the Ford
Sociological Department, but recently there has been an shameless and enthusiastic commercial promotion of cultic psychology because “the smartest marketers have realized that it is possible for communities to be formed around brands” as Atkin argues in his 2004 marketing manifesto The Culting of Brands where he tells our future business leaders “You are a priest, not a brand manager.”

(Our culture MAY BE in trouble when we’ve lost the ability to create community out of relationships with other people, and instead respond primarily to commercial priests who gather us around their mass-produced sacred objects – in safely gated communities no doubt. (can anyone say “pass the Kool-Aid?”see “don’t drink the punch”)

(source) Elsewhere, the author says:

Though The Church of the SubGenius is rarely explicitly political nor aligned with a discernible single politics, it is in synch with a creative power that is alive and well in the global anti-capitalist movement, according to we are everywhere edited by Notes from Nowhere where a return to the invitingly joyful subversions possible in
embodiment and “Carnival” are replacing the dull outdated revolutionary paradigms of grim, sober service to a duplicate disciplinary cause – “meet the new boss, same as the old boss.”

If only I shared his optimism. The Church of the SubGenius put a banner on the top of their website in March 2003 saying "BOB" SUPPORTS THE COALITION TROOPS. I don't blame Stang for doing that - doing anything else would have alienated many dues-paying SubGenius Troo Warriors For Freedom, who - all joking aside - recognized the need to stop goofing around and support brave President Bush and his mission to kill thousands of Iraqis as an act of primitive primate dominance. But it shows exactly the limits of the One True Church - as those Discordian readers of this blog keep telling me, Discordianism isn't supposed to be a revolutionary party, and neither is SubG. SubG is supposed to be a means for Stang to make a living so he can promote mutant networking fulltime, and it's very good in that respect.

As for "grim sober service" - that's all that works. Churchill and Roosevelt didn't defeat Hitler and Tojo because they were the good guys, but because they could mobilise brute force better over the medium term. If you don't mobilise your forces, you lose. If you don't become symmetrical to an enemy, you can't defeat them. You can't win in this world except on the terms of the Prince Of This World. Gandhi and MLK were brutally assassinated, while Joe Stalin lived to a ripe old age. If you don't take on the Black Iron Prison in its own terms, it will tolerate you living in your little clubhouse and playing at being cowboys, anarchists and witches... as long as you are no real threat. I am increasingly convinced that being miserable is the only sign that you're actually making a change in the real world. It is impossible to achieve the aim without suffering, but you can choose your own suffering.

No, not Disneyland

During my early adolescence - 13 to 15 - I started having what you might consider "mystical experiences". I can explain this no better than to say that the veil of reality would slip aside occasionally, and I would see - or thought I was - glimpses of another, better world, where everything really was all right. It was this kind of thing that led me to a short dalliance with a Baptist youth group, and a long one with neo-Paganism. More importantly, since they happened at about the same time I was discovering rock music and electronic pop, the Gates of Paradise have always been associated for me with certain artists (one particular artist who mentioned Gurdjieff and the Sufis quite a lot in her early work), and my career path as a musician was more or less settled. Is it also a coincidence that I first became politically active around this time?

It's often said that the "psychic centres", or whatever, kick in at around adolesence (something to do with hormones, I suppose) - which is why poltergeist activity is associated with teenagers. But to a large extent, these brief "openings" were more trouble than they were worth. The Gates of Paradise had closed by the time I was about 16, and I spent ten years blundering about in the dark wondering how the devil I was going to get back there. One might also say that it might have been better never to have a glimpse of the garden, if I was going to be satisfied with life in the basement. It was only after some major life changes that I began to experience anything like that again - about 2001, I think it must have been. Coincidence, that it was at this time that I became politically active again, and made the first steps towards a practical musical career?

As a wise mystic said, when you're up to your ass in alligators it's difficult to remember that you went in to drain the swamp, and I've been up to my ass in alligators much of my life, due to Harrowing Childhood issues which I won't bore you with. My Daily Self - or nafs - endlessly replays the terrible things that happened to me in my childhood and adolescence, trying to give the story a better ending this time. This Doloras is almost pathologically determined not to live in the here-and-now, where actions have consequences and what's done can't be undone. But if I can't do that, I won't be ready the next time the Gates of Paradise open.

I like the idea that "nothing is ever forgotten", that I never lost anything in growing up, that the Magickal Kingdom is here and now always hiding behind every molecule if you know what to look for, that I had to grow up and suffer to learn how to integrate that world with this one of Horrible Jobs. That the magick becomes real when I get my music right; that if I "remember myself" I can finally cease my eternal battle with imaginary things; and that by acting in the name of solidarity and compassion in this $2.99 material world - through socialist activism, spiritual psychology and radical cultural-materialist praxis - I can be part of a current which will change the world to one where people are less lost and afraid and hurt and cold and angry and mean. And then I forget it again, and that's how I get lost and depressed.

