LINK: A bunch of trolls cogently suggest a materialist viewpoint, although I'd disagree with their overestimation of the extent to which an "ordinary person" can tell what's material reality.
VALEDICTORY: The Beasthouse is closing down. Mad Larry says to copy and paste all the good bits ASAP, and who are we to argue with Grandfather Paradox his own self?
OBSERVATION (1): The "living goddesses" of India bear a striking and important resemblance to the movie stars of Hollywood, in the way that they embody cultural archetypes but only so long as they are hedged about with all manner of taboos. (Of course, the difference is that when a Hollywood star breaks the taboos, if they do it enough they can turn into cultural demons rather than gods, as Mss. Hilton and Lohan demonstrate.
OBSERVATION (2): You want to know what a cultural archetype is? Look at what people turn up to costume parties dressed as. Sometimes these are actual people - Marilyn Monroe, Bela Lugosi and Tor Johnson can testify.
GRUMBLE: I know full well I promised some guest postings a month or three ago. What happened to those? Y'know, I'm kind of wondering that myself.
2007-07-17
Return of the son of disconnected thoughts
People want to believe. People want a religion, a painkiller. Alienation and powerlessness to actually change their lives has knocked holes in their psyche that need to be filled by something, anything. Salespeople know this. Sales and other forms of mind control wouldn't work if the mind wasn't looking for something to control it in the first place - a "Big Other" (as the Lacanians say) that can take your powerlessness away.
The point of "motivational psychology / magic" is being able to - as the Subs say - "pull the wool over your own eyes". You wouldn't be able to "programme your own reality", though, if you deep-down didn't despair of actually be able to do anything to change things in the real world. Well, you wouldn't have to. You would be able to change things in everyday consciousness.
As it stands, your everyday consciousness is the consciousness you need to survive in a capitalist economy - to be an employee who gains the bosses' good but not bad attention, an efficient manager who maximises surplus value, a dynamite salesperson. At work, that is. You get home and you get to be a "good family man / wife", or whatever mass-produced consumption-related identity you've decided to buy. Goth, party girl, Magus, huge fan of reality TV, whatever. The only thing in common that these have is that they fill niches in a media/consumption environment rather than being in a position to change that environment.
Sadly, "revolutionary" is - for the most part - just another of those identities. Look at the industries that have sprung up to enable the "anarchist lifestyle" - organic stores, radical publishers, politically correct musical groups, etc. The Marxist sects can also be seen (for the most part) as parasitic growths on the yearning of people to believe in something. Just like Christian, Buddhist, Muslim and Neo-Pagan sects, for that matter. Religion is still the opiate (painkiller) of the masses, for a wider definition of "religion".
Any "scene", or community, or whatever, must be analysed with the tools of dialectial materialism. Where is the money and the surplus labour going? Who pays and who benefits? Is it going into creating real things in the real world or into supporting someone's lifestyle?
Lukacs said: "The Soviet is the end of alienation", because only the workers' council form can actually, consciously, change social reality. The best an individual can do is psychically "dope themselves up". This can of course be used for positive and negative goals. A painkiller can encourage you to lie around and stare at the ceiling, or kill your family, or it might take the edge off enough to allow you to accomplish something in the real world.
The early Christian writers said "we believe because it is absurd". The rationality we are taught to survive in the real world shows us that any efforts to change the world are doomed to failure. "Painkillers" - sect organisation, in this case - which enable us to act "irrationally", can bridge the gap between that reality and a future reality where workers solidarity and revolutionary political activity will be really, truly practical. This, I think, is what Gramsci meant by "pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will".
===
The death of independent working class culture came at the era when the ruling class needed to impose - not only passive habits of submission and deference - but active consent to the system and integration of the proletariat with middle-class cultural norms. That is, the era of universal suffrage and mass consumerism. This is one of the reasons that simply attempting to re-run 1917 doesn't work. Gramsci worked it out - the Tsarist state hadn't come nearly as close to incorporating the working class in "national" (bourgeois) culture as they had in Western Europe. And it's gotten much worse since then, to the point that working class culture simply doesn't exist in much of the world any more.
In our "First World" societies, industrial production has been mostly exported and we now have the birth of a service or info-processing working class. This has smashed all the old cultures and traditions of solidarity, and the new working class hasn't had the space to build new ones. We need a new "culture in opposition" - not a separatist "Proletkult", but a culture which fights the ruling class tooth and nail for everything that's good in culture (both mass-market and niche-market) as well as setting out to create our own free, open source, culture. This will take the form of a "historic bloc" (in Gramsci's terms) between a section of the cultural/ ideological intelligensia (a new middle class layer) and a new, rising layer of proletarian organic intellectuals, who may well grow precisely from those newly-proletarianised layers who went through "new middle class" education and training but lost out in the struggle for jobs.
A real international socialist movement would put as its first priority intersecting with the spontaneously arising working class cultures of China, India and South East Asia, but that's a bit beyond our means right now.
===
One of the essential contradictions of bourgeois ideology is going on about globalisation on one side, and then pretending that there are still such things as "national economies" on the other hand. The reason why there are info-processing, high-skill jobs in the West is precisely because the industrial heart of the world is now on the northwest of the Pacific.
Paradoxically, the very high-skill nature of the economy has led to the debasing of those skills and shoving people with training in cultural production and ideology into the new working class. The solution is of course not to run into the past and try to restore an industrial base in one country, but to struggle in international solidarity, and realise that only our bosses benefit from their oppression, or ours.
There's a difference in Venezuela - the Government's effort to build an industrial base there is correct because there isn't ANY sort of real working class at the moment, which is why the revolution is growing in such a weird shape. The popular masses, the base of the Bolivarian project, are mainly petty traders and casual workers in the cities who live off the trickled-down oil rents. Only a working class based in commodity production can build a social base for real workers power. The contradiction is that funnelling the oil rents into the social missions has opened up the very space for popular revolutionary consciousness that might bring this about.
The point of "motivational psychology / magic" is being able to - as the Subs say - "pull the wool over your own eyes". You wouldn't be able to "programme your own reality", though, if you deep-down didn't despair of actually be able to do anything to change things in the real world. Well, you wouldn't have to. You would be able to change things in everyday consciousness.
As it stands, your everyday consciousness is the consciousness you need to survive in a capitalist economy - to be an employee who gains the bosses' good but not bad attention, an efficient manager who maximises surplus value, a dynamite salesperson. At work, that is. You get home and you get to be a "good family man / wife", or whatever mass-produced consumption-related identity you've decided to buy. Goth, party girl, Magus, huge fan of reality TV, whatever. The only thing in common that these have is that they fill niches in a media/consumption environment rather than being in a position to change that environment.
Sadly, "revolutionary" is - for the most part - just another of those identities. Look at the industries that have sprung up to enable the "anarchist lifestyle" - organic stores, radical publishers, politically correct musical groups, etc. The Marxist sects can also be seen (for the most part) as parasitic growths on the yearning of people to believe in something. Just like Christian, Buddhist, Muslim and Neo-Pagan sects, for that matter. Religion is still the opiate (painkiller) of the masses, for a wider definition of "religion".
Any "scene", or community, or whatever, must be analysed with the tools of dialectial materialism. Where is the money and the surplus labour going? Who pays and who benefits? Is it going into creating real things in the real world or into supporting someone's lifestyle?
Lukacs said: "The Soviet is the end of alienation", because only the workers' council form can actually, consciously, change social reality. The best an individual can do is psychically "dope themselves up". This can of course be used for positive and negative goals. A painkiller can encourage you to lie around and stare at the ceiling, or kill your family, or it might take the edge off enough to allow you to accomplish something in the real world.
The early Christian writers said "we believe because it is absurd". The rationality we are taught to survive in the real world shows us that any efforts to change the world are doomed to failure. "Painkillers" - sect organisation, in this case - which enable us to act "irrationally", can bridge the gap between that reality and a future reality where workers solidarity and revolutionary political activity will be really, truly practical. This, I think, is what Gramsci meant by "pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will".
===
The death of independent working class culture came at the era when the ruling class needed to impose - not only passive habits of submission and deference - but active consent to the system and integration of the proletariat with middle-class cultural norms. That is, the era of universal suffrage and mass consumerism. This is one of the reasons that simply attempting to re-run 1917 doesn't work. Gramsci worked it out - the Tsarist state hadn't come nearly as close to incorporating the working class in "national" (bourgeois) culture as they had in Western Europe. And it's gotten much worse since then, to the point that working class culture simply doesn't exist in much of the world any more.
