As Stewart Home put it, the essential fallacy of liberalism and lifestylism is that it is impossible to live differently under capitalism. But it is possible to live ethically - i.e., with integrity. And part of that integrity must surely involve putting something into training ourselves and others to live differently. "Starting with the Man in the Mirror" is a cheesy way to put it, so maybe "live as if you were in the early days of a better nation"? Or even - this horrible world of advertising agencies and mechanised death is a university in which we train ourselves to live in the better world. The Kingdom of God, in Reality as it is in the Nice Place We Made Up Inside Our Heads. A world where Love In Action becomes easy, or at least easier.
"It's steam-engines when it's steam-engines time", as a wise man once said, and while you can't stop playing the capitalist game (there is no longer any outside to the money and capital system, which, as Rosa Luxemburg said in 1903, means it's coming near to TILT), if you play the game with integrity - which means accepting that you're not going to win the Fabulous Prizes, and that you wouldn't want to anyway - you will keep enough "soul" (energy + free time + financial spending money) to give you a chance at contributing to building a better world.
At the right time, that is. You can't be a revolutionary in a non-revolutionary time for the same reason you can't be a saint or a prophet by your own volition. The time is not right for most of the world, but - for example - in Greece I think it's getting close. If you and your mates keep doing your exercises and your eyes on the prize, one day the Black Iron Prison might show a chink and you might be able to declare a jailbreak or even an occupation.
2011-06-30
2011-06-25
Further to the below...
... being good, bringing Light into the world, making the Solid World more like Universe A and less like Universe B, is unnatural. It's fighting against gravity, as Robert Fripp puts it. It's contradicting our animal nature, and it contradicts every rational, logical scheme for living and surviving in the World-As-Is. This planet would have gotten along perfectly fine without sentience, hence the Eden myth. Consciousness=the Knowledge of (and therefor responsibility for) Good and Evil, to be better or worse than animals, the ability to make Heaven or Hell real right here right now.
Which is why utilitarianism (in liberal democratic, social democratic or Stalinist flavours) doesn't work - it assumes that good=logical, when in reality all the words and abstract concepts on paper - if not backed up with an effort of Love In Action - just lead to the same primate games, with higher technology. As R. A. Wilson pointed out, most people use words in the same way that a chimp will use a handful of its own shit.
One of the things that appeals to me about the Islamic tradition is that there's no original sin - people are not naturally sinful, but they are naturally forgetful and weak. Bad things happen because it's easier to let them happen, and it's extremely easy to forget about God or Universe A or the Inexpressible Benevolence of the Creative Impulse or whatever.
The power of capitalism is of course that it feeds on our animal nature - greed and territoriality, in particular. But the tragedy of capitalism is that it has trapped us in one of those tiny universes I was talking about in the last post - we have, in other worlds, all entered into playing a game which we can't win and is running down the planet and poisoning us body and soul, but if everyone thinks that The Game is the entire universe, then ceasing to play it and acting like adults is unthinkable. And if thinkable, then too damn hard.
If we can look after our animal selves without giving into every single prompting - if, in other words, we can stay awake, act according with Will (=Love In Action) - in little things, then perhaps we can do so in big things as well. We are what we do, and our political activism will not be worth a damn if we act in our private life like we are entitled to everything we want, that Those Guys Over There have no rights because they're wrong, that our actions have no consequences, etc.
Which is why utilitarianism (in liberal democratic, social democratic or Stalinist flavours) doesn't work - it assumes that good=logical, when in reality all the words and abstract concepts on paper - if not backed up with an effort of Love In Action - just lead to the same primate games, with higher technology. As R. A. Wilson pointed out, most people use words in the same way that a chimp will use a handful of its own shit.
One of the things that appeals to me about the Islamic tradition is that there's no original sin - people are not naturally sinful, but they are naturally forgetful and weak. Bad things happen because it's easier to let them happen, and it's extremely easy to forget about God or Universe A or the Inexpressible Benevolence of the Creative Impulse or whatever.
The power of capitalism is of course that it feeds on our animal nature - greed and territoriality, in particular. But the tragedy of capitalism is that it has trapped us in one of those tiny universes I was talking about in the last post - we have, in other worlds, all entered into playing a game which we can't win and is running down the planet and poisoning us body and soul, but if everyone thinks that The Game is the entire universe, then ceasing to play it and acting like adults is unthinkable. And if thinkable, then too damn hard.
If we can look after our animal selves without giving into every single prompting - if, in other words, we can stay awake, act according with Will (=Love In Action) - in little things, then perhaps we can do so in big things as well. We are what we do, and our political activism will not be worth a damn if we act in our private life like we are entitled to everything we want, that Those Guys Over There have no rights because they're wrong, that our actions have no consequences, etc.
2011-06-23
If there's a shortcut, I'd have found it, but there's no easy way around it
Light of the world, shine on me.
One thing that's very interesting in the Abrahamic religious tradition is this idea of the tragedy of prophecy. The idea that when Universe Central taps you on the shoulder and says "oi! pass on this message!", you are not in for a good time. Prophets are always getting stoned to death, crucified, shot with arrows, betrayed by their nearest and dearest, cursed and slandered, etc, and Universe Central doesn't do anything to help. Even the religious experience itself is portrayed in disturbing terms. The Holy Spirit, in the Christian tradition, is said to descend "like a dove". Have you ever had a pigeon land on your head? It's nothing but feathers and shit. And in this case it's DIVINE feathers and shit.
That's why these modern "You Are The Chosen One" myths fail somewhat because they don't point out that being the hero in the World-As-Is - to be technically accurate, making a commitment to act from somewhere else than your own immediately perceived selfish interests - is not going to end up with you being King and getting the Girl (or whatever gender). Actually, the best modern account of the tragedy of prophecy is Terry Pratchett's Small Gods, which gets it just right despite the fact that Pterry was an atheist until he got sick. And as for our secular prophets of revolution - MLK and Malcolm X were shot, Karl Marx died in poverty and 11 people came to his funeral, Ché Guevara ended up dead in a jungle. Fighting the good fight is not a pleasant lifestyle choice.
===
The more I think about it, the more I think that perhaps my real "religion" (in Sufi terms, my shari`a as opposed to my tariqah) is still the Church of the SubGenius. Yeah. I am sure that Greg Hill and Kerry Thornley would be kind of shocked to know that people are reading this who really, truly are Discordians - but I think Ivan Stang kind of accepts that there are people who really, truly are SubGenii (as long as they keep buying swag). And - let's face it, people - J. R. "Bob" Dobbs is a pretty damn good folk-hero for the lumpen intelligensia and the petty-creatives. Congratulations, Stang, you and Philo created something that works.
A hundred years ago, the freed slaves and children of freed African-American slaves sat around on the porch and told hilarious lies about John the Conqueror, which is pretty much what SubGenii do today WRT "Bob". Big John wouldn't pick cotton, he wouldn't bale hay, he wouldn't take a licking and he wouldn't run away; whereas every time "Bob" screws up, he makes a million dollars. (The Polynesian people's stories of Maui fulfill a similar social function.) Every era and culture and subculture creates its own mythology, its own way of being, its own gods and demigods and folk heroes, its own working religion - practical code of ethics, plus rituals to make sense of the world we live in.
You see, that's the problem for those of us out on the edge - we want to change the world we live in, change the community we came from, but we're not individuals, we live our lives in the matrix of community. But the problem comes when we turn the organisations we build to try to change our world into new communities - that's the basis of sectarianism, a turning away from the Real World of Horrible Jobs into an exciting "pocket universe" where we get to be Big Cheeses and heroes of our own narratives of Great Revolutionary Heroes. (I'm always impressed by how thoroughly the Spartacists and offshoots manage this - obsessively taping all their internal meetings, memorising the history of every ridiculous faction fight in their tradition, and in all other ways behaving as if what happened inside their group was the important thing. But it's common in pretty much all radical groups.)
