A Chaos Marxism Primer

[Cramulus]

I was looking to make something I can thumb through before bed, and also something I can share to tell people about the great stuff Dolores LaPicho is doing, so I compiled a bunch of the Chaos Marxism posts into a document.

This doc will probably change. There's still a lot of formatting that needs to be done, and I wasn't sure which posts should be included. I'm waiting for some pointers from Dolores as to which ones should definitely be included. But I basically made this for myself, so I'm not sweating it too hard at the moment. If people seem to dig it, the energy may kick it up to a higher orbit of effort.

http://www.scribd.com/doc/48887820/A-Chaos-Marxism-Primer

[East Coast Hustle]

Sounded OK until it got to the really hippie-dippy shit towards the end (I'm referencing the top post on the blog page).

I was asking myself something along the lines of "hmm, this sounds pretty spot-on so far...I wonder why they had to ruin something with so much promise by calling it something as stupid as 'Chaos Marxism'?"

Then I got to #12 and vomited in my mouth a little, but at least the ridiculous terminology suddenly made sense.

[Cramulus]

I think Chaos Marxism is actually a pretty apt name for it.. Dolores combines marxism and discordia - from my point of view, it's a pretty fresh take on things.

Personally, I've been experimenting with the gnostic reality tunnel; I've been following a trail that Dolores has blazed, but I'm definitely arriving at a new place.

I'm not real big on revolutionary grandstanding or far left ideologies, but I think the meat is that Dolores is showing us how to connect our small day to day actions with a higher cause. Unifying the micro and the macro. Also some good insight on slaying the ego, which is something I struggle with. Dolores' presentation of the nafs shook me up proper.

To me, it has the same vibe as that section in the BIP about how we can't change the world, but we can change our reality, and eventually there will be an overlap and we will have build a new world together.

[East Coast Hustle]

Yeah, I wrote that section and believe me, any sort of marxism was not what I had in mind.

[Cramulus]

well duh 

My intuition is that much of this stuff will resonate with people here if they can get over kneejerk reactions to words like Marxism and Magic. Personally, I find it all very challenging. It comes from outside my reality tunnel, so it's provoked me to think things in new/different ways.

Dolores is one of the few people outside our community to be influenced by the Black Iron Prison, so I don't want to just brush it off because some of the language does not mesh well with our subculture.

ANYHOW - here's an x-post from Chaos Marxism:


CHAOS MARXIST APHORISMS
BASIC CONCEPTS
1.   YOU ARE WHAT YOU DO. If you want to be something else, do something else.
2.   Belief follows action.
3.   You are NOT a Beautiful and Unique Snowflake. Nor are you the Chosen One.
4.   Just because a friendly voice is muttering in your head that You Are The Chosen One does not mean it's telling the truth.
5.   Nothing is more fatal to magickal success than a magical worldview.
6.   Politics, magick, psychology, advertising, propaganda are ALL THE SAME THING – attempts to describe and alter consciousness.
7.   The only true witch or Magus is she who realises that there are no cosmic forces.
8.   To be a witch or Magus, you've got to learn three things – what's real, what's not real, and what's the difference.
9.   There are no mistakes except one – the failure to learn from a mistake.
10.   Destroy your own icons and enabling narratives. They will keep you safe and neutered. Most people would rather destroy life, limb or property than do this.
11.   The world doesn't owe you jack, no matter how brilliant or unique you are.
12.   History will prove you right.
13.   There is no Big Other. Once you have figured this out you have grasped the central point of all revolutionary politics and magick.



THE GOALS OF CHAOS MARXISM
14.   Marxist revolutionary politics seek the coming to consciousness of the vast majority of people in the world – the goal of magick, the tools of politics.
15.   In this sense, the Leninist cadre party is – ideally - a magical order of adepts.
16.   The central goal of Chaos Marxism is to integrate chaos magick and dialectical materialism.
17.   You may have a wrong idea of what being a Marxist is about from the idiots who try to sell you badly-xeroxed newspapers. Being a "revolutionary" is, in most cases, a mass-produced consumer product, just like any other lifestyle. People can talk all kinds of revolution and yet still be completely harmless.
18.   The way you can tell a revolutionary from a political lifestyler is – are they trying to figure out how to engage the masses? Or are they just interested in recruiting to their cult?
19.   For both the Leninist party and the disciplined magickal order, by making yourself available to it you are also used by it. If this offends your notion of yourself as a Beautiful and Unique Snowflake, then you are in the wrong game.