In our "First World" societies, industrial production has been mostly exported and we now have the birth of a service or info-processing working class. This has smashed all the old cultures and traditions of solidarity, and the new working class hasn't had the space to build new ones. We need a new "culture in opposition" - not a separatist "Proletkult", but a culture which fights the ruling class tooth and nail for everything that's good in culture (both mass-market and niche-market) as well as setting out to create our own free, open source, culture. This will take the form of a "historic bloc" (in Gramsci's terms) between a section of the cultural/ ideological intelligensia (a new middle class layer) and a new, rising layer of proletarian organic intellectuals, who may well grow precisely from those newly-proletarianised layers who went through "new middle class" education and training but lost out in the struggle for jobs.
A real international socialist movement would put as its first priority intersecting with the spontaneously arising working class cultures of China, India and South East Asia, but that's a bit beyond our means right now.
===
One of the essential contradictions of bourgeois ideology is going on about globalisation on one side, and then pretending that there are still such things as "national economies" on the other hand. The reason why there are info-processing, high-skill jobs in the West is precisely because the industrial heart of the world is now on the northwest of the Pacific.
Paradoxically, the very high-skill nature of the economy has led to the debasing of those skills and shoving people with training in cultural production and ideology into the new working class. The solution is of course not to run into the past and try to restore an industrial base in one country, but to struggle in international solidarity, and realise that only our bosses benefit from their oppression, or ours.
There's a difference in Venezuela - the Government's effort to build an industrial base there is correct because there isn't ANY sort of real working class at the moment, which is why the revolution is growing in such a weird shape. The popular masses, the base of the Bolivarian project, are mainly petty traders and casual workers in the cities who live off the trickled-down oil rents. Only a working class based in commodity production can build a social base for real workers power. The contradiction is that funnelling the oil rents into the social missions has opened up the very space for popular revolutionary consciousness that might bring this about.
2007-07-12
Thoughts on rereading the Communist Manifesto and Faction Paradox at the same time
The major difference between now and Marx's time (apart from globalisation having advanced to the extent he foresaw) is that it's no longer true that capitalism bases itself entirely on the cash nexus and brute force. The commodification of all human existence led to consumer capitalism, where the mass of the working class have to buy the products that are produced. Capitalism destroyed all the old myths, but then had to create new myths to continually expand consumption and win our consent to the system. It's no accident that psychology was born at the same time as mass consumer society and universal suffrage. Psychology was born because it was useful to try to manufacture our consent and get us to consume.
All citizens of an advanced capitalist state are socialised as consumers and citizens as well as workers. The mass media is used to socialise docile obedient and exploitable workers, and citizens who identify with "their" state, and at the same time wild, crazy and independent consumers. The marketing industries induce wants and needs which can only be satisfied by consumption, or to dress the psychic wounds left by alienation in the workplace. If your job sucks, you get to have retail therapy, or pay to be pampered by a service worker. One side of the apparatus says TERRORISE, the other BENEVOLISE, at the same time. This is what we call a contradiction.
Consuming a good or service is explicitly intended to fill psychic gaps. Consumers pay for the burying and disavowal of labour - not just the sign of people working, but the signs that their goods or services are brought to them by other human beings. The promise of the market economy is that workers are your own "personal slave", with no thought except your pleasure. This is what you get for your money (which is usually earned by *you* having to take your turn in the barrel, so to speak). As Zizek says - everyone knows this isn't literally true, but acts like it's true, and are angry and disappointed when the facade isn't kept up. Note also that in modern capitalism needs healthy, well-fed, educated and skilled workers, so it can't starve us, which means we've crawled up Maslow's hierarchy of needs a ways.
This is one of the reasons state capitalism fell over. Not faced with cutthroat competition, their propaganda apparatus fell way behind that of the bourgeois capitalist countries. The West looked desirable not because of freedom but because of consumer goods. (Of course, this wasn't just appearance - Western consumer goods *were* better, for all the reasons that Tony Cliff explained, plus in the 80's the growth of a true global market.)
Propaganda - both aimed at feelings of citizenship or consumerism - is increasingly filling the cap in the apparatus of social control and manufacturing consent that organised religion used to. Of course, there are "bottom up" ways that people fill these gaps - with subcultures, etc - but even those end up being harnessed to sell more products. Lawrence Miles is 100% correct that the biggest problem with modern consumer culture is that the arts of marketing have advanced to the point where demographic categories have a stranglehold over any mass media culture which gets released. A subculture which does not put itself in opposition to the system quickly becomes a demographic category (hippy, punk, sci-fi nerd, fetishist, goth, etc) and thus incorporated. Ben Watson, too, has noticed that "community" has come to mean "marketing category" in modern jargon.
Members of a demographic category are not in a position to revolt. "The proletariat" is not a product of the demographic-category machine. It's like an evil waste product that corrodes the system from the inside. At least potentially.
All citizens of an advanced capitalist state are socialised as consumers and citizens as well as workers. The mass media is used to socialise docile obedient and exploitable workers, and citizens who identify with "their" state, and at the same time wild, crazy and independent consumers. The marketing industries induce wants and needs which can only be satisfied by consumption, or to dress the psychic wounds left by alienation in the workplace. If your job sucks, you get to have retail therapy, or pay to be pampered by a service worker. One side of the apparatus says TERRORISE, the other BENEVOLISE, at the same time. This is what we call a contradiction.
Consuming a good or service is explicitly intended to fill psychic gaps. Consumers pay for the burying and disavowal of labour - not just the sign of people working, but the signs that their goods or services are brought to them by other human beings. The promise of the market economy is that workers are your own "personal slave", with no thought except your pleasure. This is what you get for your money (which is usually earned by *you* having to take your turn in the barrel, so to speak). As Zizek says - everyone knows this isn't literally true, but acts like it's true, and are angry and disappointed when the facade isn't kept up. Note also that in modern capitalism needs healthy, well-fed, educated and skilled workers, so it can't starve us, which means we've crawled up Maslow's hierarchy of needs a ways.
This is one of the reasons state capitalism fell over. Not faced with cutthroat competition, their propaganda apparatus fell way behind that of the bourgeois capitalist countries. The West looked desirable not because of freedom but because of consumer goods. (Of course, this wasn't just appearance - Western consumer goods *were* better, for all the reasons that Tony Cliff explained, plus in the 80's the growth of a true global market.)
Propaganda - both aimed at feelings of citizenship or consumerism - is increasingly filling the cap in the apparatus of social control and manufacturing consent that organised religion used to. Of course, there are "bottom up" ways that people fill these gaps - with subcultures, etc - but even those end up being harnessed to sell more products. Lawrence Miles is 100% correct that the biggest problem with modern consumer culture is that the arts of marketing have advanced to the point where demographic categories have a stranglehold over any mass media culture which gets released. A subculture which does not put itself in opposition to the system quickly becomes a demographic category (hippy, punk, sci-fi nerd, fetishist, goth, etc) and thus incorporated. Ben Watson, too, has noticed that "community" has come to mean "marketing category" in modern jargon.
Members of a demographic category are not in a position to revolt. "The proletariat" is not a product of the demographic-category machine. It's like an evil waste product that corrodes the system from the inside. At least potentially.
2007-07-06
You know me. Prepare to die.
Hmph. No saucers again?
Anyway, the big news is that this blog is about to be kickstarted into life with a series of guest contributions. I won't spoil the surprise of who or what just yet, but I will undertake to act as a bit of a "warm-up act", to make sure you're still watching.
Longtime readers may know that I am impressed by the work of the sci-fi author Lawrence Miles - although perhaps less because of his work (mindfuckingly good as it is in places), but because the kind of things he says in interviews and blogs come off as extremely similar to a lot of the basic ideas behind Chaos Marxism. Unfortunately the site which used to archive his interviews has fallen victim to a time paradox, but behold the magic of intarwebz necromancy! Have a good browse.
I want to point out one of the most interesting ideas that come out of his Faction Paradox mythos. In this mythos based around time travel, all of humanity's history is featured, from the australopithecines to the "post-human" civilisations that will exist after Earth and its sun are no more and beyond. In the entry from The Book of the War on "Humanity", Larry (I think it's him, anyway) explains that in this timeline, just about now, in the early 21st century, (the "Ghost Point" of human history), all human cultural progression stops, and then begins to go backward. At one level this is supposed to explain why science fiction futures always look like, as Douglas Adams puts it, "the present with faster cars and smellier air". But it's also a representation of how the dominant culture thinks. To quote Marx: for the bourgeoisie, history was something that used to happened but has now thankfully stopped, with the right people in charge. If anyone paid me for it, I could write a very interesting Marxist analysis of the place of the Time Lords in the Doctor Who and related mythoses.