That's where "small group psychosis" comes from - voluntarily withdrawing into a tiny universe that we created ourselves, and forgetting that it's all just something we made up and that it doesn't really mean a damn thing in real terms. In contrast, a real revolutionary or saint lives in the real communities where they are at and then brings Love In Action to bear in that community. ("Love in Action" is here identical to what Crowley would have called "True Will".)
I think perhaps the Sufi distinction between shari`a and tariqah is useful here. Shari`a, in our own sense, is "how we live our real day-to-day lives in the Real World of Horrible Jobs, how we take care of our needs, have fun, deal with other beings and the real physical world - our Rules for Living". Tariqah would then be "the discipline we accept in order to bring about change in ourselves and in the Real World of Horrible Jobs". The two are orthogonal to one another - they function by incompatible rules. Which is why Hazrat-e-Pir, Dr Nurbakhsh, was fond of saying "the master's faith is the disciple's infidelity" - what you have to do to bring Light or Revolution or whatever into the World-As-Is is completely a separate matter to the rules we follow for surviving and thriving in the World-As-Is.
God or "Bob" or whoever doesn't need you to do rituals - you need you to do rituals, preferably within the matrix of community, otherwise you will never have a solid and healthy basis to work from when "Bob" or God or whoever lands on your head like a big smelly pigeon and asks you to do something impossible. I don't think it matters what rituals you do in your community, as long as your community's practice is for Love and Quality and against braindeath. And I think you also need to have "escapism" - little private worlds where you do get to play pretend and tell stories where you are a hero, like sci-fi fandom or following a football team or whatever. Just as long as you don't start mistaking them for real life, for your tariqah.
As for practical ethics, Frank Zappa never joined the Church of the SubGenius, but he did approve of them, and I think his moral code works well:
And a quote from Grant Morrison, whose work is proving suprisingly helpful to me at the moment: "The Solid World is the only place where an ugly caterpillar can become a beautiful butterfly." Things change into other things. That is the central secret of life in this world - the materialist dialectic, but also the essential spiritual insight of Heraclitus, Gautama Buddha, and virtually every mystic who was worth a shit. All that exists only exists in one time and in one place; only in the depths of consciousness is there anything pure and eternal (or foul and sinful). The question is whether we can overcome the contradiction between the shari`a of daily survival and the tariqah of becoming something more than heredity and environment programmed us for, so we can eventually end up at the haqiqah of... I dunno.
One thing that's very interesting in the Abrahamic religious tradition is this idea of the tragedy of prophecy. The idea that when Universe Central taps you on the shoulder and says "oi! pass on this message!", you are not in for a good time. Prophets are always getting stoned to death, crucified, shot with arrows, betrayed by their nearest and dearest, cursed and slandered, etc, and Universe Central doesn't do anything to help. Even the religious experience itself is portrayed in disturbing terms. The Holy Spirit, in the Christian tradition, is said to descend "like a dove". Have you ever had a pigeon land on your head? It's nothing but feathers and shit. And in this case it's DIVINE feathers and shit.
That's why these modern "You Are The Chosen One" myths fail somewhat because they don't point out that being the hero in the World-As-Is - to be technically accurate, making a commitment to act from somewhere else than your own immediately perceived selfish interests - is not going to end up with you being King and getting the Girl (or whatever gender). Actually, the best modern account of the tragedy of prophecy is Terry Pratchett's Small Gods, which gets it just right despite the fact that Pterry was an atheist until he got sick. And as for our secular prophets of revolution - MLK and Malcolm X were shot, Karl Marx died in poverty and 11 people came to his funeral, Ché Guevara ended up dead in a jungle. Fighting the good fight is not a pleasant lifestyle choice.
===
The more I think about it, the more I think that perhaps my real "religion" (in Sufi terms, my shari`a as opposed to my tariqah) is still the Church of the SubGenius. Yeah. I am sure that Greg Hill and Kerry Thornley would be kind of shocked to know that people are reading this who really, truly are Discordians - but I think Ivan Stang kind of accepts that there are people who really, truly are SubGenii (as long as they keep buying swag). And - let's face it, people - J. R. "Bob" Dobbs is a pretty damn good folk-hero for the lumpen intelligensia and the petty-creatives. Congratulations, Stang, you and Philo created something that works.
A hundred years ago, the freed slaves and children of freed African-American slaves sat around on the porch and told hilarious lies about John the Conqueror, which is pretty much what SubGenii do today WRT "Bob". Big John wouldn't pick cotton, he wouldn't bale hay, he wouldn't take a licking and he wouldn't run away; whereas every time "Bob" screws up, he makes a million dollars. (The Polynesian people's stories of Maui fulfill a similar social function.) Every era and culture and subculture creates its own mythology, its own way of being, its own gods and demigods and folk heroes, its own working religion - practical code of ethics, plus rituals to make sense of the world we live in.
You see, that's the problem for those of us out on the edge - we want to change the world we live in, change the community we came from, but we're not individuals, we live our lives in the matrix of community. But the problem comes when we turn the organisations we build to try to change our world into new communities - that's the basis of sectarianism, a turning away from the Real World of Horrible Jobs into an exciting "pocket universe" where we get to be Big Cheeses and heroes of our own narratives of Great Revolutionary Heroes. (I'm always impressed by how thoroughly the Spartacists and offshoots manage this - obsessively taping all their internal meetings, memorising the history of every ridiculous faction fight in their tradition, and in all other ways behaving as if what happened inside their group was the important thing. But it's common in pretty much all radical groups.)
That's where "small group psychosis" comes from - voluntarily withdrawing into a tiny universe that we created ourselves, and forgetting that it's all just something we made up and that it doesn't really mean a damn thing in real terms. In contrast, a real revolutionary or saint lives in the real communities where they are at and then brings Love In Action to bear in that community. ("Love in Action" is here identical to what Crowley would have called "True Will".)
I think perhaps the Sufi distinction between shari`a and tariqah is useful here. Shari`a, in our own sense, is "how we live our real day-to-day lives in the Real World of Horrible Jobs, how we take care of our needs, have fun, deal with other beings and the real physical world - our Rules for Living". Tariqah would then be "the discipline we accept in order to bring about change in ourselves and in the Real World of Horrible Jobs". The two are orthogonal to one another - they function by incompatible rules. Which is why Hazrat-e-Pir, Dr Nurbakhsh, was fond of saying "the master's faith is the disciple's infidelity" - what you have to do to bring Light or Revolution or whatever into the World-As-Is is completely a separate matter to the rules we follow for surviving and thriving in the World-As-Is.
God or "Bob" or whoever doesn't need you to do rituals - you need you to do rituals, preferably within the matrix of community, otherwise you will never have a solid and healthy basis to work from when "Bob" or God or whoever lands on your head like a big smelly pigeon and asks you to do something impossible. I don't think it matters what rituals you do in your community, as long as your community's practice is for Love and Quality and against braindeath. And I think you also need to have "escapism" - little private worlds where you do get to play pretend and tell stories where you are a hero, like sci-fi fandom or following a football team or whatever. Just as long as you don't start mistaking them for real life, for your tariqah.
As for practical ethics, Frank Zappa never joined the Church of the SubGenius, but he did approve of them, and I think his moral code works well:
Do what you want, do what you will,
Just don't mess up your neighbour's thrill
And when you pay the bill, kindly leave a little tip
To help the next poor sucker on his one-way trip.
