Chaos Marxism Primer - Principia Discordia

Chaos Marxism Primer
Dolores LaPicho
But it's also because the way the world works makes the lies seem like truth.
Because virtually everyone works for some boss in return for wages or salary, it
makes sense that that is the natural way to earn a living. Because the system is
based on competition and competitive accumulation of wealth, it makes sense
that people should have to struggle against each other to survive. Because most
people don't have a guy with a gun standing over them to obey the law and
behave like good employees, it makes sense that people are doing so out of their
own freely arrived at decisions.
When that anonymous Bush Administration staffer made that snide comment
about "the reality-based community", this is what he meant. Because ideas
come from experience as well as from the TV or from the preacher, whatever
they succeed in imposing on us will look not only rational, but natural.
People will end up justifying it to themselves just because no credible
alternative is presented. In this case, existing reality shapes ideas - but, since
in the modern era so much is potentially under human control - the ideas in
people's heads determine how much existing reality can be changed.
The Italian revolutionary Antonio Gramsci spent 15 years in Mussolini's jails. At
this time, he made the most intelligent comments so far in the Marxist tradition
as to how to fight the war for human liberation on the domain of ideology.
Gramsci suggested that everyone's consciousness contains two contradictory
elements. Firstly, "common sense" - the ideas they pick up from the
"infosphere" of the society around them. Secondly, "good sense" - the ideas that
they come to for themselves from their own personal experience. The experience
of workers in struggle - that the wagelabour relation is exploitative, that only
collective action with other workers can improve their own situation, that - is
more sharply counterposed to the "official infosphere" than anyone else's.
Lenin, summing up the insights of dialectical materialism, said "ideas become
real forces when they seize the masses". But Gramsci made it clear that the
official ideas are "short-circuited" most effectively when proved wrong in
practice - that is, in struggle against the ruling power. There's an old joke that
embodies this insight: "a radical is a liberal who's been beaten up by a cop".
The problem is that the official structures which systematically pollute the
infosphere are getting stronger as more people's experience brings them into
conflict with the lies. Our rulers won't use bribery, they prefer not to use force,
so lies upon lies are becoming their central weapon. Their technology in this
area is approaching a high degree of perfection - anyone who watches Fox News
or has read something on "neurolinguistic programming" (aka corporate magic)
will understand this. So the central question for Marxists and other worldchanging
radicals is how to tip the balance between "common sense" and "good
sense" in favour of the latter in the minds of the majority - the workers who are
in a position to reorient the entire creaking superstructure of human society, if
they want to. It's at this point that the concerns of Marxists and of the new
generation of occultists - in particular, those embodied in the fledgling
Ultraculture movement - coincide. But that's a topic for another post.
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