In any case, Larry in his other articles rants and raves about what he sees as this closing down of human potential that he sees all around him in the stultification and conformity of the mass media. He's no Marxist - he's a consistent and principled left-liberal who has not become reconciled to the victory of neo-liberalism but can't see any way out of the predicament. I hear his later work This Town Will Never Let Us Go is an extended meditation on these themes, and I may have to write about it.
If Chaos Marxism has any real point, it is to make sure that the Ghost Point is not allowed to happen. Well, of course, it wouldn't, because (given current science and human nature) you could never have a static society, or even one which gradually fell to bits over a long period. The choices are still socialism or barbarism. To quote another, more naive Doctor Who spin-off, "The 21st century is where it all starts." Or, alternatively, stops.
A parting thought - the reason most of this isn't written down in book or academic article form yet is pretty much that I don't want to be one of those wankerish "Marxist cultural commentators" who make a living pointing out the class relations of the lifeboat crew as the Titanic is going down. When Chaos Marxism is presented in for-the-masses form, it will be as a how-to guide. "101 Things An Enterprising Cultural Revolutionary Can Do To Seriously Fuck Things Up, As Opposed To Creating A Niche Market So You Can Buy A Flash Hybrid Car", or something like that. I want this to be eminently practical, and I get frustrated that I haven't got results that would stand up to peer-reviewed scrutiny yet. But I am working on it.
Anyway, the big news is that this blog is about to be kickstarted into life with a series of guest contributions. I won't spoil the surprise of who or what just yet, but I will undertake to act as a bit of a "warm-up act", to make sure you're still watching.
Longtime readers may know that I am impressed by the work of the sci-fi author Lawrence Miles - although perhaps less because of his work (mindfuckingly good as it is in places), but because the kind of things he says in interviews and blogs come off as extremely similar to a lot of the basic ideas behind Chaos Marxism. Unfortunately the site which used to archive his interviews has fallen victim to a time paradox, but behold the magic of intarwebz necromancy! Have a good browse.
I want to point out one of the most interesting ideas that come out of his Faction Paradox mythos. In this mythos based around time travel, all of humanity's history is featured, from the australopithecines to the "post-human" civilisations that will exist after Earth and its sun are no more and beyond. In the entry from The Book of the War on "Humanity", Larry (I think it's him, anyway) explains that in this timeline, just about now, in the early 21st century, (the "Ghost Point" of human history), all human cultural progression stops, and then begins to go backward. At one level this is supposed to explain why science fiction futures always look like, as Douglas Adams puts it, "the present with faster cars and smellier air". But it's also a representation of how the dominant culture thinks. To quote Marx: for the bourgeoisie, history was something that used to happened but has now thankfully stopped, with the right people in charge. If anyone paid me for it, I could write a very interesting Marxist analysis of the place of the Time Lords in the Doctor Who and related mythoses.
In any case, Larry in his other articles rants and raves about what he sees as this closing down of human potential that he sees all around him in the stultification and conformity of the mass media. He's no Marxist - he's a consistent and principled left-liberal who has not become reconciled to the victory of neo-liberalism but can't see any way out of the predicament. I hear his later work This Town Will Never Let Us Go is an extended meditation on these themes, and I may have to write about it.
If Chaos Marxism has any real point, it is to make sure that the Ghost Point is not allowed to happen. Well, of course, it wouldn't, because (given current science and human nature) you could never have a static society, or even one which gradually fell to bits over a long period. The choices are still socialism or barbarism. To quote another, more naive Doctor Who spin-off, "The 21st century is where it all starts." Or, alternatively, stops.
A parting thought - the reason most of this isn't written down in book or academic article form yet is pretty much that I don't want to be one of those wankerish "Marxist cultural commentators" who make a living pointing out the class relations of the lifeboat crew as the Titanic is going down. When Chaos Marxism is presented in for-the-masses form, it will be as a how-to guide. "101 Things An Enterprising Cultural Revolutionary Can Do To Seriously Fuck Things Up, As Opposed To Creating A Niche Market So You Can Buy A Flash Hybrid Car", or something like that. I want this to be eminently practical, and I get frustrated that I haven't got results that would stand up to peer-reviewed scrutiny yet. But I am working on it.
2007-06-17
I miss you guys.
Doing practical stuff on the ground. Hopefully able to report on success/failure in a couple of weeks. A teaser - I am making experiments in pratically applying the ideas that I have been talking about to (a) political activism, (b) cultural marketing. If I screw this up, I make a laughing stock of myself either way, so I'm sure that will give the less friendly something to look forward to.
2007-05-17
Individual and collective
A kindly contributor to our comments alerts me to a shitfight on the Ultraculture mailing list, where one fellow decides to go off about how Voodoo is teh purest EB0L. Not wishing to get into this knee-deep primate shit-flinging contest, but one non-batshit participant ot that debate has this to say:
This reminds me very much of discussions with pettybourgeois individualists on how all political parties are by definition evil mind-control cults. If the Revolutionary Party is an egregore which aims to focus the power of a mass movement, then certainly by making yourself available to it you are also used by it. This requires you to make certain compromises with your freedom of speech and action, so as to synchronise with other consciousnesses to unify the forces (RIP RAW). Just as you would do in any ritual situation, naturally.
But the mere idea of this is of course anathema to the modern consumer consciousness, which declares that the isolated monadic individual is - self-evidently - the only real reality and only total and complete intellectual "independence" (i.e. isolation) is acceptable. But the catch is that "your only weapon is those you work with" (The Redskins, 1986). The isolated consumer-individual has absolutely zero power to do anything real - just to masturbate to a different set of images. The question is whether you want to be part of a world-changing endeavour and a vessel for power, or if you want to be a Beautiful Soul Unique Snowflake Pure Individual Just Like Everyone Else.
Not convinced that our culture promotes isolation, alienation and paranoia as not only an ideal, but the highest ideal? A common complaint in customer satisfaction reports is that some poor consumer's experience was ruined because they could hear the staff having conversations. They didn't pay good money to be reminded that real people are doing the work. They paid money for the privilege of voluntary isolation from other human beings - of being able to have a private experience in a public sphere. Think on that for a moment - that consumer culture promotes collective experiences, but only to the extent that any participation in them must be totally individualised and monadic.
Marx's utopian vision was one where the collective no longer contradicted the individual. Oh, we are so far away from that.
I develop meaningful, mutually beneficial
relationships with people and entities all the time. They use me and
I use them. My job uses me to write code. I use it to pay my bills.
My friends use me for support and discourse. I use them for the same.
It seems that you're isolating the lwa as "parasitic" simply because
you perceive that they do in fact make use of vodosanti's energy. To
steal castenada's phraseology, in "making yourself available to
power", you are also used by that power. it's not a
hoarding-all-of-this-is-mine process.
This reminds me very much of discussions with pettybourgeois individualists on how all political parties are by definition evil mind-control cults. If the Revolutionary Party is an egregore which aims to focus the power of a mass movement, then certainly by making yourself available to it you are also used by it. This requires you to make certain compromises with your freedom of speech and action, so as to synchronise with other consciousnesses to unify the forces (RIP RAW). Just as you would do in any ritual situation, naturally.
But the mere idea of this is of course anathema to the modern consumer consciousness, which declares that the isolated monadic individual is - self-evidently - the only real reality and only total and complete intellectual "independence" (i.e. isolation) is acceptable. But the catch is that "your only weapon is those you work with" (The Redskins, 1986). The isolated consumer-individual has absolutely zero power to do anything real - just to masturbate to a different set of images. The question is whether you want to be part of a world-changing endeavour and a vessel for power, or if you want to be a Beautiful Soul Unique Snowflake Pure Individual Just Like Everyone Else.
Not convinced that our culture promotes isolation, alienation and paranoia as not only an ideal, but the highest ideal? A common complaint in customer satisfaction reports is that some poor consumer's experience was ruined because they could hear the staff having conversations. They didn't pay good money to be reminded that real people are doing the work. They paid money for the privilege of voluntary isolation from other human beings - of being able to have a private experience in a public sphere. Think on that for a moment - that consumer culture promotes collective experiences, but only to the extent that any participation in them must be totally individualised and monadic.
Marx's utopian vision was one where the collective no longer contradicted the individual. Oh, we are so far away from that.
2007-05-15
For those who came in late...
Welcome to new readers - I am frankly surprised any time I say anything controversial enough to attract attention, let alone trolls. This is what Chaos Marxism is all about.