And a quote from Grant Morrison, whose work is proving suprisingly helpful to me at the moment: "The Solid World is the only place where an ugly caterpillar can become a beautiful butterfly." Things change into other things. That is the central secret of life in this world - the materialist dialectic, but also the essential spiritual insight of Heraclitus, Gautama Buddha, and virtually every mystic who was worth a shit. All that exists only exists in one time and in one place; only in the depths of consciousness is there anything pure and eternal (or foul and sinful). The question is whether we can overcome the contradiction between the shari`a of daily survival and the tariqah of becoming something more than heredity and environment programmed us for, so we can eventually end up at the haqiqah of... I dunno.
2011-06-09
A new aphorism
If we can forgive without accepting, a lot more becomes possible.
"To forgive", in this context, should be understand in the same word as "debt forgiveness" - which means, nothing will change that you ran up a debt, but I waive my right to collect on that debt. It is not right that you ran the debt up, but I have decided that it's in everyone's best interest not to pursue it.
Note that we can forgive, not that we must or should. We have a choice of actions, we can pursue debts or forgive them. Which ties into the broader mystical frame that "God is both just and merciful". "Just" might mean: "everyone gets what they deserve". Mercy means: "everyone gets more than they deserve". Since we are all sinners and black sinners (or to put in secular language, we are all weak and forgetful and make mistakes), then we had better hope that others practice mercy; and indeed, an eye for an eye leaves the whole planet blind.
"Forgiving without accepting" means "exercising mercy while recognizing that it contradicts justice". In the outcome of that contradiction lies an ethical framework for a free humanity. The whole concept of restorative justice relies on precisely this question of giving the victims of a crime their own free choice as to what blend of mercy and justice should be pursued.
2011-05-26
"Pump Up The Volume" vs. "What Is To Be Done?"
An edited transcription of a rant given by Doloras LaPicho live on transmissionFM, Auckland, New Zealand, 2011/05/24.
...yeah, so, my interview guest of last week was kind of impressed by the transmissionFM setup. "Real Pump Up The Volume" stuff, he said. Now he was not referring to the great acid house hit by MARRS, but to the 1990 movie starring Christian Slater as a high school kid with his own rabble-rousing pirate radio broadcast. I actually just watched that movie the other week, and in honour of it I am, myself, sitting her wearing nothing but a cock ring. And believe me, that's an interesting experience when you're a woman.
But that movie is really, really prescient in a way that only the great artists can be. Leonardo da Vinci designed a helicopter centuries before the technology existed to build one. Frank Zappa, in the 1980s, thought of selling music down the phone lines, long before the MP3 or broadband internet were invented. Similarly, in "Pump Up The Volume", what you see is: Dude gets on the air, rants, does interactive content, leaks embarrassing information that The Man don't want you to know about, foments a social uprising, gets thrown in the jail but not before everyone and their cousin are doing exactly what he did. So what you have there is a pop culture depiction of blogs, podcasts, Twitter, Facebook, flash mobs, Anonymous, crowdsourcing, Wikileaks, and the recent revolutions in Egypt and Tunisia, ages before social media made it possible.
Because it is all possible now! And legal! You don't need a shortwave transmitter and you don't need to dodge the cops - at least until the point when you actually HAVE fomented an entire revolution and the state has to shut down the whole Intarwebz to get you. And that's when they get in trouble, because then the really big guns are after them. I've been watching Anonymous as a social movement grow and develop, since the very early days of just taking down people's websites for shits and giggles, to attempting slightly bigger game in the Church of Scientology, to now actually attempting to wreck entire national governments who dare get in the way of the Freedom of the Intarwebz. Because that's Anon's entire political programme. It's not the same as mine, it's libertarian bordering on anarchistic in that it thinks that information is the key to the struggle, when, as I will go on about at length in our second "rant" section, as far as I'm concerned, it's PRODUCTION. But THEY ARE DOING STUFF. People like Julian Assange, no matter whether he might have also done something pretty horrible to a woman, have been doing that kind of stuff as well. Why aren't you doing stuff?
All the technology is there! Technology that pirate radio broadcasters 20 years ago would have shit their pants to get their hands on! When transmissionFM goes on the internet, THEN you will see whether what we are doing here has real memetic potential. But there's always a downside, isn't it? There is SO MUCH information out there these days that it becomes very, very difficult to sort the wheat from the chaff, which is why even the most anarchic online community needs moderation and Wikipedia needs a battalion of unemployed PhDs to keep the bullshit off the system. Getting the information out is no longer the problem - gatekeeping and editing is the problem. Will YOU be a gatekeeper and editor? Will you start your own "channel" which broadcasts NOTHING BUT THE TRUTH as far as you can see it? Because it's not enough to just do something, you have to do something that actively, as T. S. Eliot put it, "purifies the dialect of the tribe".
So the question remains just the same as it was in 1903 in Russia, ladies and gentlemen, comrades and friends. What Is To Be Done?
Back in the old days of political punk, there were two answers to that question, which you could call the anarchist answer and the communist answer. What does a political band, or a radical cultural initiative of any stribe, do when the forces of Big Money come a knockin' and making an offer? Because they will if you're doing it right and getting a response from The People, because YOUR PEOPLE will be ipso facto a "market" which Big Money hasn't managed to sell to yet.
The anarchists would say - tell them to get lost, do everything DIY, for the people, non-commerical, under the radar, subversive. One keeps one's independence that way. One also runs the risk of being trapped into an intellectually inbred little group, becoming the house music of a lifestyle choice rather than becoming a VIRUS which could infect the wider civilisation. Imagine if Neo and Morpheus and that just stayed in Zion all day and went to raves and let the machines alone. I don't think the machines would have had a problem. The other issue is that - sadly, in this $2.99 material world run by capitalism - if it doesn't make a living (in money or goods and services) it's dependent on the good will and energy of whatever you are doing to make a living. People burn out. People decide to sell out individually if they can't sell out together. If you're not commercial, you had better hope that your people are extremely generous, or extremely devoted. You wonder why all those hippies punks and anarchists are now making good money as "creatives", or are Green Party MPs or something even more pathetic. Because they COULD. Because they got a good offer.
Now the communist answer is, take the money! Dumbfuck capitalists want to give us big money and sell our records and our gigs full of communist agitprop, then more stupidity to them! The capitalist will sell you the rope to hang him with, as Michael Moore put it. Now that's a higher risk venture. You find yourself in the logic of The Machine that way. It's trying to change the system from within, which, as Unca Lenny could tell you, sentences you to 20 years of boredom if you're lucky. If you're unlucky, you begin to forget you were going in to drain the swamp and you end up making friends with the alligators. These people will be NICE to you if you play nice. Striking a pose and yelling slogans, yeah, they get that, it's a good "branding" exercise. The thing is that you can yell SMASH THE STATE and it doesn't change anything unless the people you're yelling it at actually decide that's a good idea.
The most vital thing to remember is that no-one but no-one ever changed anything, a damn thing, one iota, by making a consumer choice, by buying product X or not buying product Y or buying product Z instead. CONSUMPTION IS NOT A MORAL CHOICE. It is handing over dollars in return for goods and services and it is what the system is all about. You will remember a while ago that the British record buying public were sick and tired of some manufactured bullshit star from their Idol programme, I think it's called X-Factor, being Christmas #1. So they started a meme to get Rage Against The Machine's "Killing In The Name Of" to the top of the charts. Yeah, "fuck you, I won't do what you told me". The band full of actual communists. But guess what? RATM's record company was the same as the record company which made the X-Factor single. So Sony Music made BIG BIG MEGABUCKS EITHER WAY. And some people got to feel cool. But was the market model shaking in its boots? Was it bollocks.
