A Chaos Marxist New Year's Resolution

I take immeasurable pleasure in welcoming Subtle Singer to the Chaos Marxism team. I've been doing this on my own for too long. Enjoy. - DlaP

In the Islamic tradition, one is required to host guests for three days, hospitality that is provided beyond that period being regarded as Sadaqah (voluntary charity).

Interpreting this matter-of-fact prescription as a spiritual imperative, we are called on to inquire into the nature of our own psychological hospitality;

1. Are you welcoming enough for guests? The coming of which particular guests would you like to be prepared for? 
2. What guests are currently staying in your house? How are you treating them?
3. What guests have overstayed their period, and should lovingly be shown the door? How will you put to use the gifts they have left behind?

In this New Year, regularly take the time to ask yourself these questions. God willing, you will have the courage to face these questions honestly, and adjust your door policy as necessary.

Theses on the New Chaos Marxism

1. We hereby disavow the "Old Chaos Marxism"'s interest in "meme magic" for the following reasons:
   1. The fascists got there first and did it better (or at least did it as successfully as possible).
   2. We should have predicted they should do that, because as Walter Benjamin identified in the 1930s, fascism is precisely turning politics into aesthetics.
   3. Meme politics are stupid politics. We announce Gresham's Law of Memetics: boomer memes drive out dank memes. Memes which appeal to the dumbest, grossest part of the lizard brain spread further and faster (as is being proved in practice by mainstream conservative media operators as we speak).
   4. Communist politics are supposed to be about coming to consciousness. But with great consciousness comes great responsibility. Fascism is a fantasy of childish irresponsibility in which Great Leader allows you to do whatever you want in return for loyalty, and that is precisely its appeal.
   5. It's no coincidence that when actual "communists" try meme politics, you arrive at tankie politics - politics which are identical to "channer fascism" in their nihilism, delight in violence, aggressive anti-intellectualism and bootlicking to the biggest bully on the block, only with swastikas being replaced by hammer-and-sickles, with racial nationalism replaced by a sick, Red-Brown "proletarian nationalism" (which is in fact lumpen-populism and majoritarianism, as shown in the cringing support for Han Chinese racial nationalism draped in a red flag in Xinjiang, Hong Kong etc).
      
2.  New Chaos Marxism pivots to building consciousness, and therefore immunity to memes. Memes work by subverting the rational mind ("slow" mind) in favor of the "heuristic" mind, the "monkey" mind, the mind that works on like/dislike; Chaos Marxist aims to marry the two.
3. But how?
   
   1.  It can't be done on an individual basis because there is no way for an isolated individual to know whether she is a noble defender of The Truth who sees things that the slack-jawed yokels can't understand; or just a crank (the two look identical from the inside).
   2. But it's difficult as hell to do it in a group because most groups are brought down by their own internal bullshit: ego-centricity and meme-based thinking feed off and are fed by clique politics and abusive/authoritarian leadership.
4. "Truth" (in the sense of learning to create change in objective reality in conformity with intention) can only be identified in a praxis group (a group melding theory and practice). The long-term goal of Chaos Marxism is to turn humanity as a whole into a praxis group, healing the split between theory and practice.
5. 1.  All groups are problematic but some groups are more problematic than others.
   2. For a long time we resisted the idea of "prefiguration", the idea that groups that want to change the world have to embody their own principles. It seemed far too close to the hippie bullshit of change the world to change yourself: i.e. a recipe for doing nothing but jerking yourself off to your own saintliness for not actually doing anything. But we hate to say it, a group that doesn't embody reflexivity (being able to smell its own bullshit) and making its own desires and ego subservient to the search for Truth will not only degenerate into a circle-jerk, a cult or a money-making enterprise, but will actually degrade the consciousness of its own members.
   3. A group aspiring to be a real praxis group will be able to smell its own bullshit, and must expect a commitment from its members that they themselves will at least make every effort to smell their own bullshit.