More on "Bob"
For a self described insane bogus religion, the published philosophy of the Church of the SubGenius is sometimes breathtakingly accurate. Perhaps because it is an actual, confused, attempt at explaining the world from the point of view of the "lumpen-creative class" - people who see themselves as creative artists but are temperamentally unsuited to "join the Conspiracy" (i.e. climb the ladder of corporate achievement) and thus generally have the choice between highly unreliable freelance work and a proletarian job. Chapter 9 in their most recent book, The SubGenius Psychlopaedia of Slack, is actually a confused but unmistakeable (and unintentional, I'm sure) recapitulation of the Marxist theory of alienation.
Slack in itself can be described as "the opposite of stress", but also "the opposite of alienation". It can mean hard work at something you enjoy and believe in, just as much as it can mean watching cartoons with a hamburger in one hand and a joint in the other. False Slack, on the other hand, is defined as "anything you can buy for money". Even spookier than that, pages 202-203 of this book - entitled "Art, Toolmaking and OCD" - is a quite scary recapitulation of this famous article by Frederich Engels.
In other words - the Conspiracy/ capitalism takes away what makes us human (the right to labour freely at what motivates us) and gives us in recompense nothing but money, which keeps us alive but corrodes that which makes us truly us. The fact that I'm pretty damn sure that Ivan Stang has never opened a Marxist document in genuine interest in his entire life makes this even spookier. But this is the same ranter who said "If they paid you what you were worth, they'd go broke".
The "event horizon" of SubGenius thought is, of course, their very pettybourgeois class position, which leads to totally pessimistic conclusions on the possibility of organising to overthrow "The Conspiracy", in the absence of intervention from our Space Brothers The Men From Planet X. The main point is that SubGeniuses aren't even supposed to get along, let alone work together - the alienated consciousness without the discipline of proletarian work habits turns to paranoid individualism to such an extent that it seems like the only natural form of human interaction.
So it boils down to: try to squeeze out whatever tiny crumbs of psychic nourishment you can get from the system, hang out with others of like mind when you can possibly stand them, and send more money to the Church so that Stang doesn't have to get a job and can keep amusing you. The SubGenius Must Have Slack" translates to "The Lumpen-Creative Must Break Free of Alienation". The problem is of course that Lúkacs was right, and the end of alienation only comes with the workers-council form of organisation - something that the typical "lone nut" SubGenius working on their art or their music or their writing in splendid if paranoid isolation just wouldn't be able to grok.
ETA: A friendly commenter to this post includes a link to Rev. Stang's response to my musings. Sickened, creeped out and offended. *shrug* I suppose you should never come into contact with your heroes.
Slack in itself can be described as "the opposite of stress", but also "the opposite of alienation". It can mean hard work at something you enjoy and believe in, just as much as it can mean watching cartoons with a hamburger in one hand and a joint in the other. False Slack, on the other hand, is defined as "anything you can buy for money". Even spookier than that, pages 202-203 of this book - entitled "Art, Toolmaking and OCD" - is a quite scary recapitulation of this famous article by Frederich Engels.
In other words - the Conspiracy/ capitalism takes away what makes us human (the right to labour freely at what motivates us) and gives us in recompense nothing but money, which keeps us alive but corrodes that which makes us truly us. The fact that I'm pretty damn sure that Ivan Stang has never opened a Marxist document in genuine interest in his entire life makes this even spookier. But this is the same ranter who said "If they paid you what you were worth, they'd go broke".
The "event horizon" of SubGenius thought is, of course, their very pettybourgeois class position, which leads to totally pessimistic conclusions on the possibility of organising to overthrow "The Conspiracy", in the absence of intervention from our Space Brothers The Men From Planet X. The main point is that SubGeniuses aren't even supposed to get along, let alone work together - the alienated consciousness without the discipline of proletarian work habits turns to paranoid individualism to such an extent that it seems like the only natural form of human interaction.
So it boils down to: try to squeeze out whatever tiny crumbs of psychic nourishment you can get from the system, hang out with others of like mind when you can possibly stand them, and send more money to the Church so that Stang doesn't have to get a job and can keep amusing you. The SubGenius Must Have Slack" translates to "The Lumpen-Creative Must Break Free of Alienation". The problem is of course that Lúkacs was right, and the end of alienation only comes with the workers-council form of organisation - something that the typical "lone nut" SubGenius working on their art or their music or their writing in splendid if paranoid isolation just wouldn't be able to grok.
ETA: A friendly commenter to this post includes a link to Rev. Stang's response to my musings. Sickened, creeped out and offended. *shrug* I suppose you should never come into contact with your heroes.
2007-05-09
"Bob" Works
Sherry: What's the strangest mystical experience you've had so far?
Ivan: They all had to do with failing In love with my sweetie. Those are the only real ones I can talk about. The other ones I'd rather not talk about because It would all just sound too-- you wouldn't even believe it. You wouldn't believe It If I even started.
Sherry: Ah, now that's not true.
Ivan: I'll leave that one for some very far future autobiography. I've experienced synchronicity In vast waterfalls. But, on the other hand, I did discover very early in the Church of the SubGenlus that If you Ignore those coincidences, they stop happening. They only happen If you're looking for them. When I first started working on the Church of the SubGenlus, for the first couple years, the level of sychronicities, apparent omens, and portents got so completely out of hand that I had to call a halt to It. I thought I was losing my mind. I thought, God damn It, I'm starting to make decisions based on superstitious omens and portents on something that I practically made up.
The Reverend Ivan Stang has a point there. Of course magic works - if you do it enough. As far as changing consciousness goes, anything works if you do it enough. Creating new habits, self-reprogramming, founding new traditions... this is how it's done.
I've talked elsewhere about the "paradigm shift" that happened 1999-2001; not because of anything metaphysical, but because of September 11 combined with Seattle combined with the dot-com crash, combined with the lack of the Y2K problem solving everyone's problems for them. (Although some diehard mystics seem to have just shifted the date till 2012.) In any case, the zeitgeist took a radical turn for the materialist/political around that time, which of course has been for good as well as for evil. Rev. Stang agrees:
I get a big kick out of speaking to pagan gatherings, New Agers and so forth, and basically working them up Into tears of concern and wonderment over the environment, and meanwhile sneaking In all this science and rationalist stuff. You might say we learned our lesson when those escape vessels didn't show up. And although we still believe that everybody should send their thirty dollars to "Bob" to play It safe, also, maybe we should learn how to build our own ships.
And that's actually been the thrust lately. It wasn't really a planned thrust. It came along afterwards, and I'm glad It did. But It's a great follow-up gimmick now. It's like, yeah, well, for now we've learned all we can about the little grey men from outer space and so forth. For the time being UFOIogy does seem to be a dog chasing It's own tall, and rife with buckets of self-delusion everywhere you look. Perhaps It might not be a bad Idea to maybe think about taking care of the spaceship that we're on already, using something besides prayer. You know, It's great for everybody to visualize world peace and pray and so forth, but when you talk about the hundredth monkey, you have to remember the hundredth Manson, or the hundredth Hitler. (laughter) All that other stuff.
Apologies for not posting more. Working on my music - practical magic, for me and hopefully for the audience.
2007-04-22
More on The Matrix
I sometimes wonder whether there really was a "Nineties". We know what the 80's were - big hair, shoulder pads, glorified selfishness, armageddon chic - as the MST3K crew put it, "do a lot of coke and vote for Ronald Reagan". The 70's were afros, disco, free love, punk, the oil crisis, things falling apart in general. And I don't need to explain what the 60's were, surely.
Dunno about the 90s in general, but we have a symbol of the late 90's in particular - The Matrix. I watched it last night for the first time in ages, and while still a lot of fun, it seemed quite dated in a way - not just because everyone has ripped off its most vital visual effects for crappy, third-rate action movies (and its gothic/industrial/vinyl aesthetic). I haven't thought about this in depth yet, but could we say that The Matrix is the ultimate movie of the era of Fukuyama's "end of history"; the era when new age "personal potential" belief systems were at their most popular; the high point of "liberal imperialism", where relaxed, laid-back dudes who appealed to the cultural intelligensia were doing the bombing (Clinton could invade places that Dubya would never dare); and of course the era of the dot-com bubble, when people really seemed to believe that The Internet - or the Y2K problem (remember that, anyone?) would fuck the shit up of our whole social system altogether.