And if IS THIS THE FUTURE? has a point or a purpose, it's to remind you of this. CONSUMPTION IS NOT REAL. It is neither good nor evil. It means absolutely nothing what you buy, or what you believe, or what you say, IT MATTERS WHAT YOU DO. When I'm performing with Vostok Lake or promoting the Electric Salon, it would be nice if people paid money because that means those ventures become sustainable in the material world of capitalism. But it will really only mean something every if people decide THEMSELVES to start an insane electropop band or host a weird performance night or an anarchic radio show. PRODUCTION IS REAL. Only what you do, and what you make, and what you bring into the world matters. Do it the communist way, or the anarchist way, or some other way - they're both choices with pluses and minuses, risks and potential rewards. Maybe you'll succeed, or maybe you will serve humanity for being the grisly warning of what could go wrong. Like Bono. But remember that only when we can do and make free of the Law of Value and the cash economy, only then will we be ready for the next great adventure in what it means to be human.
...yeah, so, my interview guest of last week was kind of impressed by the transmissionFM setup. "Real Pump Up The Volume" stuff, he said. Now he was not referring to the great acid house hit by MARRS, but to the 1990 movie starring Christian Slater as a high school kid with his own rabble-rousing pirate radio broadcast. I actually just watched that movie the other week, and in honour of it I am, myself, sitting her wearing nothing but a cock ring. And believe me, that's an interesting experience when you're a woman.
But that movie is really, really prescient in a way that only the great artists can be. Leonardo da Vinci designed a helicopter centuries before the technology existed to build one. Frank Zappa, in the 1980s, thought of selling music down the phone lines, long before the MP3 or broadband internet were invented. Similarly, in "Pump Up The Volume", what you see is: Dude gets on the air, rants, does interactive content, leaks embarrassing information that The Man don't want you to know about, foments a social uprising, gets thrown in the jail but not before everyone and their cousin are doing exactly what he did. So what you have there is a pop culture depiction of blogs, podcasts, Twitter, Facebook, flash mobs, Anonymous, crowdsourcing, Wikileaks, and the recent revolutions in Egypt and Tunisia, ages before social media made it possible.
Because it is all possible now! And legal! You don't need a shortwave transmitter and you don't need to dodge the cops - at least until the point when you actually HAVE fomented an entire revolution and the state has to shut down the whole Intarwebz to get you. And that's when they get in trouble, because then the really big guns are after them. I've been watching Anonymous as a social movement grow and develop, since the very early days of just taking down people's websites for shits and giggles, to attempting slightly bigger game in the Church of Scientology, to now actually attempting to wreck entire national governments who dare get in the way of the Freedom of the Intarwebz. Because that's Anon's entire political programme. It's not the same as mine, it's libertarian bordering on anarchistic in that it thinks that information is the key to the struggle, when, as I will go on about at length in our second "rant" section, as far as I'm concerned, it's PRODUCTION. But THEY ARE DOING STUFF. People like Julian Assange, no matter whether he might have also done something pretty horrible to a woman, have been doing that kind of stuff as well. Why aren't you doing stuff?
All the technology is there! Technology that pirate radio broadcasters 20 years ago would have shit their pants to get their hands on! When transmissionFM goes on the internet, THEN you will see whether what we are doing here has real memetic potential. But there's always a downside, isn't it? There is SO MUCH information out there these days that it becomes very, very difficult to sort the wheat from the chaff, which is why even the most anarchic online community needs moderation and Wikipedia needs a battalion of unemployed PhDs to keep the bullshit off the system. Getting the information out is no longer the problem - gatekeeping and editing is the problem. Will YOU be a gatekeeper and editor? Will you start your own "channel" which broadcasts NOTHING BUT THE TRUTH as far as you can see it? Because it's not enough to just do something, you have to do something that actively, as T. S. Eliot put it, "purifies the dialect of the tribe".
So the question remains just the same as it was in 1903 in Russia, ladies and gentlemen, comrades and friends. What Is To Be Done?
Back in the old days of political punk, there were two answers to that question, which you could call the anarchist answer and the communist answer. What does a political band, or a radical cultural initiative of any stribe, do when the forces of Big Money come a knockin' and making an offer? Because they will if you're doing it right and getting a response from The People, because YOUR PEOPLE will be ipso facto a "market" which Big Money hasn't managed to sell to yet.
The anarchists would say - tell them to get lost, do everything DIY, for the people, non-commerical, under the radar, subversive. One keeps one's independence that way. One also runs the risk of being trapped into an intellectually inbred little group, becoming the house music of a lifestyle choice rather than becoming a VIRUS which could infect the wider civilisation. Imagine if Neo and Morpheus and that just stayed in Zion all day and went to raves and let the machines alone. I don't think the machines would have had a problem. The other issue is that - sadly, in this $2.99 material world run by capitalism - if it doesn't make a living (in money or goods and services) it's dependent on the good will and energy of whatever you are doing to make a living. People burn out. People decide to sell out individually if they can't sell out together. If you're not commercial, you had better hope that your people are extremely generous, or extremely devoted. You wonder why all those hippies punks and anarchists are now making good money as "creatives", or are Green Party MPs or something even more pathetic. Because they COULD. Because they got a good offer.
Now the communist answer is, take the money! Dumbfuck capitalists want to give us big money and sell our records and our gigs full of communist agitprop, then more stupidity to them! The capitalist will sell you the rope to hang him with, as Michael Moore put it. Now that's a higher risk venture. You find yourself in the logic of The Machine that way. It's trying to change the system from within, which, as Unca Lenny could tell you, sentences you to 20 years of boredom if you're lucky. If you're unlucky, you begin to forget you were going in to drain the swamp and you end up making friends with the alligators. These people will be NICE to you if you play nice. Striking a pose and yelling slogans, yeah, they get that, it's a good "branding" exercise. The thing is that you can yell SMASH THE STATE and it doesn't change anything unless the people you're yelling it at actually decide that's a good idea.
The most vital thing to remember is that no-one but no-one ever changed anything, a damn thing, one iota, by making a consumer choice, by buying product X or not buying product Y or buying product Z instead. CONSUMPTION IS NOT A MORAL CHOICE. It is handing over dollars in return for goods and services and it is what the system is all about. You will remember a while ago that the British record buying public were sick and tired of some manufactured bullshit star from their Idol programme, I think it's called X-Factor, being Christmas #1. So they started a meme to get Rage Against The Machine's "Killing In The Name Of" to the top of the charts. Yeah, "fuck you, I won't do what you told me". The band full of actual communists. But guess what? RATM's record company was the same as the record company which made the X-Factor single. So Sony Music made BIG BIG MEGABUCKS EITHER WAY. And some people got to feel cool. But was the market model shaking in its boots? Was it bollocks.
And if IS THIS THE FUTURE? has a point or a purpose, it's to remind you of this. CONSUMPTION IS NOT REAL. It is neither good nor evil. It means absolutely nothing what you buy, or what you believe, or what you say, IT MATTERS WHAT YOU DO. When I'm performing with Vostok Lake or promoting the Electric Salon, it would be nice if people paid money because that means those ventures become sustainable in the material world of capitalism. But it will really only mean something every if people decide THEMSELVES to start an insane electropop band or host a weird performance night or an anarchic radio show. PRODUCTION IS REAL. Only what you do, and what you make, and what you bring into the world matters. Do it the communist way, or the anarchist way, or some other way - they're both choices with pluses and minuses, risks and potential rewards. Maybe you'll succeed, or maybe you will serve humanity for being the grisly warning of what could go wrong. Like Bono. But remember that only when we can do and make free of the Law of Value and the cash economy, only then will we be ready for the next great adventure in what it means to be human.