"We shall not cease from exploration / And at the end of all our exploring / Will be to arrive where we started / And know it for the first time" - T S Eliot.

Typical left-wing hate-trips

Sorry I haven't posted in a while. I've been depressed.

Those in the know will recognize the subject line of this post as coming from Illuminatus! Now, I thought it was unfair when I read it, because we all know that both the libertarian and the fascistic Right can get some pretty impressive hate-trips on. But the question is: exactly how far does hate and anger get us, politically speaking? (I am inspired to write this by watching all the British Liberal Democrat communities being filled with angry ragequitting posts.)

Anger and hate are, simply, like fire. Fire is very very good for clearing out what needs to be destroyed. But if you don't build something in its place, then what are you doing? Just opening the space for someone with a clearer vision to take advantage of your good work.

Now, I have no tolerance for "lesser evilism", "the left-wing of the possible", all that sell-out nonsense - the political equivalent of "if I can't be a rockstar or a cowboy, I'll be a damn fine junior ad exec". It was kind of lame watching apparent leftists meekly troop in behind Al Gore in 2000, and even lamer watching them do the same for Gordon Brown in the last month or so. (Disclaimer: I was kind of hoping for a hung parliament because it would be funny to watch, and I think I was proved right.) I don't care how much hatred you have for Tories (or how justified it is), you can't fight a negative with a negative, and giving your energy to the acceptable face of the enemy is self-defeating.

But if that's the downfall of the liberal left, I'm no more in favour of the accepted consensus on the radical left - to build forces around nothing more than opposition to "whatever those bourgeois pig-dogs are proposing this week". Of course implacable opposition, rioting, etc are fun and all. But what does it accomplish, if not tempered with a positive? An organisation or movement which is all NO and no YES isn't a political organisation. It's an excuse for having a good time, for letting off steam... no threat to the existing order at all. Easily recuperated. Scenes in Greece are uncomfortably similar to those in Tonga in late 2006, and that didn't end well.

This is why you need a political programme, rather than just a huge list of "Fight Back! Against! No! Overthrow!" - or a "put a clothespeg on your nose and vote Labor/(Social or Liberal) Democrat". But not just any programme - a transitional programme which can be enacted in the here and now, under the current rules of the game, and at the same time undermines the very rules of the game.

(Psychologically, it should barely need explaining that indulging the purely negative parts of the psyche is not healthy. At the risk of sounding ridiculous, revolutionaries - just like Sufis or radical Christians - are motivated by great feelings of love, which is the ultimate positive in the psychic level. We need to get over the feeling of being addicted to "the struggle" - of not actually wanting the Revolution, or the immanentization of the Eschaton, because fighting The Man is a fun lifestyle and we wouldn't know what to do with ourselves if we had whatever we wanted.)

If we as political radicals, gnostics/mystics/magickians and whatever are in it to actually change the rules of the game - rather than just win the game by whatever means necessary - then the question of the deep interaction of means and ends comes to mind, which means what Robert Anton Wilson meant by "bisociation" or T. S. Eliot meant by "the timeless intersecting with time". In our political practice we have to bring the Revolution / Eschaton into active existence in the Real World of Horrible Jobs. That doesn't mean pretending you can live in a different world here and now - but opening a door to that different world while still living in the here and now.

===

The ongoing mission of this blog is to find a form of words in which the Greater Jihad of struggle over the Ego can be expressed in exactly the same terms as the Lesser Jihad over ignorance, injustice and oppression in the material world.

It seems like ages since I quoted Mad Larry

... there's a difference between "left-wing" and "liberal". To be a liberal means to believe that tolerance is good and global warming is bad, but also to believe that you can save the world simply by not using the word "poof". S/he may have good intentions, but doesn't seem to appreciate that all the things s/he considers to be civilised - democracy, universal suffrage, the right to exist without having the shit kicked out of you for having long hair or skin that's a bit on the dark side - were achieved through the effort of rather more pro-active people, who fought and occasionally died in order to create a less appalling version of humanity. To be a liberal means to shield yourself from the full horror of your society, to have a veneer of civic responsibility while still approving of a system that's wholly founded on exploitation.

And this is why political activism is still necessary - because what freedoms the vast majority have were only ever won by active rebellion. I fear that an increasing proportion of liberals - among which I count most of the people who read blogs like this - are all for a global system of slave-labour and oppression, as long as they're part of the 15% privileged slaves who live in fancy cages with internet access and don't get physically whipped.

Oh.

In a dream last night, I suddenly understood what is meant by the saying "The Kingdom of God is within you". For our atheist readers: a better reality is right here, right now, wherever and whenever you are only waiting for you to realise and pay attention to it. Sadly, the last part is so very difficult - the elevator is waiting to take you to the penthouse for a visit, but it doesn't come all the way to the basement, and if you have lived all your life in the basement and you don't even realise that there's a way out, you'll find it difficult to get there.