THE ENEMY IS LIFESTYLISM
20.   Chances are, the "tribe" you cling to is a mass-produced consumer product.
21.   If you're entirely hung up on your own "lifestyle", so determined to surround yourself with a fortress of The Right Kind of Stuff that you're incapable of thinking beyond your own self-image, then you're part of the problem.
22.   Consumer culture is the opium of the 21st century masses.
23.   "I am the Chosen One" is the opium of 21st century niche markets.
24.   A lifestyle or a subculture is neither politics nor magick. It is a religion.
25.   People will believe any insanity if it allows them to belong to a real or imagined community.
26.   The logic of the "in-crowd" or the "enlightened few" is precisely what we are trying to destroy.
27.   Civilization isn't about sealing yourself off from the rest of the world and your responsibility to it, and you don't get bonus marks just for being a nice or politically correct person.
28.   The only antidote to mass-produced identities is an Identity of Opposition which is combined with a practice of effective opposition.
29.   "The proletariat" is not a mass-produced consumer product. It is more like a kind of industrial waste. No-one wants to be a wage-slave. But in wage-slavery there is the potential of power.
30.   The Real World of Horrible Jobs is everything that the Corporate Egregore sees as "chthonic" or even the Qlippoth. It's the dirty underside which you're not even supposed to look at. Here lies power, for those brave enough to grab it - but only collectively, not individually.

CHAOS MARXISM IS MATERIALIST
31.   The idea that "ideas shape the world" could only have been invented by people who earn a good living from creating ideas.
32.   If you believe in ideas as the highest good, you will find yourself incapable of effectively fighting actual material evildoing.
33.   Middle-class intellectuals fall harder for propaganda than anyone else – because their entire lives are based on propaganda.
34.   You can stay in your ivory tower and change your own reality infinitely. Until, of course, you need to go to work or deal with anyone but your immediate friends. That's the point where nasty reality cuts in. And nasty reality cuts in more and more the less money and internet access you have.
35.   Blind materialism always has a dirty idealist secret in the background – and vice versa.
36.   Dialectical materialism is the process of seeing which futures are possible, based on the contradictions of the present, and what kind of pressure on what kind of points right now will bring about which future.
37.   There are not two words with a bridge between. There is only one world.
38.   Meaning is material.
39.   Ideas are material.
40.   Ideas become real forces when they seize the masses.
41.   Chaos Marxism is interested in practicality above all.
42.   Your power lies in how much external reality you influence, not in how doctrinally pure you are.
43.   Where is the money and the surplus labour going? Who pays and who benefits? Those are the questions you have to ask in every situation
44.   There is no place for democracy and collective reality-tunnel-formation except in a materialist thought-system.

CHAOS MARXISM IS COLLECTIVIST
45.   The "individuality" you are so proud of is also a mass-produced consumer product.
46.   Once you accept that reality is individual rather than collective, you will never be a threat to the system.
47.   The more I looked at the mystics and the psychonauts, the more I realised that for them "Question everything" meant "Question everything except the idea that individual consciousness is a thing unto itself which can be worked on in isolation".
48.   If you start saying that people are not individuals - that they are created by their upbringing and the role they play in real, nasty, going-to-work-in-traffic society - then you open the door to the idea that only a social revolution can actually solve the real problems with humanity.
49.   Everyone has their own part to play, no matter who or where they are.
50.   No-one will ever be sane and healthy until we are all sane and healthy.
51.   If the subconscious, unseen and cultural levels of the world are the ocean, then magick is all about being able to dive, swim, and get back on dry land safely. Eventually, we should be able to become psychic and cultural surf-lifesavers – a role that will be integral to a new society.