2011-04-28
Against anarcho-narcissism
One of the things that strikes me from reading The Invisibles - particularly the later, less interesting issues - is how incredibly naive and short-sighted the argument that the essential conflict is between "order and chaos" is. See, the thing about capitalism and imperialism - the current face of The Black Iron Prison - is that it's always combined the two. As Marx put it, the hierarchical order of the firm is balanced by the anarchy of the free market. And in modern consumer capitalism, the dominance/submission model of the workplace is replaced by the GO HOG WILD mentality encouraged by the advertising industry for after work hours. This is why capitalism is so dynamic (or, to put it in another way, unstable) - that very tension between order and chaos.
Which is, I think, why those of us lucky to have the cultural and social capital and productive skills necessary to join the professional or creative middle classes end up selling out the movement for a better world. Because once they get to be their own bosses - or get a boss who encourages them to be creative - they think they've cracked it. Oh! The current system is wrecking the planet and causing poverty and misery and violence and death and torture on a global scale, but since I get to slack off and still get fed well and buy consumer products which tell me I'm a cool person and bitch and moan and make offensive jokes on the intarwebz, it can't be the same as that evil Black Iron Prison thing I read about in all my favourite books, can it?
Yes it freakin' can. The true rulers and archons of this world want a world where some people are free to go to raves and have kinky sex and to write sarcastic blogs, just as long as they think they've earned that privilege by being superior to the slave classes. The current system not only gives "creatives" a special privileged place, it tells them that the class system is just and meritocratic. So that's why anarcho-capitalism always appeals to SubGeniuses and the other lumpen-intelligensia, because it's a consistent system of individualism and chaos, where the Evil Bad Corporate Monsters are vanquished but you get to keep your precious ego and your illusion that you somehow have a separate existence out of the matrix of your neighbourhood, your bioregion, the human species and the wider ecosystem.
But the sad twist is that anarcho-capitalism is the only social system which is actually impossible. The "free market" can't exist without some sovereign to enforce the sanctity of property rights and contracts. Wilson and Shea's contention that there would be such a thing as "property-2", i.e. property rights that everyone would just agree to respect in an anarcho-capitalist system, is bringing in The Cop Inside Your Head through the back door, to reconcile the irreconcilable contradiction of "individualism without hierarchy and punishment". The sovereign individual of liberal/libertarian theory is just as gross and unreal a chimera as the "New Socialist Man" of North Korean totalitarianism, because it dissolves actually existing social bonds and mutual obligations in favour of an administered totality, either that of the almighty dollar or the almighty bureaucracy (or combination thereof).
Any social system worth a damn has to start from human civilisation as it actually exists - a dynamic tension between individualism and community/cultural matrices. A society of yeoman farmers can't exist in the modern era any more than a society of altruistic, collectivised tree-huggers. We revolutionaries are ourselves similarly for both order and chaos at the same time - just in different places than the current system would have it. Of course "Worker's State" is a contradiction in terms, but then so is "Capitalist State". The next era won't abolish all our problems, it will just - hopefully - give us new ones to solve while safeguarding the individual from oppression and commodification, the species from extinction and the biosphere from devastation.
Which is, I think, why those of us lucky to have the cultural and social capital and productive skills necessary to join the professional or creative middle classes end up selling out the movement for a better world. Because once they get to be their own bosses - or get a boss who encourages them to be creative - they think they've cracked it. Oh! The current system is wrecking the planet and causing poverty and misery and violence and death and torture on a global scale, but since I get to slack off and still get fed well and buy consumer products which tell me I'm a cool person and bitch and moan and make offensive jokes on the intarwebz, it can't be the same as that evil Black Iron Prison thing I read about in all my favourite books, can it?
Yes it freakin' can. The true rulers and archons of this world want a world where some people are free to go to raves and have kinky sex and to write sarcastic blogs, just as long as they think they've earned that privilege by being superior to the slave classes. The current system not only gives "creatives" a special privileged place, it tells them that the class system is just and meritocratic. So that's why anarcho-capitalism always appeals to SubGeniuses and the other lumpen-intelligensia, because it's a consistent system of individualism and chaos, where the Evil Bad Corporate Monsters are vanquished but you get to keep your precious ego and your illusion that you somehow have a separate existence out of the matrix of your neighbourhood, your bioregion, the human species and the wider ecosystem.
But the sad twist is that anarcho-capitalism is the only social system which is actually impossible. The "free market" can't exist without some sovereign to enforce the sanctity of property rights and contracts. Wilson and Shea's contention that there would be such a thing as "property-2", i.e. property rights that everyone would just agree to respect in an anarcho-capitalist system, is bringing in The Cop Inside Your Head through the back door, to reconcile the irreconcilable contradiction of "individualism without hierarchy and punishment". The sovereign individual of liberal/libertarian theory is just as gross and unreal a chimera as the "New Socialist Man" of North Korean totalitarianism, because it dissolves actually existing social bonds and mutual obligations in favour of an administered totality, either that of the almighty dollar or the almighty bureaucracy (or combination thereof).
Any social system worth a damn has to start from human civilisation as it actually exists - a dynamic tension between individualism and community/cultural matrices. A society of yeoman farmers can't exist in the modern era any more than a society of altruistic, collectivised tree-huggers. We revolutionaries are ourselves similarly for both order and chaos at the same time - just in different places than the current system would have it. Of course "Worker's State" is a contradiction in terms, but then so is "Capitalist State". The next era won't abolish all our problems, it will just - hopefully - give us new ones to solve while safeguarding the individual from oppression and commodification, the species from extinction and the biosphere from devastation.
2011-04-25
Out of traction, back in action
I returned to active political service over the weekend. Soon you will get to see the kind of wild-assed, cultural-political ranting you've come to love on this blog on a real live website of a political tendency. Here's a meme for you to chew on: terminal 5.
As to the Greater Jihad, I'm currently up to vol 3 of The Invisibles, and damned if it's not totally synchronistically relevant to my life. I feel like I'm going toe-to-toe with The King Of All Tears at the moment. I'm in a major life transition which, if it succeeds, will pretty much mean my death and rebirth as the human being that I was supposed to be before the personality implants kicked in in my childhood. (And if it fails, I'll end up living in a gutter and standing on a street corner with a sign saying WILL DROP PANTS FOR FOOD.)
In any case, I will not be who I am for much longer. Will keep you posted.
As to the Greater Jihad, I'm currently up to vol 3 of The Invisibles, and damned if it's not totally synchronistically relevant to my life. I feel like I'm going toe-to-toe with The King Of All Tears at the moment. I'm in a major life transition which, if it succeeds, will pretty much mean my death and rebirth as the human being that I was supposed to be before the personality implants kicked in in my childhood. (And if it fails, I'll end up living in a gutter and standing on a street corner with a sign saying WILL DROP PANTS FOR FOOD.)
In any case, I will not be who I am for much longer. Will keep you posted.
2011-04-05
Disregard the below, I give fellatio
Q. Why do things hurt?
A. Because if they didn't you'd walk around like a benumbed zombie all the time. Because you don't really allow yourself pleasure or even real feelings unless they're forced on you, we gotta force them on you until you decide to wake the fuck up on a semi-permanent basis.
A. Because if they didn't you'd walk around like a benumbed zombie all the time. Because you don't really allow yourself pleasure or even real feelings unless they're forced on you, we gotta force them on you until you decide to wake the fuck up on a semi-permanent basis.
2011-04-01
However did it come to this?
"A failed initiation doesn't mean the end of all things, but it means that any future attempts will be even less likely to succeed." - Lawrence Miles
"No god accepted me; no power spoke through me; no-one came to get me out. The suffering was meaningless." - from my personal diary
"No god accepted me; no power spoke through me; no-one came to get me out. The suffering was meaningless." - from my personal diary
2011-03-31
KING FELIX was here.
"So you can encounter God while you're alive," he said.
"Under exceptional circumstances. Originally God and Moses talked together as a man talks with his friend."
"What went wrong?"
"Wrong in what way?"
"Nobody hears God's voice anymore."