A retraction and an apology

Much like B. B. Rodriguez, I only like mobs when I'm leading them

To sum up in a sentence, the project of Chaos Marxism was to try to build links between two of my main interests - classical Marxist politics and magick/mysticism - through materialist approaches to cultural studies, religion, the sociology of movements and transpersonal psychology, all filtered through a Church of the SubGenius style gonzo-rant aesthetic.

Early posts in this blog extolled the concept of meme politics - the idea that a liberatory anti-capitalist political project could be spread through something like the Anonymous internet mob phenomenon which grew out of 4chan /b/, the asshole of the Internet, and secondary websites like Encyclopedia Dramatica.

Well, the future is here, and it FUCKIN' SUCKS.

Do you guys know about QAnon? That's pure meme politics of the type I used to foresee. It's also a bloodthirsty fascist braindeath cult, operated by grifters and exploited by mainstream political operators. (The latter is the classic relationship, of course: the original Nazis were despised by mainstream German conservatives as dumb thugs, but were cynically used to bash the Left with.)

The main problem is that meme politics are stupid politics, in its current form. It's effectively precisely because it destroys consciousness - it encourages people to switch off their minds. YouTube is a hive of conspiracy theories and fascism not just because of its algorithm, but because studies have showed what Chaos Marxism always understood - that people will believe absolute garbage if it's in video form with smooth graphics and creepy music, that they would reject if they saw it written on the page. ETA: Memes are aesthetics; Walter Benjamin said that turning politics into aesthetics was an essential point of fascism. You do the match.

Some wiseacre on Twitter was recently saying that QAnon in particular is something like the Snow Crash mind virus, creating a "human botnet" which will do whatever the signals tell it (or, for the real nerds, the Remote from the Faction Paradox universe). So, Q can tell someone "$30 grand and I'll instruct my minions to stalk and harass that café down the road which gave you bad service". Tell them that they're harvesting adrenochrome from babies in its basement or something.

(As I've said before, Anonymous didn't have to wind up in GamerGate, QAnon and similar fascist online mobs - but its anti-capitalist, anti-systemic leadership were taken out when Lulzsec was destroyed.)

So if Chaos Marxism still has a project, I suppose it'll be something like trying to create a vaccine (or a psychological anti-virus program) that will make socialist movements immune to meme politics. And it would have to be something like creating an intellectual culture in the movement, rather than some kind of individualist CBT thing.

Could memes be used to convey positive messages? Yes. But let's face it - it was always an elitist idea, the cynical idea of overriding people's conscious minds and appealing straight to the preconscious. Chaos Marxism now rejects that in favour of what Marx himself, as well as Sigmund Freud, wanted - bringing ourselves and the whole world to full consciousness, so we can no longer be worked like a puppet by cynical meme-lords.

Anyway, check out this lady, she seems to be working in a similar tradition.

TWELVE YEARS OF CHAOS MARXISM

...contemporary life is locked into a situation in which it can only see its magicians as isolated hermits who withdraw into the cultivation of a superior ego, when in fact the visionary is nothing without the pack, truibe, or band - in a word, the collective he or she servces. The becomings-animal, -woman and -molecular undertaken by the shaman are not self-serving, but ultimately for he purpose of the healing and transformation of a social body, and of the earth itself. Contact with what I would call the "shamanic virtual" - a plane of consistency populated by ancestors, totems, and spirits - is not primarily for the ecstatic enjoyment of the visionary. In fact, it is much more like a hallucinatory illness that the shaman sustains for the sake of the people. And the joy of the shaman's song comes directly from the pain of the people.

- Joshua Ramey, The Hermetic Deleuze (2012) p. 217

Ghost stories

In The Adventures of Pinocchio, and the Disney cartoon based thereupon, our favourite puppet-lad is enticed away from schooling and upright behaviour to a place known as Toyland in the original (Pleasure Island in the film), where kids just bum around all day smoking big cigars, etc. And then they get turned into donkeys and are forced into slave labour.