The civilisation we live in is determined to keep all of us in the basement, because at least in that way we're predictable. This is a civilisation which prioritises the collection of imaginary "points" in a trading system (aka $$$) over all else. Some would tell you that power and oppression of a tiny elite are the reason for the warped system, but money is more powerful than any elite whims. Military force, oppression and control tactics are in the service of money in an advanced capitalist economy, not the other way around.

This is why magic and narrative thinking are so important in the modern era, because we are already in a trans-personal era. This is what conspiracy theorists don't get - "anti-Semitism is the socialism of fools", because it assumes that money itself doesn't have a will of its own, that its evil doings must be traced to an evil group of people, i.e. tha j00s. Of course people and how they live their lives are the final, fundamental reality. But if people act as if they are forced to by some evil idol, then the evil idol is a real thing that can't be banished just by pointing out that it doesn't exist. Things that don't exist often have more power than things that do.

Our social system is deeply devoted to a hideous idol / egregore / false God / master meme, which unlike previous Gods doesn't demand blood and grovelling, it just demands that you devote every single part of your life to its needs.

Gets you jumping like a real live wire

"[T]his revolution is necessary, therefore, not only because the ruling class cannot be overthrown in any other way, but also because the class overthrowing it can only in a revolution succeed in ridding itself of all the muck of ages and become fitted to found society anew."

- Marx, The German Ideology

"So, you see, the whole key to liberation is magic. Anarchism remains tied to politics, and remains a form of death like all other politics, until it breaks free from the defined 'reality' of a capitalist society and creates its own reality....Reality is thermoplastic, not thermosetting you know: I mean you can reprogram it much more than people realize."

- Wilson and Shea, Illuminatus!

"[P]ractitioners of the shock doctrine tend to seek a blank slate on which to create their ideal free market economies, which inevitably requires a usually violent destruction of the existing economic order."

- Wikipedia on Naomi Klein's The Shock Doctrine

"[A]ssuming daily life provides us with sufficient opportunities for appropriate & necessary learning, daily life does not provide the conditions for us to amplify & intensify educative arising-incidents, enabling us to better refine who & what we are. This refining only takes place intentionally and, usually, in carefully-designed environments. [...]
But, even were enough educative-opportunities to accidentally occur, ordinary life does not provide suitable environments for amplifying & intensifying our process, necessary & sufficient to cook us to the required degree. Different traditions & ways refer to this cooking & refining in various ways, one of which is transformation, whatever we may understand by that."

- Robert Fripp, diary of 2009/7/21.

You know something's true when not only do people keep saying it over and over again, but the ruling class manage to use it for their own effort. Simply put: when people's realities and identities are put under pressure, the impossible becomes possible. Real change only happens in transformative "leaps", which only happen under great strain and stress, or at least under artifically-induced "crucible" environments. I know, this is terrifying, heartless and illiberal. It also happens to be true.

ETA: But never let us forget the distinction that Sufis make between a state and a station. Robert Fripp's metaphor is: it is possible to take the elevator from the ground floor to the penthouse; but you probably can't afford the rent to live there. Making a change is one thing, making that change permanent is another thing altogether. My feeling is that shock and trauma and other "initiatory" experiences play a part in turning a state into a station.

Come on the beach with the nouveau-riche!

The traditional Marxist attitude to occult movements is that they're petty-bourgeois self-delusion, desperately searching for individual solutions to the accelerating collapse of individualist subjectivity brought on by the inexorable growth of corporate capitalism (and the forces of commodification and reification that go along with it). I, being young and impulsive, demurred, believing that perhaps art, cultural studies and psychology might be a missing link between the social liberation promised by Marxist revolutionary practice, and the personal liberation sought by the occultists and psychonauts.

This attitude is a little difficult to keep up, however, when I realise that so many of the authors of the mystical texts I've dug over the last few years make their living by being very efficient servants of the "corporate egregore" - the Globalised Free Market. One is a copywriter, whose website brags of (to put it in occultist terms) his efficient use of verbal and graphic "spells" to garner more attention and financial energy for the biggest, most bloated, most dehumanized corporate entities on the planet. Another is a "creative coach" - someone who will teach you how to get yourself noticed by corporate scumbags, and how to get them to make you an offer of big buck$$$ on your immortal soul. Another is... oh, hang on, this guy's website is not nearly as offensive as I remember it being, so forget I mentioned him (and read Join My Cult!, it's funny.)

But is that all it is? Is that their True Will? Is the end point of consciousness warrioring to be able to peddle your metaphorical ass to corporate pimps for the biggest $$$? And then do what with those $$$? Engage in leisure pursuits to build up your market-based ego, of course, because then how else will you get more $$$? Money, as conceived in the capitalist marketplace, is an addictive drug, and is getting a sustainable supply the best we can hope for?

The Sufis teach that the nafs (aka ego, aka "false self") is the trickiest little bugger, and will continually disguise itself as something else (God, the Greater Good, ascended Space Brothers, the Muse) in order to continue your slavery and addiction to it. Actually - connect the two paragraphs above. The individual ego is very, very much like money, in that (a) neither of them have any objective reality; (b) the capitalist system is defined by its elevation of both to the fundamental principle of life.