THE NECESSITY OF ACTION
52.   Technology will not solve your problems for you.
53.   The Apocalypse will not solve your problems for you. Global civilization will not collapse in a friendly manner so as to leave you and your buddies unscathed.
54.   Since you are what you do, you will have to DO to BE. There is no substitute for doing.
55.   There is no place to run, and no place to hide. So you will have to fight.
56.   Socialism doesn't fall from the sky. Nothing does, except rain, snow, meteorites, and airplane toilet droppings.
57.   Any course of action which can be summed up in the words "Wait and see" is the wrong one.
58.   As far as religion or magick goes, ANYTHING works if you do it enough. It might not work as advertised, though.
59.   Success breeds daring and failure breeds passivity.
60.   The proper stance for a revolutionary is: pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will. To know which is the winning side, and still join the other.
61.   To use Situationist jargon, détournement which remains on the symbolic can always be recuperated. The only thing which really can dissolve all magic spells whatsoever is the self-activity of the masses.
62.   A Marxist might call a picket line or a militant demonstration "an altered state of consciousness", since it takes place in an area not acknowledged to exist by the dominant paradigm of reality.
63.   This side of the revolution, the revolutionaries are a minority.
64.   Success comes to the strong. The struggle is hard and the struggle's long.

THE PAINKILLER OF THE MASSES
65.   Religion, like any other painkiller or hallucinogenic, can be used for good or evil purposes. It can encourage you to lie around and stare at the ceiling, or kill your family, or it might take the edge off enough to allow you to accomplish something in the real world.
66.   The way cults operate is just a boiled down and spiced-up version of the way in which all authoritarian society operates.
67.   Some of the nastiest religions preach atheism and rationalism.
68.   Judge every school of politics or magick, every religion or subculture, as to whether it enhances and promotes conscious, rational thought and ability to shape the world, or the opposite.
69.   Most people do not base their actions on rational thought related to material reality. They base their action on stories which they partly pick up from their culture and partly make up themselves.
70.   People who base their lives in images and narratives expect those images or narratives to be "morally true" – or "truthy" - not physically true or even logical.
71.   Even if I know on an intellectual level that X is bullshit, if I act like it's real it becomes real for me at least.
72.   People will happily swallow lies if it enables them to maintain the narratives that they live by.
73.   Addictions, whether to chemicals or to abusive personal relationships or whatever - are a natural reaction to the World-As-Is.
74.   Basing your life on images and narratives rather than the hard facts of material existence is much, much, much easier. And it will virtually ensure that you don't ever change anything.

CULTURAL REVOLUTION – A DO IT YOURSELF GUIDE
75.   To put it in magical jargon, we start with the memes and thoughtforms which arise spontaneously from anti-corporate activity, transmute them magically to give them the best chance of survival and replication, and then release them back into the infosphere of the activity where they were born.
76.   Metaphorical, narrative language can help people understand real although intangible forces better than intellectual jargon.
77.   An effective political or advertising slogan has all the same characteristics of a meditative mantra.
78.   The most effective advertising does not say "Brand X has qualities Y and Z"; instead, it presents a meme which associates X with Y and Z and leaves it up to the recipients to connect the dots. All the most virally infective memes require that the readers/viewers/listeners do some work to make some sense of what they are given – they are "pull" rather than "push" marketing.
79.   Make your memes open-ended in possible meaning.
80.   If you're not being misunderstood, you haven't been properly understood.
81.   If you're not being attacked, you won't be supported.
82.   Leave it noncommercial for as long as possible.
83.   If you don't have a party, a mystic order or a scene, you have to start one.
84.   A meme will spread if it fills a niche in the materially existing noosphere.
85.   A successful memetic operation will work backwards in time - in other words, pick a possible future, and attempt to make it a real present.
86.   Invoke often.

HACK YOUR OWN PERSONALITY
87.   The rationality you were taught to survive in this world is often diametrically opposed to the rationality you will need to change it. Drugs or religion may create the "altered state" necessary to build an alternative rationality. Or they may screw you up.
88.   Engaging in hostile banter is not politics or magick. It's a kind of sado-masochism.
89.   Keep your recreational activities separate from your work, or one will begin to substitute for the other and both will suffer.
90.   If you're not hated by a large group of people when you die, you didn't do it right.
91.   Seek out mystical enlightenment, then subject it to the most merciless skeptical examination.
92.   Arguments over what is 'good' rest on arguments about reality, even if they seem not too. 'Ought' does rely on arguments about what 'is'.