It's a very interesting trope, that of children being warned of about the evil, substitute parent, who will promise them everything their little childlike hearts could desire... in return for enslavement and abuse. Yes, up to and including rape. And this trope is of course based on reality. Hey, remember that cute little song about "The Big Rock Candy Mountain"?

Originally the song described a child being recruited into hobo life by tales of the "big rock candy mountain". Such recruitment actually occurred, with hobos enchanting children with tales of adventure called ghost stories by other hobos. In proof of his authorship of the song, McClintock published the original words, the last verse of which was:

The punk rolled up his big blue eyes
And said to the jocker, "Sandy,
I've hiked and hiked and wandered too,
But I ain't seen any candy.
I've hiked and hiked till my feet are sore
And I'll be d--ned if I hike any more
To be buggered sore like a hobo's whore
In the Big Rock Candy Mountains.

And there's another, much less funny song called "The Appleknocker's Lament" which tells a brutal story of a young boy being enticed by these ghost stories into a life of sex slavery/regular slavery.

The healthy parent sets boundaries and thus enables the child to develop boundaries of their own. The abusive parent, the abusive partner, the authoritarian political or religious leader, does not allow boundaries; and in return gives the victim/follower permission to act out their darkest fantasies.

We've mentioned before that what authoritarian parenting/politics/religion provides is an excuse for bad behaviour. You see these scumbags coming out of the woodwork as out and proud Nazi racist misogynists now that the Orange Goblin squatting in the White House has given them the signal that that's okay? Remember that Futurama episode where Zapp Brannigan tells his crew that as long as they're "loyal", they can sit around drinking beer in their underpants? And then later they find out that "loyalty" means going on a suicide mission? Exactly the same thing. Hitler took an advanced civilised nation on a goddamn suicide mission with him, in return for 12 years getting to push Jews and Commies around and feeling that they were making Germany great again.

The sad thing is that Pinocchio didn't learn his lesson and later became a Fascist.

Why do we do this, anyway?

Thank you, Rorschach.

It's no fun being one of the souls that tread the knife's edge, living in liminal space, never having a home to go to. Even the cliques of Weirdo Kids treat you like crap if you challenge the groupthink and the shibboleths.

A commitment to The Truth, to al-Haqq, to the Bodhisattva Vow means giving up on everything that either The Culture and The Counterculture offer you - no security, no permanent paid gig, no subcultural social capital, no fan club, no grovelling disciples punching out your enemies.

It also means living "without lust of result", as Uncle Aleister put it. You might never see Full Communism in your lifetime. You might live to see the end of bourgeois liberal democracy. Or even the end of human civilisation. You might see your kids or grandkids hunting cancerous rats for food in a "Syria gone global + Mad Max scenario". (Always remember that what happens in "those other countries where brown people live" is a testing ground for what they will do to YOU and your friends and family if you ever become a threat. There are not two places with a bridge between - there is only one place.)

Funnily enough, if what we're doing does become useful to "the normies", it will be because The Shit Has Hit The Fan and normal human reality has collapsed. We will have lessons to teach in that case. The good scenario is that we will die in anonymity, our struggle unappreciated by wider humanity.

The question as always is, short of The Revolution/The Apocalypse, how to live in The Real World of Ordinary Jobs - as well as we can - while not being of it. To combine having a family, a life, a career, all those normal human things with a commitment to a path of what Alice A. Bailey called Love In Action. If we don't feed our ego as well as but separately from doing The Great Work, then The Great Work will be sucked up into our ego and we'll become just another subcultural capitalist. You can't save humanity while investing your psychic energy in a little club of oddballs which thinks it's better than the rest of humanity.

You must learn to love your brothers and sisters who don't know The Law, while never ceasing to follow The Law yourself. Love is the Law.