Karl Marx defined the glorious future day of communism as that day when "the condition for the free development of all is the free development of each"; or, to put it another way, when there is no more contradiction between the personal, the social, and the global. Is it just coincidence that this is how Aleister Crowley described the consequences of every man and woman following their True Will?

I'm going to spend, er, the next year and a day (how's about that?) attempting to cut meaningless bullshit out of my life so I have more time and energy to dismantle my ego and find my True Will. I gamble that this will go along 100% with being a more effective political activist, cultural theorist/propagandist, and artist. If this proves not to be true, it proves that Chaos Marxism is pretty useless and you should ignore it. Stick around.

ETA: ...what was I doing a year ago? Oh, that's the time when I first discovered the Islamic/Sufi traditions... and started talking big about writing a CM book. Huh. Every time I think I've got it All Sorted Out and I can start preaching to the masses, it's drawn to my attention that my personal practice doesn't really back up the Big Ideas I'm peddling. Perhaps there's an important lesson in that.

The mysteries of the organism

This perception is 100% in accord with my own experience:

I'd like to look at a model of Reich's which I find has much explanatory power. He broke out character down into three "layers". The first of these is a "social" layer, a veneer of good behaviour and politeness with which we interact in the social world. If we see this layer as partially a product of armouring and learnt restraint, we can see that underneath it might lie a second layer — of frustration, anti-social impulses, rage and so on. Where Reich really showed his insight was that he posited another layer beneath this, a part of us which is open, loving and vulnerable. Reich argued that this "core" is naturally decent and moral. It is the suppression and suffocation of this layer, through the events of our birth and childhood that produces armouring. I only have to think about which emotions I have easiest "access" to, to see the validity of these ideas - real openness and tenderness seem much more affecting and come from a much more guarded place.

The rest of the article is well worth reading, keeping in mind at all times that Wilhelm Reich was a revolutionary socialist until the Stalinized Comintern hung him out to dry.

===

The central conceit of this blog is that revolutionary politics, psychology, occultism, cultural studies and artistic endeavour are all going to fail as long as they are isolated from each other. But I fear I may have ignored Rule One of the mystical mindset - as above, so below - in that I have elevated abstract theorising on these issues above actual practice in my daily life. (Which in itself violates one of CM's basic ground rules, viz. you are what you do - or as Karl Marx himself put it, "it's not sensible to evaluate someone based on their self-opinion".)

There will never be enough books for me to read or articles to write to create a Silver Bullet Theory, and it has been a species of intellectual arrogance for me to believe that it could be - and also a species of intellectual cowardice to decide that "nothing could be done" to test the theories in the here and now. (Which is of course precisely what I castigate the sectarian Marxists and anarchists for, opening me to the charge of hypocrisy.)

The middle of the middle

The essence of any thought-reform process is:

1) break down the existing identity of the subject. "Identity" is defined here as "the list of things that the subject feels that they have to do, or like doing, and will become anxious if prevented from doing."
2) replace that list with one you made up.

I've noticed this before with Marxist political groups. They will go into great detail explaining that CBT won't make you happy, drugs won't make you happy, TV or sports or beating up black people won't make you happy, because capitalism is a stinking memetic shitpile which makes everyone unhappy as the basis of its existence. True, that.

But they leave unspoken what the next step of the process is. The next step is, you should join the Marxist group and learn to identify your own happiness with political activism. This isn't necessarily a problem - this is how all groups which actually have life-changing effects (eg Weight Watchers) work. And heavens knows we need political activists, and Leninists and Platformists agree that having them properly organised is a necessity.

But the problem is that, in small groups which aren't properly democratic (which is virtually all of them in the advanced Western countries), "political activism" means "conformity with the goals and priorities of the self-perpetuating leadership and the group culture it promotes". Simply put: "You must give up your ego! So we can replace it with one we prepared earlier!"

So beware - be very aware - of any guru, political, spiritual or psychological, who's telling you "what you're doing isn't going to make you happy", but who isn't going into detail about what they recommend you do instead. Chances are it will be "giving me money", or "selling the ridiculous, badly-produced paper we edit on street corners", or "working for pennies on our agricultural plantation until the day we tell you to drink the Flavor-Aid", or something similar.

Robert Fripp has said that "any act based on principle is a good one". Dr Javad Nurbaksh has said that hooking up with even an inferior, selfish, not-properly-enlightened Master is better than letting your ego continue to run rampant. I find it very difficult to accept these propositions, because they're very similar to L. Ron Hubbard's dictum that "you must let others control you before you can learn to control yourself", which is clearly a cynical command to induce people to sign themselves up as slaves.

But I am having great trouble figuring out what the alternative might be.