THE WORLD AS IS
93.   The Devil (however defined) owns this world. It's his. You can either sell your soul, fight the power, or be irrelevant.
94.   Propaganda and consumer culture fills the gap left by the decline of traditional forms of religion in modern society.
95.   Capitalism destroyed all the old myths, but then had to create new myths to continually expand consumption and win our consent to the system.
96.   An egregore is a magickal term for an ideological construct with a will of its own. We can see corporate capitalism in these terms.
97.   It's no accident that psychology was born at the same time as mass consumer society and universal suffrage.
98.   Corporate Psychology wants to make us functional, not to make us well.
99.   The corporate egregore creates the needs it survives by supplying – including the need for meaning.
100.   Our culture promotes isolation, alienation and paranoia as not only an ideal, but the highest ideal.
101.   The "Green Zone" in Baghdad is the most effective microcosm of the World-As-Is.
102.   Less bread means more circuses – the less food and shiny consumer items there are to hand out, the more lies and spectacles must be provided.
103.   Corporate politics and management are memetics combined with brute force. Memetics are generally cheaper and have less unpleasant side effects than brute force, but need to be continually updated to remain effective.
104.   Corporate (or Black, or brute-force) Memetics works through a barrage of constant mutually reinforcing impressions.
105.   When corporate capitalism had succeeded in fulfilling the basic physical needs of its workforce, it then had to create new needs and desires in order to perpetuate itself.
106.   The corporate egregore will stop existing the instant that the masses stop believing in it. That will only happen once the alternative begins to make sense to them. Your work is judged on how successful you are at making an alternative to the World As Is a real thing to real numbers of people.
107.   Diversion of consciousness into impractical reality tunnels is one of the prime means by which the Corporate Egregore maintains its power.
108.   Sometimes in the World-As-Is, you've got to shake the hand that feeds you. There is no virtue in starving. If you have a job, then you are at a point in the belly of the beast where it is possible to wound it – with help.
109.   There is change in the World-As-Is, once you accept that the World-As-Is exists.

DON'T CONFUSE THE LEVELS
110.   The struggle has to be carried on on three levels at once: industrial, political and ideological. Don't confuse these.
111.   The map is not the territory - that symbols are only useful in so far as they serve the actual purpose on the ground. Ideology is an imaginary solution to a real problem – an attempt to "live in the map".
112.   If you try to live in the metaphor you constructed, rather than using it as a guide to action, you will at best create just another religion, and at worst, create an internet subculture that people will laugh at.
113.   The most powerful magic of all is what causes change on the level of the subconscious mind; on the level of Industry; on the level of the reality which doesn't go away when we stop believing in it.

THE FUTURE
114.   The main indication that the future will be different from the present is that the present is different from the past.
115.   Believing that there is change, that the future will be more than the present with faster cars and smellier air, is in fact a revolutionary act in itself.
116.   Will the corporations collectivise humanity? Or will humanity collectivise the corporates?
117.   Revolutions are not predictable. People don't wear nice colour coded symbols in a real revolution. They get drunk and smash shit up and in all other ways go over the top.
118.   We adopt a reality-view that maximises our effectiveness in causing change-in-accordance-with-will in the real, physical, material world.
119.   The revolutionary organisation must organise counter-hegemonic cultural movements.
120.   We are not initiators of the New Culture - we can only hope to be its midwives.
121.   Culture-from-below is always free, and often illegal – mainly because it subverts the intellectual property laws. The new world will have different definitions of property and reward.
122.   Revolutionary commercial culture is ideally a kind of virus in the system, but sustained on the same logic as the system itself – the ideas contradict the commodity format.
123.   Don't blame the media - become the media. Turn readers into writers, consumers into producers, buyers into sellers.
124.   Propaganda and agitation are transitory, art is eternal – but they can have the same effect.
125.   There is no future for small, independent capitalism. The only way to defeat the corporates is to go through them.
126.   To defeat an enemy you must become symmetrical to it - then we need some kind of "egregore" (or cultural metaphor for struggle) equally strong on our side.
127.   We will make sure the Ghost Point never happens. The 21st century is where it all starts – or stops.

