¡Ché! - a Chaos Marxist "how to" guide

Sometimes I despair a bit about whether what I am writing here will ever bear fruit. But today our friends at the BBC took a look at how the cult of Blessed St Ernesto the Motorcyclist got started, and Dobbsdammit if my intuitions weren't right on the money. Judge for yourself:

"Che Guevara has become a brand. And the brand's logo is the image, which represents change. It has becomes the icon of the outside thinker, at whatever level - whether it is anti-war, pro-green or anti-globalisation"...

The unchecked proliferation of the picture - based on a photograph by Alberto Korda in 1960 - is partly due to a political choice by Korda and others not to demand payment for non-commercial use of the image...

"I deliberately designed it to breed like rabbits... The way they killed him, there was to be no memorial, no place of pilgrimage, nothing. I was determined that the image should receive the broadest possible circulation. His image will never die, his name will never die."...

After Che Guevara's death, an outraged Mr Fitzpatrick furiously reprinted originals of the poster and sent it to left-wing political activist groups across Europe...

"His death was followed by demonstrations, first in Milan and then elsewhere. Very soon afterwards there was the Prague Spring and May '68 in France. Europe was in turmoil. People wanted change, disruption and rebellion and he became a symbol of that change."...

"There is a theory that an image can only exist for a certain amount of time before capitalism appropriates it. But capitalism only wants to appropriate images if they retain some sense of dange..."

Combining capitalism and commerce, religion and revolution, the icon remains unchallenged.

Compare the above with the intuitions I put on this blog back in January:

• 1. Make your memes open-ended in possible meaning. It's sheer death to a meme to attempt to control how it spreads. If at least some people aren't misusing it or misinterpreting it - if, indeed, it's not being subjected to the merciless application of Rule 34 by /b/tards and their ilk - it doesn't have real power. If you make the meaning plain on the surface - meaning that it has to pass a "conscious mind" filter first - its usefulness will be restricted to people who already agree with you. The fact that capitalist pigs use Ché for advertising is a tribute to his power, as the lady quoted above says. To give another counterexample, mass movements start to suck when the founders start insisting on the right to "bounce" their fanbase - followers of the career of Andrew Eldritch will know what I mean.


• 2. Leave it noncommercial for as long as possible. Make it a signal that can't be stopped. Are you in this to change the culture or to make a living? Choose, but choose wisely.


• 3. Invoke often. You can't get this going until you put in the work yourself. Memes don't spread by themselves - you have to get the damn thing out there, not just make it available and assume that people will find it as if by (heh) magic.


I would like to add a fourth to this list:


• 4. A meme needs an environment to grow in. You need to have a receptive audience to give your meme the start it needs. Ché had the mass movement of 1968 to grow to maturity in - but not all of us will be that lucky. On the other hand, Malcolm McLaren said: "if you don't have a scene, you have to start one". In politics, I think we call that cadre-building.

Cool always equals "expensive". Funny, that.

Moffa is one of a crew of young dance producers who have dumped their neat little laptops for rooms full of hulking black boxes, scouring eBay and garage sales for vintage, amp-driven, analogue synthesisers.

Interesting. In the early 80's, when the cool people like Moffa were jumping on the digital bandwagon, it was crappy old analogues which were cheap and easy to acquire and people like Gary Numan and Depeche Mode used them to create the sound of their generation. Now, when software synthesizers have made weightless music - free and open source - possible for the first time in history, the cool people are trying to make bulky, hard-to-acquire, difficult-to-repair-store-and-carry technology fashionable again. The article above talks about

the genre's growth (or dilution, according to some)

Uh-huh. Because if more people can do something, it suddenly becomes worthless. There's the logic of not only capitalism but of all class societies in a nutshell.

It gets better:

"People are realising what's missing from the sounds they're getting out of software," Phil Moffa of production/DJ outfit Vinyl Life says. "They're conscious of how everything is sounding the same, and digital replication is the same every time."

But of course, when you sell it to them on a record, it will be the same every time. And you don't object to that because it's your precious intellectual property, which by its nature has to be infinitely reproducible to make you $$$.

"You try to do something, and they'll give you something back you didn't expect," Ford says of the old-school technology. "Also, because they're physical things, it's less cerebral; there's a humanism to it. We're not big fans of pushing blocks around screens."

Firstly - fuck humanism. I'm going transhuman as soon as it's feasible. Secondly - pushing blocks around screens is precisely what the majority of working people in rich countries do for a living all day. If you want escapism, fine - I'm looking for something which expresses real, concrete, nasty reality.

Oh, and the best bit is this:

"I hate really nostalgic records that are trying to sound like old records," Ford says. "But there's something familiar about (analogue), the way it shapes the sound and rounds out the edges and warms it up. It reminds you of the records you grew up with."