Beyond belief and non-belief

Alan Moore claims to have met John Constantine in real life. Twice. The question, as I'm sure most of you who've been following will understand, is not whether this "really" happened or not. The question is, what rules does Alan Moore's personal reality follow in which things like this can happen? And are they rules that might be profitably adopted by others? How does it differ from the world in which bread and wine transform into the living presence of the Son of God, or the world in which a Koori headman can point a bone at someone and they die right then and there? (Apologies if I've got the details of the last one confused.)

My political mentor suggests that the job of revolutionaries is to be "organisers of optimism". I take this to refer to Gramsci's "optimism of the will", as opposed to "pessimism of the intellect". In other words - "we're probably all screwed, but if we do something it just might work". Million-to-one chance, and all that.

Chaos Marxism rejects solipsism. It is simply not true that every individual has their own hermetically sealed personal reality, mainly since individuals do not exist on the level of biological evolution or class struggle, the first and second most important defining factors in human existence. But given the material substrate of the above, there can be many different kinds of social, cultural, subcultural and personal "etic realities" (i.e. realities based on ideologies, abstractions, cultural images and other automatic parts of consciousness). Some of us never emerge from the world-as-it-seems that we are taught by our parents, our schools and our TV shows. Others reject that reality and substitute their own, based on consumer goods or possibly weird things we read.

In Chaos Marxism, we want to create a reality where the possibility of large-scale, technologically advanced civilisation based on ties of solidarity rather that wage labour and commodity exchange is possible. Our analysis of material reality says that it's objectively possible; but as long as the idea seems a ridiculous utopia or dystopia to the vast majority of humanity, it's never going to actually happen. And we will not be satisfied with play-acting "living in a better world" (the domain of lifestylers or cults) because that is what the Black Iron Prison allows everyone anyway - to live in their own little world as long as they don't cause problems.

If Hugo Weaving and the machine intelligences said that if you sat down and shut up, you could have your own little section of the Matrix just as you liked it, would you take the bait? Be honest, now. That would be much easier, and much more fun.

Myself, I'm going to experiment with living in an alternate reality where people are naturally kind and willing to listen, rather than hostile and mean. It might just work.

P.S.

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

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

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

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

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

Free love and irresponsible sex

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

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

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

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

The song remains the same

In 2010, war was beginning:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Quick thoughts before my brain melts

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

One face says terrorise, the other benevolise

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

(source)

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

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

Even anarchists know about the serious business

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

(source)

Sectarianism = political narcissism?

Narcissism is a defense mechanism related to the splitting defense mechanism. The Narcissist fails to regard other people, situations, or entities (political parties, countries, races, his workplace) as a compound of good and bad elements. He either idealises his object - or devalues it. The object is either all good or all bad. The bad attributes are always projected, displaced, or otherwise externalised. The good ones are internalised in order to support the inflated (grandiose) self-concepts of the narcissist and his grandiose fantasies - and to avoid the pain of deflation and disillusionment.

The narcissist pursues narcissistic supply (attention, both positive and negative) and uses it to regulate his fragile and fluctuating sense of self-worth.

(source)

Compare this to the toytown-Leninist attitudes of "won't get out of bed for anything less than pure proletarian revolution / we are uniquely gifted with the correct insights"; or ways in which, say, the GOOD regime (eg Lenin's Russia) gets a free pass for things that the INFERIOR AND THEREFORE WORTHLESS regime (eg. Chávez's Venezuela) is roundly criticised for. In fact, in general, the attitude from any shade of opinion that "it's okay if we do it / pure-evil-on-a-stick if those guys over there do it" is pure grade-A narcissism. (Or its variant, "they did it first so we get a free pass to do it".)

Narcisstic politics are one way for narcissistic personalities to recruit the unwary around into propping up their pretend selves. But be warned that you can only make this judgement call on the basis of practice, rather than speech. Plenty of sect-warriors will happily admit "in abstract" that their organisation has faults and flaws - but if in practice they act like only they are allowed to say that, and if an outsider says that they must be motivated by sordid personal failings, that's also grade-A political narcissism.

Short shameful confession

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

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

Cult leaders and cult followers

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

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

A couple of thoughts...

One by Llewellen Vaughan Lee:

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

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

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

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

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

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

The enemy is protest politics

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

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

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

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

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

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

Credo

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Follow me follow, down to the hollow

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

Oh, and for your daily dose of mysticism:

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

Oh crap

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

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

Thinking about perfection will only screw you up

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

==

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

I feel I owe you guys an explanation.

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

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

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

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

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

I STILL ATEN'T DEAD

A new aphorism for you:

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

Predecessors

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

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

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

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

Video killed the socialist movement?

The Marxist critique of capitalism would not have been able to spread, it seems, had industrial capitalism already annexed the sphere of symbolic goods. Marx profited from the backwardness of cultural circuits in relation to those of market production. A hundred years later, he would have missed his chance. All things being equal on other fronts, within the logic of image and markets (literary talkshows, weekly top-tens), Das Kapital would have remained what it was when it first appeared: a scholarly extravagance for book-lovers, not the source of a mass political current.