(Is it possible that this disappointment of the cultural intelligensia's technoutopian/technoapocalyptic fantasies are behind the dismissive labels that young people use to describe their primary social outlet? I think the slightly sneering tone of labels like "teh intarwebz", "intertubes" or even "interbutt" are a reaction to the hushed and glorified tones that The Internet was described in back in the Matrix days. We now know that technology will not solve all our problems for us, or even give us a new set of problems. The problems of society are virtually the same that they were in 1973, when the current historical era began.)
Welcome to the Noughties. We are now in the era of 9/11, Islamophobia, the global anti-capitalism and anti-war movements, when we have been forcibly reminded that there is still an "outside" to globalised capitalism and its ideology, when internet technology has been subsumed into the dominant paradigm with only a marginal effect on the relations of productions. In retrospect, The Matrix seems a nostalgia trip - cute, but faintly embarrassing, as I supposed the hippy 60's looked from looking back from the fraught 70's.
Dunno about the 90s in general, but we have a symbol of the late 90's in particular - The Matrix. I watched it last night for the first time in ages, and while still a lot of fun, it seemed quite dated in a way - not just because everyone has ripped off its most vital visual effects for crappy, third-rate action movies (and its gothic/industrial/vinyl aesthetic). I haven't thought about this in depth yet, but could we say that The Matrix is the ultimate movie of the era of Fukuyama's "end of history"; the era when new age "personal potential" belief systems were at their most popular; the high point of "liberal imperialism", where relaxed, laid-back dudes who appealed to the cultural intelligensia were doing the bombing (Clinton could invade places that Dubya would never dare); and of course the era of the dot-com bubble, when people really seemed to believe that The Internet - or the Y2K problem (remember that, anyone?) would fuck the shit up of our whole social system altogether.
(Is it possible that this disappointment of the cultural intelligensia's technoutopian/technoapocalyptic fantasies are behind the dismissive labels that young people use to describe their primary social outlet? I think the slightly sneering tone of labels like "teh intarwebz", "intertubes" or even "interbutt" are a reaction to the hushed and glorified tones that The Internet was described in back in the Matrix days. We now know that technology will not solve all our problems for us, or even give us a new set of problems. The problems of society are virtually the same that they were in 1973, when the current historical era began.)
Welcome to the Noughties. We are now in the era of 9/11, Islamophobia, the global anti-capitalism and anti-war movements, when we have been forcibly reminded that there is still an "outside" to globalised capitalism and its ideology, when internet technology has been subsumed into the dominant paradigm with only a marginal effect on the relations of productions. In retrospect, The Matrix seems a nostalgia trip - cute, but faintly embarrassing, as I supposed the hippy 60's looked from looking back from the fraught 70's.
2007-04-11
Some disconnected, vital thoughts
The motif of harmful sensation - in other words, the belief that "memes" have an independent existence and spread like viruses - is on one hand another self-comforting masturbatory fantasy of the people who create memes. ("Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of mankind"? No disrespect to the Romantics, but only a poet could have thought that one up.) Workers and professionals in the intellectual/creative industries love to buy consumption goods which spread the message that "dreams shape the world", that "stories can change people's minds like magic", that all the world will dance to your tune if you figure out the magic word. Funny, that. A good marketing decision by Messers Gaiman, Stephenson and Pratchett - flatter your audience that they themselves are at least potentially kick-ass magic users.
On the other hand it's a kind of a distorted mirror of the way ideology actually spreads. It becomes plausible if you can cause yourself not to see the real social factors which determine which "memes" survive and which don't - that is, if you are a cultural "Wizard of Oz" determined to pay not attention to the force of Capital behind the curtain.
A hard law of the dialectic is that blind idealism always has a dirty materialist secret running in the background (and vice versa: Stalinism is the mirror image of this). If you seriously believe that "culture" is something which exists independently of material/economic realities, then it becomes easy to believe that North American and European capital dominates the world because of "our culture". (Although I wonder how these people explain China or Japan.) And it's a short step from there to seeing "alien cultures" as the enemy - which leads directly to "liberal imperialism". If you have decided that people are psychologically or culturally "sick" because, for example, they get offended by racist caricatures of their major religious figures, then it's all too easy to turn a blind eye when people with the right "culture" bomb the crap out of them and steal their oil. These people are like children and cannot be trusted with wealth or sovereignty.
The social liberalism of the new middle classes is also liberal imperialism - it consists of making up cultural excuses for acts of brutality carried out for the sheer naked greed of capital accumulation. Once again, imaginary solutions to real problems. The class position of the new middle class - their belief that symbols, language and "memes" are what is truly important - leads to their complete inability to defend people who are really up at the sharp end of neoliberalism and mass murder. They know deep down that their privileged position selling images and narratives depends on the exploitation and oppression which makes "manufacturing consent" necessary. The academic/publishing/artistic/infotech circles of this world are increasingly talking themselves directly into the Green Zone in Baghdad.
On the other hand it's a kind of a distorted mirror of the way ideology actually spreads. It becomes plausible if you can cause yourself not to see the real social factors which determine which "memes" survive and which don't - that is, if you are a cultural "Wizard of Oz" determined to pay not attention to the force of Capital behind the curtain.
A hard law of the dialectic is that blind idealism always has a dirty materialist secret running in the background (and vice versa: Stalinism is the mirror image of this). If you seriously believe that "culture" is something which exists independently of material/economic realities, then it becomes easy to believe that North American and European capital dominates the world because of "our culture". (Although I wonder how these people explain China or Japan.) And it's a short step from there to seeing "alien cultures" as the enemy - which leads directly to "liberal imperialism". If you have decided that people are psychologically or culturally "sick" because, for example, they get offended by racist caricatures of their major religious figures, then it's all too easy to turn a blind eye when people with the right "culture" bomb the crap out of them and steal their oil. These people are like children and cannot be trusted with wealth or sovereignty.
The social liberalism of the new middle classes is also liberal imperialism - it consists of making up cultural excuses for acts of brutality carried out for the sheer naked greed of capital accumulation. Once again, imaginary solutions to real problems. The class position of the new middle class - their belief that symbols, language and "memes" are what is truly important - leads to their complete inability to defend people who are really up at the sharp end of neoliberalism and mass murder. They know deep down that their privileged position selling images and narratives depends on the exploitation and oppression which makes "manufacturing consent" necessary. The academic/publishing/artistic/infotech circles of this world are increasingly talking themselves directly into the Green Zone in Baghdad.
2007-03-31
There's a reason that pill was RED
It's an observation made several times that The Matrix can be seen as a very Marxist movie. The basic idea: there is a vast system which relies on exploiting us for its fuel. It creates an illusion of reality that encourages its victims, not only not to fight it, but not to even see that it's there. (To misquote C S Lewis: "Capitalism's greatest triumph was convincing the world that it didn't exist" - or that it was the same thing as nature.) And, of course, that there could be a small but bad-ass organisation of people who have broken free and are determined to break everyone else free too. I actually own a vinyl dress and have been called "Trinity" on occasion.
And then there's this fellow. Now, to see where I think he's going wrong, remember what the Marxist definition of ideology is - "an imaginary solution to a real problem". Because on one hand, Mr Draven has certainly got a hell of a lot right:
But here is where the ideology kicks in. The dude mistakes the map for the territory. He is seriously attempting to live in the metaphor. And - crucially - this has led him away from making revolutionary change in order to promote a religion - a kind of private "opting out" of what he sees as the Construct:
This fellow has all the passion that could have made him a great revolutionary. But his central mistake is one of his basic axioms:
In a word, bullshit. Tattoo the very opposite on the inside of your eyelids. Once you accept that - an idealist, rather than a materialist analysis - you are no longer a threat to the system. You are lost inside your own head and can only build a castle in the air which has nothing to do with the real world. Just because you might persuade other people to live in that castle doesn't mean diddly-squat. You could have changed the world and instead you just invented a new painkiller. To make people happier in their slavery rather than to help liberate them. To offer escapism instead of escape. Way to go, Neo.
And then there's this fellow. Now, to see where I think he's going wrong, remember what the Marxist definition of ideology is - "an imaginary solution to a real problem". Because on one hand, Mr Draven has certainly got a hell of a lot right:
The Matrix, here, IS real: but here, it is the societal construct that in fact creates, maintains, and controls the collective 'reality', and forces people to accept their own limitations.