Ay-ay-ay. Warm, comforting, reminding you of your childhood... this is not the direction in which a future which avoids the Ghost Point lies.

Anyone gets to be a supernatural entity these days

Some gloating jackal-like parasites are fond of saying that the resonance of Ché Guevara has become nothing since his face is now a meaningless icon of "cool", useful only to sell T-shirts to idiots. Think again.

By night in the main square of the dusty town of Vallegrande, the only sound is the buzz of prayer coming from the church. Inside, devoted Catholics sit and stand around the image of Our Lord of Malta - the only black Christ in Latin America, brought to this Bolivian town during the Spanish conquest.

But this is not the only foreign element of devotion. Father Agustin, the Polish priest, reads out prayers written down by local people: "For my mother who is sick, I pray to the Lord and ... ", hesitantly, "to Saint Ernesto, to the soul of Che Guevara."

"Saint Ernesto," the parishioners murmur in response.

It was here in Vallegrande, 40 years ago, that the corpse of Ernesto "Che" Guevara lay on display, eyes open, in the hospital laundry. And it is here that his unofficial sainthood is becoming firmly established.

"For them, he is just like any other saint," Agustin says ruefully.

On a bench in the square, Freddy Vallejos, 27, says: "We have a faith, a confidence in Che. When I go to bed and when I wake up, I first pray to God and then I pray to Che - and then, everything is all right."

Chaos Marxism still thinks it was bloody stupid for Che to go to the peasants rather than the tin miners in Bolivia, but that's irrelevant to the issue at hand. The historical Jesus of Nazareth is only tangentially related to Christ the Lord - I'm not sure how much Ernesto Guevara has to do with Saint Che. I'm not going to argue with someone who answers prayers and performs miracles. Especially since his mate Fidel is in good with the Santería spirits, by all accounts.

Sectarian Cat Is Sectarian

The most parasitic “Satanic” newsletters invariably contain a liberal dose of LaVey-baiting. Their editors’ masochistic requirements are exercised as “lively exchange.” Their mainstay is often the reprinting of any letter, pro or con, from anyone capable of grasping a writing implement or poking at a computer or typewriter key. When responding to such transparent tactics, it’s our policy to preface rebuttals with two acknowledgments:

A) “I know you’re a masochist and delight in hostile banter,” and

B) “Anything I write or say to you will keep you going for another six months.” The Satanic Bible advises to “question all things”—but it helps to be able to think, first.

The Church of Satan tells dimwits where to get off. The funny thing is that - substituting a few words - Marxist sectarians often act in precisely the way described above. (*cough*) Note also that Uncle Karl said "Question Everything" long before Uncle Anton the Lion-Tamer did.

If there is hope, it lies in weightless music

Your last release ´The Futurist´ talked about leaving rock and roll behind, yet ironically any ground that techno gained over rock in the mid 1990s has now been dramatically beaten back by the stadium emotion of bands like Coldplay. How do you feel about this, do you think there is any hope of an electronic or experimental backlash?

The end of the 90's was so wild, this almost had to happen. George Bush, Blair, the return of garage rock and retro. I interprete the last years in that way that people were scared. 9-11, the war, everything suddenly changed. That’s perhaps why the music scene, especially in the UK has gone so conservative. But I already see the signs of that ending. Evolution is on our side, that’s the good thing. I mean we can watch films on our mobile phones, but we listen to music which sounds like it was done 30 years ago? This is stupid and boring. We witness the death of the music industry like it existed for the last fifty years. Pop music in the British sense is dying. And that’s no provocative statement, it’s a fact. Globalisation plays a huge part in that. The identity of the 'people' of a nation will slowly fade away. And with that goes pop music. The underground has the right model in place. It has created a worldwide network already and only the good music can survive within that system. 'Good’ meaning, truly chosen by the crowd and not being financed by corporations or religious organisations.

Alec Empire from Atari Teenage Riot reassures us that the Ghost Point hasn't actually happened yet. Although note a comment posted to this interview:

Alec's politics are alright with me... just a shame his music is awful. I found it as aurally appealing as putting a steel rubbish bin over my head and having several people smash the bin with hammers. Maybe some people enjoy that attack on the senses but I cant stand it. All of the ATR/DHR stuff never seemed to mature beyond that sound, which is a shame because as mentioned in the interview, the ease of making music with software meant that a lot more people could pick it up - which they did, witness the continuing mutant children of all forms of electronic(ally produced + arranged) music ranging from the bass weight of dubstep to the cut+paste/sample-happy bastard pop.