[East Coast Hustle]

see, as hard as I try, I just can't make it past the terms "magick" and "marxism".

Sometimes I think I have even more of a problem with people who KNOW that "magick" is bullshit and insist on using it to describe NLP/self-hypnosis/behavior-changing memes anyway than I do with people who actually think they can shoot fireballs from their fingertips.

I mean, we already have words for that sort of thing. I could probably even ignore the tenuous and somewhat idiotic-seeming connection to marxism if it weren't for that. This Dolores seems like they might be an intelligent and forward-thinking person but they definitely aren't taking their own advice regarding destroying their own icons and enabling narratives.

[Cramulus]

Right - but read Dolores' definition of magic in Aphorism 6. "Attempts to describe and alter consciousness." Most of what we discuss here on the board is magic in that sense. The language is similar to the model in the Art of Memetics - that politics, marketing, and magic are all ways of transforming both the world and the self. (The AOM carefully avoids the word Magic because it's such a loaded term, they probably wanted to avoid this exact discussion)

Dolores expands further in Aphorism 7 - "there are no cosmic forces."

And a magus is somebody who can make sense of these things and figure out what's real and what's not. Dolores isn't telling us what's real, he's saying we need to figure it out. As it says in the Chao Te Ching, "What works in the real world is correct." Who cares what word we use, so long as we all know what we're talking about? There is so much more here than the words "magic" and "marxism".

I feel like we're building this ivory tower. It's difficult to discuss things outside of the PD/forum norms because people get hung up on little things like this. It sort of reminds me of this this recurring discussion I have with an atheist I know - I talk about some aspect of religion or spirituality, and he is compelled to interject that All Religion Is Control. He's so stuck in that rigid idea that it shuts down any other thought. You can't talk to him about these things, he's so wound up for the opportunity to tell everybody what bullshit it all is and how stupid religious people are. It ends up being a very insular position.

[East Coast Hustle]

It's not really such a little thing, though. Why not just call it what it is instead of FORCING the term "magick" onto it? Also, I read further despite how it made my eyeball twitch...it takes a sharp left turn into "Adbusters for the intellectually pretentious", doesn't it?

I mean, as hard as I tried, this:

75.   To put it in magical jargon, we start with the memes and thoughtforms which arise spontaneously from anti-corporate activity, transmute them magically to give them the best chance of survival and replication, and then release them back into the infosphere of the activity where they were born.

is just too fucking much for me to take.

[Cramulus]

The One Key and Nine Commitments of Chaos Marxism (amended draft)
We can sum up in one word the core of the Chaos Marxist approach. Mindfulness. Or, if you prefer, consciousness, or even Gramsci's good sense. Or Gurdjieff's "Remember yourself". The Sufi tradition, Buddhism and modern cognitive-behavioural therapy agree - being able to step back from compulsive thoughts and the compulsive feelings they evoke, to recognize them as not real, is the essence of psychic health and enlightenment. And Marxist theories of ideology insist that the way our rulers impose their control over us is by reification - mistaking illusion for reality, social relations for concrete things, narratives or memes for actual laws of existence. You can't live without an ego any more than you can live without money, but you must remember that it's not real, it's a convention, it only exists if you and others believe in it, and that it's a great servant but a hideous master.

On the micro-level, Chaos Marxism stands for the ruthless "obedience training" of the ego. Imagine that your ego is a badly trained dog - it barks when not necessary, it requires far more attention than it really needs, it humps your leg or otherwise annoys you when you're trying to do something. But you don't need to take it out and shoot it, you just need to teach it that its perceptions are not reality and it should submit to rationality and discipline. You'll all be happier that way. Indeed, your ego is the way it is because it evolved to help you survive in capitalism as it is; and one of the main ways that capitalism makes money in this day and age (and fosters obedience) is by selling pre-fab ego-identities to people. The ego cannot change "what is" because it has adapted to work with "what is". The "Greater Work" of Chaos Marxism, therefore, consists of the following commitments:

1. to learn how your ego works, and how it fits in with the broader culture, the media-industrial complex, the "identity industry" and mechanisms of social control;

2. to discover what your own physical, mental and spiritual needs and joys are, independent of the ego's needs, and to learn to provide for those needs;

3. to commit yourself to the service of Something Greater than your ego - humanity, the biosphere, God however defined, etc.