Old-school Guevarist Régis Debray argues that the shift from print culture to audiovisual culture has pretty much wrecked the way in which socialist memes used to grow and be reproduced. He seems pessimistic about whether socialism has a future in digital-Internet culture, for that reason. Your thoughts?

Chanology: the state of play

Chanology may turn out to be the sort of thing that can't be duplicated. It's unlikely that Anonymous will ever face an opponent more exquisitely matched than Scientology—a strictly disciplined, hierarchical organization founded on the exact reproduction of relentlessly earnest, fiercely copyright-protected words. Here the assclowns of Anonymous found the perfect antithesis of their own radically authorless, furiously remixed, compulsively unserious culture. Scientology was a target so ideal that there is now almost no point in looking for another. Perhaps this, then, is how Project Chanology will be remembered: not as the first of a new breed of online protest movements, but as the last of the epic trolls.

(source)

A Marxism - Memetics glossary, first few entries

Ideology: memetic entity
Personal consciousness: ego
Class consciousness: group mind
"Common sense": memes which shield the consciousness from reality
"Good sense": memes which enable the consciousness to change reality

O wad some power the giftie gi'e us...

I think I've mentioned before that, in late period consumer capitalists, the cultural technician class functionally act in the same regard as the priesthood did in feudal Europe (manufacturing consent among the oppressed for their own oppression, creating narratives for the ruling class which justify that oppression, and being rewarded with quasi-autonomy and a slice of the pie). But of course, that's not how the "creatives" see themselves. They pretty much see themselves as wizards, as if this were some kind of fantasy novel. And of course some of them cast their "magic spells" for their own self interest, some for what they think might be the interests of the world as a whole (filtered through their own perception), and some simply for hire. The common thought is that they are the s00per-special elite who will decide the battle for one side or another.

Deluding yourself is probably a good survival trait if your aim is to get the most goodies out of the World-As-Is. However, rigorous honesty with what you really are is necessary if you actually want to act as an outlet of goodness into the world. And you might have the power to shape people's consciousness with your magick spells, and thus gain for yourself $$$ and other class privileges, but really, that's nothing that a mediaeval priest or a tribal witchdoctor can't do. And both those professions found themselves historically obsolete when a stronger class or national force appeared on the scene - unless of course they shifted their allegiance to the new boss, same as the old boss.

The cultural technicians and creatives have to be an important part of a new historical bloc to overthrow the system, of course, or the planet's screwed. If for no other reason that they probably have as much economic "weight" to throw about in the advanced capitalist countries as the industrial proletariat. However, the problem happens because they always assume that they're going to run the show and teach the idiot proles what's what.

Stalinism, and its mirror image McCarthyism, are both essentially middle-class ideologies because they include this basic assumption - that proles are dumb machines who need to be programmed by an enlightened class, and that the real battle is a Wizard's Duel between competing value systems and media networks. So it's White Wizards vs. Dark Wizards for the soul of the nation, and the proles will just have to sit back and wait to be told which side won. This of course lends to all manner of elitist claptrap such as conspiracy and terrorism, both of which might mean a new class of entitled jackasses taking over, but will never mean a change in the actual way the world works.

In contrast, Chaos Marxism promotes the concept of the "organic intellectual". Can you actually unify yourself with a real class force, and help it to come to self-awareness - which does not mean teaching them to see themselves the way you think they should be seen, but to clarify their own semi-conscious grasp of reality? To put it in concrete terms - the response to the Fox Newses and Globovisions of this world is not to set up competing and opposing propaganda channels. You can't beat the bastards on their own terms because it's based on mobilising within current market forces, and we're supposed to be opposing market forces. On the contrary - how can we create media in which people tell their own truth, rather than waiting for clever wizards to tell them what reality is?

Not your grandfather's Marx

As far as the natural-scientific materialism of his contemporaries was concerned, Marx felt only scorn for it. The realization that we are, both mind and body, spirit and flesh, is a basic assumption of Marxian naturalism. While Marx did not differ from the materialists in their belief that body is more fundamental than mind, he also clearly put the spirit high above the flesh. Marx cherished the spiritual aspirations and the spiritual world of man as much as the most determined idealist and showed little appreciation for the material in the everyday use of this term. Although he was close to materialists, Marx was so emphatic about the worth of man’s spiritual life that he was rightly described- in the sense in which a paradox might state an important truth- as a thinker who leaned, so to speak, towards a practical dualism of body and mind and wished to liberate men from the bondage of their material nature.

This book is fascinating. It mainly consists in arguing that Marx was not a dialectical materialist, but an anthropological naturalist, and that dialectical materialism bases itself on Engels' misunderstandings of Marx and then Lenin's misunderstandings of Engels. Interesting and plausible - the paragraph above totally confirms the basic ideas that this blog is founded on (that spirituality and culture can be understood using Marxism, not abolished), and the book's description of "anthropological naturalism" reads like simple common sense to yours truly.