But here is where the ideology kicks in. The dude mistakes the map for the territory. He is seriously attempting to live in the metaphor. And - crucially - this has led him away from making revolutionary change in order to promote a religion - a kind of private "opting out" of what he sees as the Construct:
The point - there or here - was never, ever to destroy the Matrix. To destroy the System. I wish, wish, wish that people would see that, hear me say that so desperately, before they go forward and judge my words based on the PC[films]... even Morpheus was wrong... God forgive me for saying so again. "As long as the Matrix exists, the human race will never be free..." No. Wrong. The Matrix, the Construct, the System, is not evil. Blowing up the prison isn't the point. They'll just find another one, as they must. And even within its walls and its bars - as within its pods and programs - the System sustains life for those who cannot live without it.
Opening the door, showing those who want to see the sky that they certainly can, if only they look this way, shed their fear... giving them the choice to make that decision, to define their reality, for themselves, and letting the System CHANGE AS IT MUST as more and more of them realize that the door's not locked after all...
This fellow has all the passion that could have made him a great revolutionary. But his central mistake is one of his basic axioms:
Reality is subjective, not collective.
In a word, bullshit. Tattoo the very opposite on the inside of your eyelids. Once you accept that - an idealist, rather than a materialist analysis - you are no longer a threat to the system. You are lost inside your own head and can only build a castle in the air which has nothing to do with the real world. Just because you might persuade other people to live in that castle doesn't mean diddly-squat. You could have changed the world and instead you just invented a new painkiller. To make people happier in their slavery rather than to help liberate them. To offer escapism instead of escape. Way to go, Neo.
2007-03-18
Why Corporate Memetics works (a 50th post special)
People buy or otherwise consume things because they meet some kind of "use value" - either they fulfill a physical need or desire, or some kind of psychic need/desire. The latter consists - crudely - in making someone feel better about their life, their place in the world, their identity. The two are not distinct, of course - if you have enough physical goods you are less likely to need psychic goods. What kind of psychic goods you need depends on what kind of dependencies were induced in you by your formative experiences. Some things - like sex - are "a little from column A, a little from column B".
Marxists see ideology as "an imaginary solution to a real problem" - a psychic good (or "meme") which compensates for the lack of another psychic or physical good. Marxists see the capitalist system as automatically creating "alienation" - a kind of negative psychic good. We base this on the idea that being able to change your world through your own efforts is part of being human, and that's precisely what isn't allowed under capitalism.
In late capitalism, as the conditions of semi-permanent slump continue, the general level of physical value (goods and services) that it's possible to distribute to the workers stagnates or even falls. Real wages in the US are less than they were 30 years ago, for example. Therefore the consumer engine must continually produce more ideological value to make up for it, or else the system will lose the consent of the masses. The gap in the cupboards must be filled with a feeling of security, of superiority, or of involvement in another world where things are better. (These other worlds can be religious, or fictional, or even geo-political.) Less bread means more circuses. Identity is part of what they create and attempt to sell.
The New Middle Class are those employed to smooth out the frictions between capital and labour. A very few are those who physically maintain order in behaviour and in the distribution of goods and services. A major section are technicians and administrators - the people who count the beans, the people who draw up the blueprints and the labour plans, the people who create and distribute the information which relates to some objective reality.
But the section I am interested in are the type who interpret and manipulate subjective reality. These are the people who create ideological goods and market them successfully, who fill the psychic and physical gaps created by the exploitative relationship at the basis of capitalism. They know they've won when the product sells better, or the single hits #1 in the charts, or the candidate wins, or the meme spreads, or people join the new religion. They create ideological goods which can be sold as products in themselves, or can be used to "package" physical goods. People go to a movie or buy a CD for - essentially - the same reason they buy something or vote for someone marketed by a particular campaign. It tickles some psychic need - which often makes up for their feelings of alienation, or even their lacks in a physical area. A variation of this is creating a negative psychic good (eg "terrorism"), and associating it with some kind of action which they want to discourage.
But it also includes management and bureaucracy. These fields are concerned with encouraging consent to the process of exploitative labour by selling the psychic good labelled "being a valued member of the team". Generally, the more psychic validation is handed out the nastier the actual financial and other concrete benefits of the job are. This is how volunteer organisations of all kinds work - and it's visible in, say, the really nasty conditions of labour in software or animation firms where "a cool company culture" makes up for insane long hours and no benefits. At a lower level, this is why Starbucks calls its frontline wageslaves "partners" rather than employees.
This section of the New Middle Class are paid - usually very well - from the surplus of labour exploitation to create the psychic goods that keep all of society content or at least channels their resentment into harmless areas. Not just the workers - the ruling class need to consume ideologies which tell them that they deserve to be where they are and it's right to do what they do. All marketing and mass-media consumption goods can be described as Corporate Memetics - especially mainstream, institutional religion (as opposed to "subversive religion").
Management and politics consist partly of Corporate Memetics, and partly of "brute force" - offering or withdrawing goods, services or money, threatening to fire you, put you in jail or the loony bin, etc. Gramsci realised that the reason the revolution succeeded in Russia is that the State there knew only brute force - and that Corporate Memetics were what would have to be defeated in the West.
It is well known that modern governments and employers lie much more than those of thirty or forty years ago. They have to. They can't afford to hand out carrots and they don't dare use the stick too much. So they have to invent very convincing imaginary carrots, and cross their fingers that the masses don't catch wise in time.
Our goal of creating a new society will be to create a world where not only will every human's real physical needs and desires be fulfilled, but alienation will be abolished and there will no longer be that yearning lack at the basis of the human spirit which needs to be filled by consuming psychic goods - or, at least, everyone will be producers as well as consumers of such memes. Marx described this as "the abolition of the distinction between mental and physical labour".
But here and now, our only antidote to the ideology sold to us by Corporate Memetics is to create and promote an ideology of struggle, of becoming fully human, of building not only communities but teams or combat formations which can actually accomplish something to change the world. It's not enough to expose the fact that our enemies are lying - people will continue to believe in lies when they have a physical or psychic need that can't be assuaged otherwise. Orwell called this doublethink.
We need to build a culture of struggle. But this cannot be allowed to turn into a sneering Mandarin dismissal of corporate popular culture, any more than it can be allowed to turn into an atheist-snob dismissal of religion. Pop culture is the modern religion, and the New Middle Class are the modern priests. The heart of a heartless world, the soul of a soulless condition, the painkiller of the masses. You can't take someone's trash-TV or girly magazines away from them any more than you can take away their God or their seasonal observances. But we can attempt to reclaim them for our side. All this corporate bullshit - however much we might hate it - sells because it assuages a psychic need. Until we have our own, revolutionary psychic goods that can do that for a mass audience, we have to learn how to include popular culture in our own strategies.
I'm sorry to have to say this, but this means that we have to find some way to use Britney Spears and reality TV for our side. We could perhaps start by trying to decide how much of celebrity culture is actually "sneering at celebrity idiocies" culture - "ha ha, that person might be a zillion times richer and more beautiful than me but they're a total fuck-up". Perhaps it subverts itself and we need only figure out how to use that.
Now, I'm not usually one who supports the idea of "how we fight now determines what the new world will look like" - that's like saying that you need a beautiful, artistic chisel to sculpt Michelangelo's David. It lends itself to pacifist and lifestylist conclusions. But certainly, an organisation which aims to destroy alienation, can start by destroying the division between mental and manual labour in its own ranks - by encouraging all members to get involved in producing not only plans, not only ideology, but the cultural artifacts of struggle.
Marxists see ideology as "an imaginary solution to a real problem" - a psychic good (or "meme") which compensates for the lack of another psychic or physical good. Marxists see the capitalist system as automatically creating "alienation" - a kind of negative psychic good. We base this on the idea that being able to change your world through your own efforts is part of being human, and that's precisely what isn't allowed under capitalism.
In late capitalism, as the conditions of semi-permanent slump continue, the general level of physical value (goods and services) that it's possible to distribute to the workers stagnates or even falls. Real wages in the US are less than they were 30 years ago, for example. Therefore the consumer engine must continually produce more ideological value to make up for it, or else the system will lose the consent of the masses. The gap in the cupboards must be filled with a feeling of security, of superiority, or of involvement in another world where things are better. (These other worlds can be religious, or fictional, or even geo-political.) Less bread means more circuses. Identity is part of what they create and attempt to sell.
The New Middle Class are those employed to smooth out the frictions between capital and labour. A very few are those who physically maintain order in behaviour and in the distribution of goods and services. A major section are technicians and administrators - the people who count the beans, the people who draw up the blueprints and the labour plans, the people who create and distribute the information which relates to some objective reality.