Rybys said, "You do."
"My audio and video systems do."
"That's better than nothing." She eyed him, "You don't seem to enjoy it."
"It's interfering with my life."
She said, "So am I."
To that he could think of no response; it was true.
I think PKD was totally onto something when he had his dystopia in The Divine Invasion ruled by a fusion between the Stalinists and the Catholic Church. Mechanical materialism has always depended on brain-dead idealism as its flipside and counterpart, like two drunks propping each other up. The equivalent in the World-As-Is is free-market consumerism's alliance with the most backwards-assed superstition.
2011-03-23
No-one likes me, and I do care.
A while back, a kindly contributor to our comments blog - Noisysphinx, I believe it was - suggested that instead of writing mopey articles on here, why I didn't just go out and spraypaint some slogans on some walls with some friends. I was too ashamed, at the time, to respond "Because I don't have any friends".
I was reminded of this by this article on a friendly allied blog, which led to me giving a flick through of the first volume of The Invisibles. I was of course struck by the great similarities of the general conceit of the work - and of course to a whole series of literature running from Illuminatus! to Join My Cult and beyond - to my own recurring fantasy...
Yeah, the issue there is that there are plenty of people who at least act like they're The Invisibles, or Hagbard Celine's crew, or the living continuity of the OTO or the Fourth International or whoever. And they would never have anything to do with me because I'm not socially skilled.
I am serious. You've seen Futurama, right? I have always been slightly more popular than Dr Zoidberg. Slightly. I had literally no friends in high school. Even the weird kids avoided or bullied me. The kid with Asperger's Syndrome looked down on me, for heaven's sake. At university I made a few "friends", by which I meant people who liked to have me around as the butt of their jokes. The kind of people who read The Invisibles back in the 1990s, to be dreadfully precise, would have never wanted anything to do with me because I was the kind of person people emigrated to avoid.
To some degree I also get that feeling reading principiadiscordia.net. That I can't actually take part in changing the world because I wouldn't be welcome at the parties of those other people who would have that agenda. All these articles about "affinity groups" etc. assume a basic level of "being able to fit in" which some of us just don't have.
Just as liberation theology tried to bring to Catholic Christianity "an option for the poor", I suppose Chaos Marxism wants to bring to revolutionary cultural politics "an option for the uncool".
I was reminded of this by this article on a friendly allied blog, which led to me giving a flick through of the first volume of The Invisibles. I was of course struck by the great similarities of the general conceit of the work - and of course to a whole series of literature running from Illuminatus! to Join My Cult and beyond - to my own recurring fantasy...
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.
Yeah, the issue there is that there are plenty of people who at least act like they're The Invisibles, or Hagbard Celine's crew, or the living continuity of the OTO or the Fourth International or whoever. And they would never have anything to do with me because I'm not socially skilled.
I am serious. You've seen Futurama, right? I have always been slightly more popular than Dr Zoidberg. Slightly. I had literally no friends in high school. Even the weird kids avoided or bullied me. The kid with Asperger's Syndrome looked down on me, for heaven's sake. At university I made a few "friends", by which I meant people who liked to have me around as the butt of their jokes. The kind of people who read The Invisibles back in the 1990s, to be dreadfully precise, would have never wanted anything to do with me because I was the kind of person people emigrated to avoid.
To some degree I also get that feeling reading principiadiscordia.net. That I can't actually take part in changing the world because I wouldn't be welcome at the parties of those other people who would have that agenda. All these articles about "affinity groups" etc. assume a basic level of "being able to fit in" which some of us just don't have.
Just as liberation theology tried to bring to Catholic Christianity "an option for the poor", I suppose Chaos Marxism wants to bring to revolutionary cultural politics "an option for the uncool".
2011-03-21
Commodification ain't all bad
There's one good thing about, as Uncle Charlie said, money under capitalism making everything equal to everything else; and, as Walter Benjamin put it, mass reproduction removing the "aura" from previously meaningful individual objects, like works of art. Mass production means that nothing gets lost forever. Everything can be replaced - and, in the era of the Internet, if it can be digitised, these days nothing need be lost at all.
That's a good thing, in some ways. I'm a music nerd, myself, and I remember 15 years ago having to desperately hunt through the used bins of record stores, trying to fine rare and beautiful music from past decades which hadn't made it to CD yet, and hoping the vinyl wouldn't be too scratched up. Sometimes I'd hunt years for a particular album. Now, I can generally find anything I want with a thirty-second Google; and, perversely, the greater the rarity and obscurity of something, the more likely that someone will have slapped it up on some dodgy blog somewhere. (Less obscure stuff will have been commercially re-released and I'll have to pay for it.)
But it's a bad thing in that, as Walter B. put it, it has put an end to the category of the sacred. The individual as created by late capitalist society no longer has a "homeland", in the way we would have understood it when your average human never ventured more than thirty miles from their place of birth. They no longer have sacred traditions handed down from generation to generation - they have professional gurus who earn an honest capitalist living from their work, who will teach you any practice from any culture you can name, and a few they made up on the spot. And they certainly no longer have sacred objects.
Even thirty years ago, in my childhood, even mass consumer objects were sacred, because mass consumption hadn't gotten to the point where everything was replaceable, or at least, easily replaceable. People would still take their toasters to be fixed or sew buttons on their jeans, when these days it's much more convenient and easy to buy new ones. In a previous era, before deliberate obsolescence, even consumer items could have some whiff of "the sacred", if they were looked after and cared for and had the precious labour of their owners poured into them. A basic principle of Chaos Marxism might be expressed: labour is not only the source of value, it is the source of meaning. If I rip a $50 jacket I got at K Mart, no biggie, any $50 bill will get me one that's identical. If I rip a really cool jacket I got for 10 euros at a second-hand store in some obscure country, I might never be able to replace it. If something bad happens to my computer system with all my finely coded information on it, that's a disaster coupled with a nightmare.
So that's what's behind "vintage culture", steampunk, Goth, SCA, whatever - the attempt to create a culture of objects which are totally individual and therefore meaningful, even sacred. To some extent, my musical project - which is dependent on low-budget equipment linked together in idiosyncratic, customised ways - epitomises this connection. What is commodified or "weightless" can never be lost (as long as the means of information reproduction are intact - someone's brain, a piece of paper, a computer, whatever). But physical things which are individually customised and individualised cannot be gotten off a shelf for mere money. It may be lost forever, and is therefore precious, even sacred. So is my music essentially reactionary, attempting to return to an era of "artisanship" rather than glorifying in what is truly weightless, truly disposable? Or is it just an attempt to turn the essence of "me" into something that can't be imitated, that isn't a commodity?
In the current era, nothing is permanent except information artefacts and the Culture. In some weird way, the current era (of relative abundance of mass-produced STUFF) is less materialistic than it ever has been. As communists have said for hundreds of year, morality will come naturally to human beings when the struggle to accumulate "stuff" comes to its end. Of course, this current "false liberation" (for the well-off in "the West", including places like Bangalore and the Green Zone in Baghdad) will all come crashing to a halt when the current economic system reaches its end point, 20-40 years from now. (The information artefacts are only permanent as long as there are freely available storage devices on which they can be copied, and power to run those storage devices on.)
So, we'll have to find a way to make abundance not only generalised, but long-term sustainable. The answer will surely have something to do with "expanding the public" - i.e. minimising how much "stuff" any human needs to own to be a fully participating member of the Culture. Other socialists have pointed out that community daycare and socialised housework would lead to the liberation of women - surely, for example, high-quality public transport and free car share on demand would liberate us from the twin demons of Oil and Suburbia.
