Predecessors

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

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

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

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

Video killed the socialist movement?

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

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

Chanology: the state of play

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

(source)

A Marxism - Memetics glossary, first few entries

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Not your grandfather's Marx

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

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

Oh noes!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Good advice

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Anyway, perhaps more later.

ETA: Oh, here we go:

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

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

Art and politics

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

(source)

Cleavage

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

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

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

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

An excellent aphorism

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

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

The most important word: "energy"

Links in the tradition

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

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

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

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

We get criticism

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

Brief reactions:

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

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

3) The poster says:

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

Oh dear. This guy sounds a lot like Neo.

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

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

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

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

Suffering

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

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

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

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

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

The cult of No-God

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

On peut pas arrêter le signal

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

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

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