Alec is just as uncomprimising with his views as he is with his music, this means of course while other (apolitical) people went out and made fun, engaging, soulful music, he was still banging it out ear-blistering style, while people got bored of it and went elsewhere for their kicks. I didnt even know he was still around.

[...]

Music that is constantly out and out political all the time (by that I mean artists who only ever write political lyrics) gets fairly tedious + childish too... count the number of lame punk bands screaming the same shit repeatedly about the system, the cops, the man.. it might not have even been so bad if you could actually hear what they were saying. But I doubt it.

A timely warning against musical as well as political sectarianism, there.

Closer now, to seeing the revelation

I have a recurring dream where I have finally been accepted into the S00per-Sekrit Society of Cool People Who Are The Only Hope For The World. Their headquarters is up a set of clammy and portentous stone steps, and they have the damndest best parties up there. Everyone is extremely pretty and wants to have sex with me once we get back from our vital, world-changing missions.

And then I wake up and say "...stupid reality."

And that's what most really popular fiction is, it's lying to the target audience, it's coming up with whatever they need to hear to make them feel good about themselves. It's about reassuring them that they're the centre of the universe. I know I'm well-known for ranting, but I think that's the thing which unites everything I've ever ranted against. Sandman and The Matrix and Harry Potter all have it in common, they're all incredibly cynical that way, they're all about the self-satisfaction of the audience. They're about making people in the target demographic group feel as if they're the chosen ones, or potential chosen ones.

- Mad Larry. In "This Town", Larry also says something along the lines of "the only true witch is someone who understands that there are no cosmic forces". Well, the 15 year old me who read The Mists of Avalon and believed it for a while might be happy to hear that.

Cultural revolutionaries - then and now

"History will absolve me" - Fidel Castro



"History will prove us right" - Sigue Sigue Sputnik

Seriously. Both of the above screwed up in spectacular fashion, but at least proved what is possible. Read Tony James' own account of what SSS was all about, and gasp at the amateurish but quite impressive grasp of memetic engineering. (DISCLAIMER: Chaos Marxism does not endorse wearing fishnets over your face.)

Incidentally - everyone out there interested in revolutionary politics, magick or the future of humanity in any way must immediately purchase and read This Town Will Never Let Us Go. It has precisely the same top-of-the-head-unscrewing effect that James Curcio's Join My Cult!, and yet Mad Larry has never used any drug more intense than alcohol.

Here's a more recent attempt at cultural revolution - the Weightless Music manifesto.

Hello, new friend

A sympathetic but not uncritical review of what we do here. Thanks for your feedback - it makes it more likely that I'll update more frequently.

I should point out that I went precisely the opposite way from the cliché - I was an anarchist ten years ago, but got fed up with the lifestyle "politics", the tyranny of structurelessness and the endless posing, so went towards Leninism. You see, love him or hate him, you must admit that Lenin caused a ruckus on a worldwide level. The day an anarchist political figure manages that, call me back.

I still maintain that Lenin - like Crowley - gets a bad rap because (a) the majority of his "followers" were and still are idiots, and even contain a minority of sociopathic assholes; (b) because he was more interested in getting results than getting warm fuzzies. I am tempted to say that if you're in the business of revolution, if you're not hated by a large group of people when you die, you didn't do it right.

Also - I'm still sad about the SubGenius response to my comments. The responses were pretty unanimously the standard liberal auto-smears of Marxism, which didn't explain why, if it was "a doctrine for bees, not primates" (Stang), they had written something that looked extremely like it in their holy book.

A link, a valedictory, two observations and a grumble

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.

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.

Larry and Doloras sitting in a tree

Traditionally, though, the most useful way of understanding the meaning of "right-wing" has been to look at what people who classify themselves as right-wing have in common.... But this model of the universe has broken down, now that most left-wingers are equally tedious. So perhaps the only true indicator of a human being, in our supposedly-busy but monumentally lazy civilisation, is self-obsession. If you're entirely hung up on your own "lifestyle", whether you think you're a small-l liberal or a small-c conservative [or, indeed, a socialist, anarchist or magickian - DlaP], then you're right-wing. If you're so concerned with the vestments of that lifestyle that you lose sight of anything else, so determined to surround yourself with a fortress of The Right Kind of Stuff that you're incapable of thinking beyond your own self-image, then you're filling the same niche in society that used to be occupied by old-school bunker-mentality Tories. Because civilisation isn't about sealing yourself off from the rest of the world and your responsibility to it, and you don't get bonus marks just for being tolerant towards homosexuals or not using the word "piccaninnies".

See? It's not just me who thinks so. Lifestyles, demographics and nichemarkets are the modern enemy of consciousness.

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.

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.

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.

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:

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.

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.

"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.

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.

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.