But it might explain the big boom in "magick" of the late 90's and why that seems to have petered out now. "Magick" is to the current era of hacktivism, culture-from-below, the Pirate Bay, Anonymous etc. what alchemy is to chemistry - the former being people who know in theory something should be possible (which the rise of mass media and the dawn of infotech made obvious from the late 60's onwards), but going at it with ridiculous "cargo-cult" style tools that don't work. Now, we have something that works.
That's a good thing, in some ways. I'm a music nerd, myself, and I remember 15 years ago having to desperately hunt through the used bins of record stores, trying to fine rare and beautiful music from past decades which hadn't made it to CD yet, and hoping the vinyl wouldn't be too scratched up. Sometimes I'd hunt years for a particular album. Now, I can generally find anything I want with a thirty-second Google; and, perversely, the greater the rarity and obscurity of something, the more likely that someone will have slapped it up on some dodgy blog somewhere. (Less obscure stuff will have been commercially re-released and I'll have to pay for it.)
But it's a bad thing in that, as Walter B. put it, it has put an end to the category of the sacred. The individual as created by late capitalist society no longer has a "homeland", in the way we would have understood it when your average human never ventured more than thirty miles from their place of birth. They no longer have sacred traditions handed down from generation to generation - they have professional gurus who earn an honest capitalist living from their work, who will teach you any practice from any culture you can name, and a few they made up on the spot. And they certainly no longer have sacred objects.
Even thirty years ago, in my childhood, even mass consumer objects were sacred, because mass consumption hadn't gotten to the point where everything was replaceable, or at least, easily replaceable. People would still take their toasters to be fixed or sew buttons on their jeans, when these days it's much more convenient and easy to buy new ones. In a previous era, before deliberate obsolescence, even consumer items could have some whiff of "the sacred", if they were looked after and cared for and had the precious labour of their owners poured into them. A basic principle of Chaos Marxism might be expressed: labour is not only the source of value, it is the source of meaning. If I rip a $50 jacket I got at K Mart, no biggie, any $50 bill will get me one that's identical. If I rip a really cool jacket I got for 10 euros at a second-hand store in some obscure country, I might never be able to replace it. If something bad happens to my computer system with all my finely coded information on it, that's a disaster coupled with a nightmare.
So that's what's behind "vintage culture", steampunk, Goth, SCA, whatever - the attempt to create a culture of objects which are totally individual and therefore meaningful, even sacred. To some extent, my musical project - which is dependent on low-budget equipment linked together in idiosyncratic, customised ways - epitomises this connection. What is commodified or "weightless" can never be lost (as long as the means of information reproduction are intact - someone's brain, a piece of paper, a computer, whatever). But physical things which are individually customised and individualised cannot be gotten off a shelf for mere money. It may be lost forever, and is therefore precious, even sacred. So is my music essentially reactionary, attempting to return to an era of "artisanship" rather than glorifying in what is truly weightless, truly disposable? Or is it just an attempt to turn the essence of "me" into something that can't be imitated, that isn't a commodity?
In the current era, nothing is permanent except information artefacts and the Culture. In some weird way, the current era (of relative abundance of mass-produced STUFF) is less materialistic than it ever has been. As communists have said for hundreds of year, morality will come naturally to human beings when the struggle to accumulate "stuff" comes to its end. Of course, this current "false liberation" (for the well-off in "the West", including places like Bangalore and the Green Zone in Baghdad) will all come crashing to a halt when the current economic system reaches its end point, 20-40 years from now. (The information artefacts are only permanent as long as there are freely available storage devices on which they can be copied, and power to run those storage devices on.)
So, we'll have to find a way to make abundance not only generalised, but long-term sustainable. The answer will surely have something to do with "expanding the public" - i.e. minimising how much "stuff" any human needs to own to be a fully participating member of the Culture. Other socialists have pointed out that community daycare and socialised housework would lead to the liberation of women - surely, for example, high-quality public transport and free car share on demand would liberate us from the twin demons of Oil and Suburbia.
But it might explain the big boom in "magick" of the late 90's and why that seems to have petered out now. "Magick" is to the current era of hacktivism, culture-from-below, the Pirate Bay, Anonymous etc. what alchemy is to chemistry - the former being people who know in theory something should be possible (which the rise of mass media and the dawn of infotech made obvious from the late 60's onwards), but going at it with ridiculous "cargo-cult" style tools that don't work. Now, we have something that works.
2011-03-18
What others say
Herewith an interesting thread on the project to make a compendium of CM postings. The posters here have several comments and criticisms to give on CM. I was advised not to jump into the debate (advice that I ignored, but only the once), but if you want some arguments about whether what we're doing here is of any value, of varying quality, there's the place to get them.
This blog has been quiet lately because I've been (a) gearing up for a political writing project; (b) cleaning my room. There's a hell of a lot of penguins in there, for some reason.
ETA: These are also great. Thanks, Cram, I've put one of them next to my computer terminal at work. See if you can guess which one.
This blog has been quiet lately because I've been (a) gearing up for a political writing project; (b) cleaning my room. There's a hell of a lot of penguins in there, for some reason.
ETA: These are also great. Thanks, Cram, I've put one of them next to my computer terminal at work. See if you can guess which one.
2011-02-11
Chaos Marxism Manifesto #2 - Electric Boogaloo
- There is only one physical reality, and only one real scientific understanding of why the world of human beings is the way it is.
- Almost all human beings live according to "consensus realities" - the totems of their particular tribe. (This is because we are social animals and have never been able to exist as isolated individuals.) They act as if these totems are real, and therefore they are real for them, even though in any objective sense they are fictional.
- Therefore, almost all of what humans collectively believe to be real - and act accordingly - is an illusion created by repetition. You are what you do; therefore, if you act in accordance with the tribal totems you help make them real, even though you might "intellectually" realise they're not.
- The ego - that is, the individual consciousness - is born to help the individual survive in consensus reality. Therefore it is irretrievably and mechanically tied to its particular tribal totems and cannot step outside them.
- Psychic disturbance comes from the ego squishing down the other parts of the psyche in response to its own survival objectives, including service to the tribal totems.
- Creativity does not come from the ego, but from some other part of the psyche outside consensus reality. We might as well say that creativity - and, in fact, everything that makes us "human" in the best sense, rather than robots or apes - comes from another, better world existing concurrently with that of consensus reality.
- Mental illness we can say comes from another, worse world existing concurrently with that of consensus reality.
- It is for this reason that even the more rigorously scientific, materialist analysis of human culture will be incomplete, because it cannot understand art, creativity, religion, madness etc. by its very nature.
- Those who really want to bring goodness into this world have to fuse science and spirituality, as Aleister Crowley said. "Science" in the sense of we have to understand on a physical, rational basis how humanity really works; "spirituality" because we have to accept that humans are not and can never be 100% rational, and indeed so much of what is truly glorious about our species-being works by non-rational rules.
- "New Atheism" is particularly pernicious because it seeks to demolish belief in "God" (i.e. a supra-human consciousness), but by default leaves all the totems of the currently dominant tribe (Consume Mass Quantities, Have A Good Time All Of The Time, We Are The Superior Culture And Deserve To Own The Planet And Tell Everyone Else What To Do) alone, because they're not "God" in the way that they understand it.
- Chaos Marxism says: God is the part of your own consciousness that comes from the better, creative universe. It existed prior to your ego and therefore it really did create your world. So have some respect.
- Our practice is to build, with actual concrete deeds, a new way of being, a new way of living together in this world, which will be sustainable, just. This will include: concrete ways of producing all those things we need to survive and thrive in a better way; practical loving-kindness towards all living beings; healthy ways to tap into the Better Reality and come back to Normal Reality safely (art, spirituality, etc); and political/cultural/memetic activism against the current world order in the service of the Great God Mammon who quite literally wants to eat the planet.