But the section I am interested in are the type who interpret and manipulate subjective reality. These are the people who create ideological goods and market them successfully, who fill the psychic and physical gaps created by the exploitative relationship at the basis of capitalism. They know they've won when the product sells better, or the single hits #1 in the charts, or the candidate wins, or the meme spreads, or people join the new religion. They create ideological goods which can be sold as products in themselves, or can be used to "package" physical goods. People go to a movie or buy a CD for - essentially - the same reason they buy something or vote for someone marketed by a particular campaign. It tickles some psychic need - which often makes up for their feelings of alienation, or even their lacks in a physical area. A variation of this is creating a negative psychic good (eg "terrorism"), and associating it with some kind of action which they want to discourage.
But it also includes management and bureaucracy. These fields are concerned with encouraging consent to the process of exploitative labour by selling the psychic good labelled "being a valued member of the team". Generally, the more psychic validation is handed out the nastier the actual financial and other concrete benefits of the job are. This is how volunteer organisations of all kinds work - and it's visible in, say, the really nasty conditions of labour in software or animation firms where "a cool company culture" makes up for insane long hours and no benefits. At a lower level, this is why Starbucks calls its frontline wageslaves "partners" rather than employees.
This section of the New Middle Class are paid - usually very well - from the surplus of labour exploitation to create the psychic goods that keep all of society content or at least channels their resentment into harmless areas. Not just the workers - the ruling class need to consume ideologies which tell them that they deserve to be where they are and it's right to do what they do. All marketing and mass-media consumption goods can be described as Corporate Memetics - especially mainstream, institutional religion (as opposed to "subversive religion").
Management and politics consist partly of Corporate Memetics, and partly of "brute force" - offering or withdrawing goods, services or money, threatening to fire you, put you in jail or the loony bin, etc. Gramsci realised that the reason the revolution succeeded in Russia is that the State there knew only brute force - and that Corporate Memetics were what would have to be defeated in the West.
It is well known that modern governments and employers lie much more than those of thirty or forty years ago. They have to. They can't afford to hand out carrots and they don't dare use the stick too much. So they have to invent very convincing imaginary carrots, and cross their fingers that the masses don't catch wise in time.
Our goal of creating a new society will be to create a world where not only will every human's real physical needs and desires be fulfilled, but alienation will be abolished and there will no longer be that yearning lack at the basis of the human spirit which needs to be filled by consuming psychic goods - or, at least, everyone will be producers as well as consumers of such memes. Marx described this as "the abolition of the distinction between mental and physical labour".
But here and now, our only antidote to the ideology sold to us by Corporate Memetics is to create and promote an ideology of struggle, of becoming fully human, of building not only communities but teams or combat formations which can actually accomplish something to change the world. It's not enough to expose the fact that our enemies are lying - people will continue to believe in lies when they have a physical or psychic need that can't be assuaged otherwise. Orwell called this doublethink.
We need to build a culture of struggle. But this cannot be allowed to turn into a sneering Mandarin dismissal of corporate popular culture, any more than it can be allowed to turn into an atheist-snob dismissal of religion. Pop culture is the modern religion, and the New Middle Class are the modern priests. The heart of a heartless world, the soul of a soulless condition, the painkiller of the masses. You can't take someone's trash-TV or girly magazines away from them any more than you can take away their God or their seasonal observances. But we can attempt to reclaim them for our side. All this corporate bullshit - however much we might hate it - sells because it assuages a psychic need. Until we have our own, revolutionary psychic goods that can do that for a mass audience, we have to learn how to include popular culture in our own strategies.
I'm sorry to have to say this, but this means that we have to find some way to use Britney Spears and reality TV for our side. We could perhaps start by trying to decide how much of celebrity culture is actually "sneering at celebrity idiocies" culture - "ha ha, that person might be a zillion times richer and more beautiful than me but they're a total fuck-up". Perhaps it subverts itself and we need only figure out how to use that.
Now, I'm not usually one who supports the idea of "how we fight now determines what the new world will look like" - that's like saying that you need a beautiful, artistic chisel to sculpt Michelangelo's David. It lends itself to pacifist and lifestylist conclusions. But certainly, an organisation which aims to destroy alienation, can start by destroying the division between mental and manual labour in its own ranks - by encouraging all members to get involved in producing not only plans, not only ideology, but the cultural artifacts of struggle.
2007-03-10
Old Possum on the tactics of magick
Eliot's poetry is not a question of meaning in the first place. The meaning of a poem for Eliot was a fairly trifling matter. It was, he once remarked, like the piece of meat which the burglar throws to the guard dog to keep him occupied. In true symbolist fashion, Eliot was interested in what a poem did, not in what it said—in the resonance of the signifier, the echoes of its archetypes, the ghostly associations haunting its grains and textures, the stealthy, subliminal workings of its unconscious. Meaning was for the birds, or perhaps for the petit bourgeoisie. Eliot was a primitivist as well as a sophisticate, a writer who made guerrilla raids on the collective unconscious. For all his intellectualism, he was averse to rationality. Meaning in his poetry is like the mysterious figure who walks beside you in The Waste Land, vanishing when you look at it straight. When Raine enquires of a couple of lines in one of Eliot's poems whether we are supposed to be in a brothel, the only answer which would be true to Eliot's own aesthetic is that we are in a poem.
Emphasis added. Terry Eagleton, a Marxist critic, points out correctly that a poem - like a person - is what it does, not the ideas that it contains. It is a material thing, a collection of phonetic, phonemic, semantic and semiotic signals that produces an ideological as well as biochemical effect on the human consciousness.
Is it very wrong for a Marxist to love a reactionary like Eliot? As Eagleton points out in the above review, it could have been worse. He could have been his mate Idaho Ez and actually ended up snorkelling fascist sausage.
2007-03-04
Proles and animals are free
George Orwell's political satire Nineteen Eighty-Four is rightly lauded as a brilliant skewering of Stalinism and Fascism in particular and all administrative/bureaucratic power systems in general. But as Randall said in Clerks, I never noticed something about it until now.
All the horror in the novel - continual and total surveillance, witchhunting of thought criminals, etc - only happens to the middle class. The "Outer Party", what we would call today the people with jobs in information and marketing, are the ones continually terrorised. The ruling class - the Inner Party - are allowed to turn their home telescreens off. And no-one gives a crap about what the overwhelming majority of the citizens of Oceania - the working class, the "proles" - think or do. The Party considers it impossible that the proles could ever revolt on their own - so as long as they prevent any potential rebellion within their own ranks, everything should be sweet.
There's more to this, of course. When our hero Winston Smith goes into the proletarian part of town to try to find someone who can remember what things were like before the Party took over. The old guy he talks to honestly doesn't seem to notice any difference. You can't get beer in pint jugs any more, and top hats seem to have gone out of fashion, but apart from that... Winston assumes that the old man is senile and confused, but perhaps there really is no difference between life under Big Brother and life under capitalist democracy, for the proles.
Noam Chomsky apparently said that it's always the middle-class intellectuals who fall easiest for propaganda. Perhaps our own rulers think like Orwell's big brother - that the solution is to keep the middle-class sweet and then they won't need to worry about anything, because proles can't think for themselves. Under globalised competitive capitalism, of course, this entails far more carrot and far less stick than in Orwell's vision. But these people really seem to think that if they keep the 25% of the population who create ideology and media in shiny cars, designer salads and broadband internet then the majority won't even be able to think of rebelling.
And then they wonder why in the "less economically favoured" areas every major city in the world there is a continual slow-motion riot in the form of steadily increasing levels of crime against person and property, often exacerbated by the trade in illegal drugs and the occasional hostile meme such as racism or homophobia. You just can't keep this shit in the Third World or the domestic third world known as "the suburbs where nice people don't go". It ends up crawling into the downtown areas and the leafy suburbs, in the form of panhandling, burglary, etc. As Maurice Gee said, there are not two worlds with a bridge between. There is only one world.
Crime, properly understood, is a spontaneous inchoate rebellion against the economic deprivation, alienation and polluted infosphere in which the majority of us live. Another thing our rulers perhaps haven't thought about is that if they insist on enriching themselves too much, some of the "creative class" are going to drop off the bottom end of the scale and find themselves becoming proles themselves. When people trained in theory get into contact with masses of people itching for practice, that's when you get serious mass movements. Big Brother might have just lost control of the Outer Party.
All the horror in the novel - continual and total surveillance, witchhunting of thought criminals, etc - only happens to the middle class. The "Outer Party", what we would call today the people with jobs in information and marketing, are the ones continually terrorised. The ruling class - the Inner Party - are allowed to turn their home telescreens off. And no-one gives a crap about what the overwhelming majority of the citizens of Oceania - the working class, the "proles" - think or do. The Party considers it impossible that the proles could ever revolt on their own - so as long as they prevent any potential rebellion within their own ranks, everything should be sweet.