Oh noes!

Some meddling libertarian kids have uncovered this blog's secret control of planet Earth!

I think the form of the dialectic that we are overwhelmed with today is probably more accurately "dialectic materialism." It is a tool to "manipulate us into a frenzied circular pattern of thought and action to advance humanity into an international dictatorship of the proletariat." It is often referred to as "chaos Marxism" because chaos must be created in order to inject the conclusion/goal.

Seriously, though - my habitual googlestalking of myself seems to have shown that the meme is actually spreading, in that people who don't get what we're on about at all are talking about us. That's kind of cool.

There is a war between the rich and poor, a war between the man and the woman

Look, guys, this might be the most important thing I've written here in a long time. Are you listening closely? Right.

Forget all your labels. Forget all your words. Forget all your ideas and your images and your godforms and your shorthand and your colour-codes for the pieces on the global chessboard. It's all just froth on the surface. "The Tao that can be spoken is not the true Tao," and the true "tide in men's affairs" that is really shifting things around in this world is far, far deeper than any abstraction that you can come up with.

This is not about two teams of human egos, the Illuminati vs the Discordians, the liberals vs the conservatives, the pure vs the infidels. That's because human egos are not real. The world changes and shifts because of real forces - real physical forces, which express themselves in ideologies and consciousness.

This is why the Muslims will say "there is no power or strength but in God". Or a Marxist might put it: "the history of currently existing society is the history of class struggle". It is really, REALLY not about good guys and bad guys, of nice vs nasty, of a clash of ideologies, because all of that is a tiny, tiny tip on an iceberg, and the real things that moves are forces far more fundamental to reality than the individual human ego.

If Chaos Marxism has any point, and perhaps the jury is still out on that one, it's that your ego is not only unimportant in the grander scheme of things, it is lying to you. Your ego developed to help you play the game of personalities and ideologies and images. Your ego grew to help you navigate the Matrix. But the Matrix cannot tell you who you really are.

The whole point of everything we do on this blog has been attempting to cut through all the words in the world and bring us face to face with messy reality, a reality far, far deeper than the Real World of Horrible Jobs. Everything that happens to you might as well not be real if you only look at it with the eyes you've developed to play "the Game" of our current consumerist-capitalist society. You have to lean to look under the surface. It is possible for an individual to do this, with a lot of extremely hard and painful work. Easier to do it in a group, magickal order, political party, whatever, but you'll have to find a good one.

All human culture and ideology and language is simply a manifestation of deeper tides within Humanity as a collective entity, and at this point in history, that means the Class Struggle. Class struggle is how Humanity as an entity is coming to manifest itself - or kill itself off, if everything goes wrong. The forces of Waking Up as a planet or - well, not just staying asleep forever, but possibly even choking on our own vomit in our sleep, like John Bonham.

Things only REALLY change in the real world because a class - i.e. a current of humanity united by its place in the system of material production - makes things happen. Those foolish hippies in 1967 thought things were going to change because they took a bunch of acid, had more sex than was considered seemly and wore weird clothes. But of course the system took all that and commodified it and sold it back to them.

No, things really changed in the 1960s and 1970s because a new class - the middle-class managers and cultural technicians - became aware of themselves as a class and started agitating for the things important to it - consumption freedoms, for the most part, but among them important freedoms such as abortion, birth control, non-traditional sexuality, the breakdown of the classical family unit, and removal of censorship over expression. And they got all that, eventually, after fighting the Thatchers and Reagans who wanted to roll it back, simply because they were important to capitalism, and the system could grow much better and more efficiently if they got what they want.

A similar revolution is brewing around things like the Pirate Party and open-source. A new generation of cultural and infotech professionals simply want zero-priced digital content. And it will happen because if the corporate world doesn't give this new class force what it wants, that force will take what it wants. The whole question is: can corporate capitalism actually give the Intarwebz its liberty and still make profit? Because if not, we are coming up against a socio-economic convulsion that will dwarf the late 60's in importance.

But truly, truly, all this is for nothing if the majority class doesn't get into action and change things. Because up until that point, this is just the elite squabbling with the next bunch down the totem pole of history. A new chapter in history, but not a new volume. We really do need a class force which will crush corporate capitalism altogether - and that has to be a force which rallies the majority of the currently powerless, not just a small middle layer.

Anyway. *ahem* Nothing happens because of great men or women, their great egos, their abilities to manipulate memes, etc. That's just an ideology which reflects the cultural-techician class masturbating to its own cooklness. No, to use religious language again - if it looks like you just kicked a door down, God already opened the door for you and you happened to be in the right place at the right time. This kind of humility isn't popular, though, because it goes against the reward structure of the Matrix - viz., if great individuals aren't the ones who cause change, if they are actually only expressions of broader forces within human society as a whole, then the whole basis of intellectual property and authoritarian leadership goes down the drain.