4. to bring the ego to the service of this Something Greater by discipline and rationality, rejecting all irrational beliefs, compulsions and pre-packaged identities as a snare and a delusion for the ego;

5. to "tune up" the ego so that the needs of Something Greater and your own personal needs can both be served. (If they appear to conflict, then you have misconceived one or both of them.)


On the macro-level, Chaos Marxism acknowledges that capitalism pollutes the cultural/information space, and therefore the psyche of all those subject to it, just as badly as it poisons the ecosphere and thus our physical health. Therefore, we encourage any and all social or political activity which increases consciousness of objective reality and dispels illusions. We suggest that would-be social activists combine their activism with the work of disciplining their own ego. Only that way can you get actual real objective knowledge of the World-As-Is, and what needs to be done, rather than prejudices reflected back off the inside of your skull. And also, only that way can you teach people by example that their own egos are part of the problem rather than part of the solution. This "Lesser Work" consists of a commitment to:


6. serving the Something Greater, as above, by concrete action for a better world where it will be easier for everyone to live free of illusion and slavery, physical, mental and spiritual;

7. practicing compassion for all living things, including yourself, by helping whoever wants to be helped in whatever way you can;

8. putting the lessons learned in the Greater Work into practice, by creating propaganda, art, and magick however defined that calls to awaken the "good sense" of the broad mass of people over the top of the "common sense" of ego and the cultural-ideological apparatus of oppression;

9. keeping the ego out of this Lesser Work by refusing the role of "guru", "leader", or in any other way trying to submit other wills to your own rather than liberate them on their own path to Something Greater.


I'm no guru or shaikh. I can't claim to be doing any of the above with anything other than fitful success. This is a path that I hope might be useful as a framework to others, but it's something I'm struggling with myself. For example, I will know that I have humbled my own ego when I feel free to use my real name on this blog, i.e. when I am no longer afraid of ridicule or abuse. So please, your comments and criticisms, please. This only becomes real when it's real for someone else but me.

[LMNO]

Hey Cram, remember when we were doing the book club on Angel Tech, and people were complaining about A.A.'s use of language, so I started paraphrasing the chapters in terms we could digest more easily?*

Maybe you can take Dolores' core ideas and reword them so we don't get all facepalm-y?











*And that I never finished...  Whoops.

[Cramulus]

ehhh I'm not really interested in rewriting all of Dolores' ideas so that they're inoffensive to this community. I wanted to discuss them, not sell them to you.

I couldn't get through Angel Tech in part because of the vocab -- so I can grok that the terminology is an obstacle to discussion here. I guess I'll tuck this one away for another forum. C'est la vie!

[The Wizard]

I do like some of what this guy says, I can't really accept the idea of forsaking individuality or destroying the ego. I think a lot of problems come from people not actually thinking for themselves, not actually being individuals.

As for the ego, letting oneself become consumed by it is bad, but destroying seems to be bad as well. Instead of hitting one extreme or the other, how about we find a nice middle ground?

[East Coast Hustle]

We all just need to transmute ourselves magically and release ourselves back into the egosphere.

I think that's a pretentious way of saying "go rub one out", but I'm not sure.

[Jasper]

Isn't that "releasing oneself into the used-sock-o-sphere"?

[Captain Utopia]

75.   To put it in magical jargon, we start with the memes and thoughtforms which arise spontaneously from anti-corporate activity, transmute them magically to give them the best chance of survival and replication, and then release them back into the infosphere of the activity where they were born.

is just too fucking much for me to take.

Is that saying much more than take the default reactions people have to X, and use that as a basis to put conscious effort into culture-jamming X?  E.g. people get pissed at adverts being played louder than the shows, so a story about kids suffering hearing loss as a result may have legs.

I dunno, maybe it's because I come from a programming background, but I'm happy using different languages to express different ideas.. the translation isn't that hard if you don't allow yourself to get offended by the flowery jargon.