There's more to this, of course. When our hero Winston Smith goes into the proletarian part of town to try to find someone who can remember what things were like before the Party took over. The old guy he talks to honestly doesn't seem to notice any difference. You can't get beer in pint jugs any more, and top hats seem to have gone out of fashion, but apart from that... Winston assumes that the old man is senile and confused, but perhaps there really is no difference between life under Big Brother and life under capitalist democracy, for the proles.
Noam Chomsky apparently said that it's always the middle-class intellectuals who fall easiest for propaganda. Perhaps our own rulers think like Orwell's big brother - that the solution is to keep the middle-class sweet and then they won't need to worry about anything, because proles can't think for themselves. Under globalised competitive capitalism, of course, this entails far more carrot and far less stick than in Orwell's vision. But these people really seem to think that if they keep the 25% of the population who create ideology and media in shiny cars, designer salads and broadband internet then the majority won't even be able to think of rebelling.
And then they wonder why in the "less economically favoured" areas every major city in the world there is a continual slow-motion riot in the form of steadily increasing levels of crime against person and property, often exacerbated by the trade in illegal drugs and the occasional hostile meme such as racism or homophobia. You just can't keep this shit in the Third World or the domestic third world known as "the suburbs where nice people don't go". It ends up crawling into the downtown areas and the leafy suburbs, in the form of panhandling, burglary, etc. As Maurice Gee said, there are not two worlds with a bridge between. There is only one world.
Crime, properly understood, is a spontaneous inchoate rebellion against the economic deprivation, alienation and polluted infosphere in which the majority of us live. Another thing our rulers perhaps haven't thought about is that if they insist on enriching themselves too much, some of the "creative class" are going to drop off the bottom end of the scale and find themselves becoming proles themselves. When people trained in theory get into contact with masses of people itching for practice, that's when you get serious mass movements. Big Brother might have just lost control of the Outer Party.
2007-02-27
The Enemy Is Lifestylism
Sage Kiesel, in a comment posted to the previous entry, suggests that even the most batshit (Scieno or otakukin) universes are "plausible and existent, even though they are not practical". Probably true, although Chaos Marxism is interested in practicality above all.
But we assert strongly that diversion of consciousness into impractical reality tunnels is one of the prime means by which the Corporate Egregore maintains its power. Of course it's easier and more fun to live in an alternative universe where it doesn't exist. Until of course you have to go to a horrible job, or deal with other people who live in a less pleasant universe - or until the ecosystem goes belly-up and we're all underwater or breathing brown goop instead of air. Which is still reality for 99% of people, even in the advanced industrial capitalist nations.
I have therefore great contempt for any reality tunnel which has the same political/magickal effect of an ostrich hiding its head in the sand, or a child putting its head under the blankets. Encouraging people to adopt "lifestyles" or - more pretentiously - "personal paths" which lead them away from engagement with consensus reality is not only a good way to demobilise any possibly dangerous rebellion, but also a good way to create more markets to sell people mindless crap. (Walk into any magic or New Age shop and see how much overpriced crap there is for sale and you see what I mean).
The really awful thing is it's not just religion, magic, or sci-fi fandom which has gotten to this point - it's politics. So many people aren't anarchists, socialists, libertarians or even conservatives because they want to be part of a political project to change consensus reality. They want a an alternative reality-space where they can hide from that reality. You can see this most effectively with conservatism because they have the most money. There are entire industries (and projects - "Conservapedia", for fuck's sake?) which aim to make sure that conservatives never have to deal with outside reality. It reminds me of a Ken MacLeod novel where they sold Christians telescopes doctored to make it look like the universe was geocentric.
But exactly the same with the small-group psychosis associated with so-called revolutionary left political projects. Far too many of them end up as cliques or clubs or internet forums full of people who only want to talk to people already like them, continually performing the rituals which make them feel like they are the Chosen Ones - whether this be "direct action", "making and selling the revolutionary paper", etc etc etc. These people too are being sold a lifestyle by the corporate egregore - and thus making themselves completely and utterly harmless.
(One of the most annoying things about "lifestyle politics", as an aside, is that you can no longer have a political debate. If someone's politics are their identity, then you can't argue with a conservative or an anarchist any more than you could argue with a committed Christian or a supporter of Glasgow Celtic. Of course, debate is an intersubjective phenomenon which requires communications between different realities - exactly what they don't want.)
Unless someone somehow creates a "lifestyle option" where we can avoid the physical reality of world capitalism, the necessity to work horrible jobs to survive and the steady collapse of planetary ecology - i.e. getting off the planet altogether and leaving the simpering humans to choke on their own filth - lifestylism is the enemy. And I don't think I'd take that option anyway.
But we assert strongly that diversion of consciousness into impractical reality tunnels is one of the prime means by which the Corporate Egregore maintains its power. Of course it's easier and more fun to live in an alternative universe where it doesn't exist. Until of course you have to go to a horrible job, or deal with other people who live in a less pleasant universe - or until the ecosystem goes belly-up and we're all underwater or breathing brown goop instead of air. Which is still reality for 99% of people, even in the advanced industrial capitalist nations.
I have therefore great contempt for any reality tunnel which has the same political/magickal effect of an ostrich hiding its head in the sand, or a child putting its head under the blankets. Encouraging people to adopt "lifestyles" or - more pretentiously - "personal paths" which lead them away from engagement with consensus reality is not only a good way to demobilise any possibly dangerous rebellion, but also a good way to create more markets to sell people mindless crap. (Walk into any magic or New Age shop and see how much overpriced crap there is for sale and you see what I mean).
The really awful thing is it's not just religion, magic, or sci-fi fandom which has gotten to this point - it's politics. So many people aren't anarchists, socialists, libertarians or even conservatives because they want to be part of a political project to change consensus reality. They want a an alternative reality-space where they can hide from that reality. You can see this most effectively with conservatism because they have the most money. There are entire industries (and projects - "Conservapedia", for fuck's sake?) which aim to make sure that conservatives never have to deal with outside reality. It reminds me of a Ken MacLeod novel where they sold Christians telescopes doctored to make it look like the universe was geocentric.
But exactly the same with the small-group psychosis associated with so-called revolutionary left political projects. Far too many of them end up as cliques or clubs or internet forums full of people who only want to talk to people already like them, continually performing the rituals which make them feel like they are the Chosen Ones - whether this be "direct action", "making and selling the revolutionary paper", etc etc etc. These people too are being sold a lifestyle by the corporate egregore - and thus making themselves completely and utterly harmless.
(One of the most annoying things about "lifestyle politics", as an aside, is that you can no longer have a political debate. If someone's politics are their identity, then you can't argue with a conservative or an anarchist any more than you could argue with a committed Christian or a supporter of Glasgow Celtic. Of course, debate is an intersubjective phenomenon which requires communications between different realities - exactly what they don't want.)
Unless someone somehow creates a "lifestyle option" where we can avoid the physical reality of world capitalism, the necessity to work horrible jobs to survive and the steady collapse of planetary ecology - i.e. getting off the planet altogether and leaving the simpering humans to choke on their own filth - lifestylism is the enemy. And I don't think I'd take that option anyway.
2007-02-19
Essay contest!
1. Read what I wrote below about Scientology basically being people programming themselves to believe that bugfuck crazy things they see in their heads are real.
2. Read this article on the subject of otakukin.
3. Compare and contrast, noting that I am not the first person to make this comparison.
===
What does this teach us? My personal thoughts:
- People will believe any insanity if it allows them to belong to a real or imagined community. (Which ties us into the broader question of abusive relationships.)
- The mass media fill the gap in the late-capitalist cultural psyche which would have been filled by oral folktales and organised religion in previous historical eras.
2. Read this article on the subject of otakukin.
3. Compare and contrast, noting that I am not the first person to make this comparison.
===
What does this teach us? My personal thoughts:
- People will believe any insanity if it allows them to belong to a real or imagined community. (Which ties us into the broader question of abusive relationships.)
- The mass media fill the gap in the late-capitalist cultural psyche which would have been filled by oral folktales and organised religion in previous historical eras.
2007-02-15
Remember this phrase
You seem to think that a television show's propaganda function works like an essay - as if, it can't be racist if it has some nice Muslim characters, or occasionally could give the impression that war might be a bad thing. It is as if the argument works through explicit didactic steps, rather than through a barrage of constant mutually reinforcing impressions.
Emphasis added. The esteemed comrade Richard S. in a comments thread at the Tomb.
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