Polish your mirror. You can't individually change the world. But you can perhaps see where change is coming, and be in the right place at the right time at the right frame of mind so that the positive currents within humanity - the forces of Waking Up rather than Choking In Our Sleep - can use you as their gateway into the world. This means really realising that you don't own anything, you don't have any rights, that your ego is an artefact of the Matrix, that you are froth on the surface of crashing waves, but that if you know all this you can surrender yourself to the real forces which move everything, and make yourself a useful part of evolving, awakening Humanity.

This is perhaps easier for those of you who don't have advanced egos which are admirably placed to earn privileges in the "Real" World of Horrible Jobs - those who have nothing to lose but their chains, in other words. But the industrial proletariat of Marx's time weren't just revolutionary because they had nothing to lose, it was because "without their strength and labour, not a single wheel would turn". The industrial proletariat are still the most vitally important class on the planet, but we cultural technicians in the advanced West also have our part to play. Will you play it, or will you play around in the Matrix until the whole thing shorts out?

I think I'm starting to understand the Hidden Mystery.

Good advice

... spiritual life is exactly like everything in nature. It's subject to the law of nature. There is a tide like the tide in the sea, like the day and night. There is tremendous nearness to the Beloved, and the soul is happy, and we are walking on clouds, and then suddenly there is nothing there. You are suspended naked over a chasm or an abyss, you can't pray and God doesn't exist and everything is cold and everything is horrible... This is the path of the mystics.

- Irina Tweedie. Substitute "the Revolution" for "God" and this paragraph should look familiar to our secular Marxist readers as well. The test is whether you give up when it looks like everything's turned to shit. But there's a subtler trap - the trap of "well, maybe what I've been doing hasn't worked, so let's do something else." That way lies spiritual and/or political dilettantism, jumping on whichever bandwagon seems interesting at the time.

The important question is: regardless of success in the real world, is your group as a group working? If you've got a good political party, or tariqa, or affinity group, stick with it because groups can do things individuals can't. You might waste a lot of time and energy trying to affiliate yourself to a new guru, only to find out that you actually brought the problem with you.

...your future you often have asked me...

There's an important scene in the beautiful film Goodbye Lenin! (which you all should watch), in which our East Berlin hero goes to some kind of West Berlin underground-fetish nightclub and is totally blown away. Now, that's something that always struck me - the idea that Eastern Bloc "socialism" ended up being so grey, boring, aping the most cheesy and unthreatening parts of Western mass culture but criminalising its own interesting dissidents. You would have never predicted that back in the 20's and 30's - Picasso was a socialist, the Surrealists were Trotskyites for God's sake, and generally all the best artists were actual anti-capitalists, rather than posturing "lifestyle anarchists" or insipid Greenie-liberals like they are today.

Obviously, part of the problem was the establishment of "socialist realism" (i.e. bland, feelgood pap) as the official art of Stalinism. But there's also a problem with a rigid centralised political/social structure of any sort, and that's that Stalinists don't really understand the dialectic. Because they think that a bureaucratic police-state structure is pretty much as good as it gets for humanity, they think it's their job to repress all social contradictions. Hence bullshit elections where the "good guys" get 99% of the vote, and all the other nonsense of social unanimity.

I once read an old Soviet propaganda brochure called "What do people talk about in the Soviet Union?" It gave "real-life" examples of random Soviet people having heated arguments on all manner of things, but the last chapter said: "One thing that we never discuss is whether socialism works. That's settled forever and ever and ever." And the Catholic Church is really democratic because you can discuss anything apart from the central dogma. What did Marx say? "All criticism starts with the criticism of religion" - the idea that there is any dogma, anything which can be off-limits for debate, is brain-death and a block on the evolution of humanity. (Note: yelling "fire" in a crowded theatre, or "Islam out of Britain" in Brick Lane, does not count as debate and should be rightly suppressed.)

Learn your Marx, guys! The whole freakin' universe is in contradiction, and always will be, because without contraries, without tension and conflict, there can be no progress. The promise of socialism is that social-economic contradictions (class and inequalities) will be overcome, so that we can learn all-new forms of conflict and contradiction! All the great art comes out of struggle. All bland, boring nonsense comes out of official propaganda trying to pretend that struggle and conflict doesn't really happen in our glorious utopia. The point of the end of the history of class society is that we can start a new history, not a boring "happily ever after" - aka "death", or a kind of C S Lewis afterlife.

This is why the socialist future cannot be a bureaucracy, or a central bank (sorry Lenin), but a network, with interdependent but autonomous nodes of production, of thought, of culture, of art, and yes they must not get on with each other. The main difference from capitalism as it stands is of course that these different centres will have different ways of relating to each other than markets, money, oppression and violence. There's only the vaguest idea from this point what that might look like.

The Holy Qur'an quotes the central intelligence of the Universe as saying something like: "If I wanted you all to be the same religion, I would have made it so. Instead, I gave you several different faiths, so you could vie among yourselves in holiness". If it doesn't have a counter-culture and heated arguments on every subject under the sun, it's not my revolution.