- The totems of the old tribe - of Western capitalist civilisation - are causing us to quite literally eat the planet and shit in our own nest. They can only be defeated by a combination of (a) rational debunking; (b) creating new totems for the new way of being. Humans cannot live without irrationality and totemic thought, at least right now.
2011-02-09
The death of individuality
By happily accepting a description of themselves as "THE HIVE" (or "hivemind"), the massed ranks of Anonymous show that capitalist normality's privileging of individuality as the highest good is a trap. Remember all those TV shows and stories in which the hero realises that being part of some movement that might change the world - or some old-fashioned "community" - is impinging on his precious individuality, and therefore he gives up and retires to private life, and that's a good thing? Remember how Billy Elliot's dreams of being a dancer (and thus getting all the privileges of the middle classes) lead to his father scabbing on a strike and wrecking the whole way of life of his community, and that's a good thing?
All this of course goes back to 1950's anti-communist sci-fi terror of the evil assimilating aliens who threaten the boundaries of our precious individuality, most recently reinvented as the Borg on Star Trek? Before Seven of Nine was "reverse-assimilated" back into being a (white middle class American) human individual, she yelled at Janeway "WE DO NOT WANT TO BE LIKE YOU". I agreed. I always wondered why my sympathies were always with the bad guys in those cartoons. They hate us because we don't need to be individuals.
All this of course goes back to 1950's anti-communist sci-fi terror of the evil assimilating aliens who threaten the boundaries of our precious individuality, most recently reinvented as the Borg on Star Trek? Before Seven of Nine was "reverse-assimilated" back into being a (white middle class American) human individual, she yelled at Janeway "WE DO NOT WANT TO BE LIKE YOU". I agreed. I always wondered why my sympathies were always with the bad guys in those cartoons. They hate us because we don't need to be individuals.
2011-02-06
Even the BBC knows about the serious business
Twenty Reasons Why It's Kicking Off Everywhere. Note in particular points 11-14, talking about the class basis of the new worldwide movements.
A few points:
- Point 1 is mistaken. The "graduate with no future" has been an endemic feature of the Middle Eastern client states of the West for decades now. They were the same crowd who overthrew the Shah in '79.
- Point 3 is also mistaken. Truth and lies now move at the same speed. The speed of a narrative meme is not determined by its truth content, but by how much it makes sense given the pre-existent consciousness of those spreading it. "Teabagger" memes in the USA spread plenty fast. But I suppose the point is that sheer memetics have rendered traditional propaganda obsolete, although people like the Chinese Communist Party and the Republican-aligned think-tanks in the US are keeping up with the play.
- Point 4; I'm afraid "radical Islam" works as a meme just like we mentioned above and spreads the same way. In fact - and this vital - Al-Qaeda itself is a meme, rather than an organisation, which spreads via online videos, flash animation games, etc etc. What is becoming obsolete are vertical bureaucracies - as people have said elsewhere, the platonic form of capitalist domination is not the Pentagon or a Central Bank, but it's Wal-Mart, with its networked forms of surveillance and domination.
- Point 18: "young people believe the issues are no longer class and economics but simply power". Hah. We'll see how long that lasts once the econocataclysm starts to bite. And in some cases - the open-source movement - that is simply not true, as the true interconnectedness of power with economics and class ("class" in the sense of "who does the work and who rakes in the money?") becomes obvious.
- Complication (e) - this is vital stuff. The highest ranks of the media priesthood and the ruling class no longer speak the same language as ordinary street humans. This is a contradiction that needs to be heightened.
A few points:
- Point 1 is mistaken. The "graduate with no future" has been an endemic feature of the Middle Eastern client states of the West for decades now. They were the same crowd who overthrew the Shah in '79.
- Point 3 is also mistaken. Truth and lies now move at the same speed. The speed of a narrative meme is not determined by its truth content, but by how much it makes sense given the pre-existent consciousness of those spreading it. "Teabagger" memes in the USA spread plenty fast. But I suppose the point is that sheer memetics have rendered traditional propaganda obsolete, although people like the Chinese Communist Party and the Republican-aligned think-tanks in the US are keeping up with the play.
- Point 4; I'm afraid "radical Islam" works as a meme just like we mentioned above and spreads the same way. In fact - and this vital - Al-Qaeda itself is a meme, rather than an organisation, which spreads via online videos, flash animation games, etc etc. What is becoming obsolete are vertical bureaucracies - as people have said elsewhere, the platonic form of capitalist domination is not the Pentagon or a Central Bank, but it's Wal-Mart, with its networked forms of surveillance and domination.
- Point 18: "young people believe the issues are no longer class and economics but simply power". Hah. We'll see how long that lasts once the econocataclysm starts to bite. And in some cases - the open-source movement - that is simply not true, as the true interconnectedness of power with economics and class ("class" in the sense of "who does the work and who rakes in the money?") becomes obvious.
- Complication (e) - this is vital stuff. The highest ranks of the media priesthood and the ruling class no longer speak the same language as ordinary street humans. This is a contradiction that needs to be heightened.
2011-01-07
A CM economic aphorism
The correct market value of something which doesn't actually exist is zero.
Note also this very convincing materialist explanation of why "decentralisation" and "networking" have become unchallengable dogma, even among the oppressed. Truly the 90's were the high point of pure solipsism among the Western intellectual classes (only in such an era could The Matrix have been such a huge hit). But philosophers have only interpreted the world, the point is to change it, and one could equally argue that it's been the failure of dialectical materialists to take culture and psychology seriously which has led to their current marginalisation, at times when the world is calling out for revolutionary ideas and leadership.
2011-01-04
Fnord 23, Pen 15
The latest XKCD clearly understands the appeal of cults and the paranoid lifestyle, as exhaustively discussed here.
2011-01-02
A cheery thought for the new year
There are other "states of awareness" than the one you are currently in. To swipe from the terminology of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, there are heaven dimensions and hell dimensions - not separate "realities", but ways of experiencing That Which Is Really Here Right Now. You can call them "higher" and "lower" energy worlds if you like, and that's quite close to the concept of valence electrons, in the sense that you can "jump" from one to another, given an expenditure of energy.
The fundamental difference can be summed up thus: in "heaven", the impossible becomes possible, and "hell" the possible becomes impossible. Thus, "heaven" is of course a higher energy state than what you're used to, and "hell" is a lower energy state. Given this, it should not surprise you that - although you can suddenly end up in heaven or hell for no good reason - it takes effort to remain in heaven, and it takes effort to get out of hell.
The fundamental difference can be summed up thus: in "heaven", the impossible becomes possible, and "hell" the possible becomes impossible. Thus, "heaven" is of course a higher energy state than what you're used to, and "hell" is a lower energy state. Given this, it should not surprise you that - although you can suddenly end up in heaven or hell for no good reason - it takes effort to remain in heaven, and it takes effort to get out of hell.
2010-12-28
The power of love is a curious thing
I have experience of fantasy & its power, on the inside & outside. A very small part of it is real, which gives the rest of the illusion/delusion its strength. The Orthodox might call this a strategy of The Great Deceiver, The Tempter, the Prince of Lies, and see fantasy being used as a device to hold us to this earth, and prevent us realising our destiny.- Robert Fripp (source), emphasis added
Further to the discussion below: the religious might say that there ain't nothing that's completely foul and worthless through and through, because it wouldn't exist. All evil has a kernel of good, that's what gives it its power. And all cults have some real truth and goodness amidst all the bullshit and lies, else no-one would get involved in the first place. Fatso Hubbard was absolutely right that most people hold themselves down with subconscious commands, and Neo is absolutely right that most people live in a prison of their own imagination. But - physician, heal thyself. "Thou art that." The critic gives themselves away in their criticism - which might give you some insight into this Doloras, if you'll note that what she hates more than anything else is hypocrisy, people who say one thing and do another.
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