Cult of Cosmic Karl Marx

All Marxist “theory” begins by believing it uniquely knows what human beings really are (socio-spiritual beings), into what they have been thrown (a mundane world of property ownership, imposed identity, and suffering through scarcity), and to what we must return (a truly social society that transcends individualism). Because Marxists fundamentally believe they know the true and secret socio-spiritual nature of humans whereas social forces have conditioned everyone else not to know them, they feel uniquely entitled to power for the purpose of remaking man into who he is. 

The ultimate goal of Marxism isn’t economic, political, or social control, as most would believe. Those are merely means to its end. Its ultimate goal isn’t even power, though it worships power as the constitutive force of reality. Its ultimate goal is to direct the socio-spiritual evolution of Man. Socio-spiritual in the sense that Man’s true spiritual nature manifests in his social relations. This is the idea of the “New Man” Marxists always speak of. He is a Man spiritually evolved to remember who he truly is, a truly social and creative being that is one with all others in his species and, indeed, all of Nature. 

This means that the Cult of Cosmic Karl Marx is a form of Cultic Communist Gnostic Theosophy. Ultimately, we must utilize dialectics even with Marx of course, considering Marx alongside an anti-Marx. Most importantly it ought to be acknowledged that Marxism as an ideology is a “cult of personality.” As such, philosophies of action and guiding principles are named after a verb, value, platform, or program. Ideologies of cults of personality are named after a person. Many failed experiments in communist countries were controlled by cults of personality. Thereby, clarifying the example of danger of dictatorship of the proletariat. We consider Marx here with these qualms, caveats, qualifications, and clarifications. He is a thinker of immense proportions and ought to be understood in all his brilliances and cosmic risk for catastrophe. 

Marx and Cosmic Astrology 

True to “the worker” first and foremost, Karl Marx’s astrological chart is dominated by the sign of Taurus, with his Sun, Moon, Venus, in the Epicurean sign of the Bull. Tauruses are most commonly described as hard-working, practical, earthy, nature-loving, sensual, honest, and willful. As a fixed Earth sign, they are known for stubbornness, determination, and endurance. In astrology, the Second House of Taurus is known as the House of Value. It’s concerned with possessions, money, and material things. 

With this new information, snapshots from Marx’s life take on a undeniable Taurean glint: here he is squirreled away in the British Library, steadfastly filling  notebook after notebook with  his investigations into political economy; here he is locating the mysteries of capitalist accumulation in the practical, sensuous activity of labour; here he is struggling year after year, doggedly trying to identify  and track the complex transformations  of value under capitalism. Adamantly grounded in  the material and the practical, Marx’s critique of political economy is quintessentially Taurean.

The second critical aspect of Marx’s birth chart is his Ascendant in Aquarius and his Uranus in Sagittarius. The Ascendant refers to a person’s outward style and how they appear to others around them. Aquarians are curious, creative, independent, unconventional, and rebellious, and Marx clearly displays such qualities in his thinking. His work is characterized by openness, creativity, originality, non-conformity, independence, and individualism. Russian literary critic Pavel Annenkov confirms this in his reflections on Marx in 1846: “All his movements were angular, but bold and confident; his manners directly violated all accepted social conventions.” 

Uranus, meanwhile, represents freedom, innovation, and progressive thinking, and those with Uranus in Sagittarius strive to collect as much information as possible, with a constant need for change and adventure.

The third and last element of Marx’s chart that deserves attention is his Mercury in Gemini. Mercury is concerned with intellect, information, and communication. Under the influence of  Gemini, the sign which means “twins” in Latin, Marx’s thinking is defined  by the desire to learn and communicate. With a speedy, racing mind making connections and moving in many directions, Marx was enamored by all knowledge. Influenced by Gemini, Marx’s thinking, much like the twins, is inherently dualistic, or… dialectical, if you will.

Marx and Cosmic Prometheus 

For Marx and other radicals in the Western tradition, the Greek titan Prometheus represented the liberation of mankind from the ignorance of religion and the barriers it imposed to prevent human progress. Moreover, he represented mankind’s thirst for knowledge, his quest to master nature, his rebellion against the church and other forms of institutional tyranny, his ambition to explore new frontiers and breach into unexplored, even potentially ‘dangerous’ realms of knowledge to further improve and enhance his condition.

Marx is heavily implying that that capitalism, despite its revolutionary achievements and historical progress, after a while actually imposes constraints on the creative capacities of humanity instead of emancipating it. It was a basic precept of revolutionary socialism that socialism will unleash the creative potential of humanity from the barriers capitalism has imposed upon it, and with the dawn of socialism humanity will achieve and innovate in ways that we can’t even begin to comprehend today.

The Russian Cosmists of the late 19th and early 20th centuries thought it was humanity’s Promethean destiny to conquer the flames of the stars because, despite their mysticism, they radically believed that humanity through its ingenuity and technological innovation could collectively develop the means to one day literally reach for the stars. Space exploration should be seen as part of the long tradition within socialism of using science and reason to the benefit of the masses.

Marx and Cosmic Machiavelli 

By linking democracy to resistance and to struggle, Marx enacts a "Machiavellian moment" in political thought. What the two thinkers do share in common is that they are both largely unread by the people who either embrace or demonize them. We’ve all heard the terms Machiavellian and Marxist used to describe people, ideas and events – usually disparagingly, and usually without a proper understanding of what either stood for. This is in large part because those who later adopted their words often changed, condensed or altered them into mere epithets that in no way reflect the depths or complexities they stand for.

They also have in common that they wrote about the conditions of their own times and looked for immediate ways to deal with them. And in their writing, they attempted to expose the mechanics of those politics to outsiders; to shine a light on what had been before them only the purview of the elite. They pulled aside the curtain.

This is why Machiavelli was significant for Marxist politics. Just as The Prince stresses building the consent necessary for achieving and stabilising the prince's reign (while recommending violence be deployed when necessary), Gramsci emphasises the patient work of developing the collective will, putting off a violent confrontation with the ruling class to the point where the modern prince can pull the rest of society in its train.

Returning to the main point, for Gramsci the modern prince was the revolutionary socialist party. Its task is nothing less than winning over the mass of popular classes (the working class, the peasantry) to a force (the historic bloc) is with the potential to make a revolution. Intertwined with this is the forging of a national-popular collective will that successfully challenges the hegemony of the modern day 'traditional class' (the bourgeoisie), overturns their legitimacy, and justifies the socialist transformation of society.

Marx and Cosmic Queer 

The roots of Marxist queer studies go back to the first interactions between Marxist theorists linked to socialist labour movements, on the one hand, and successive waves of homosexual emancipation and lesbian/gay liberation, on the other. The story goes back to German Marxist Eduard Bernstein’s critique in Die Neue Zeit of sexually repressive legislation in response to the 1895 trial of Oscar Wilde, and to the Russian Bolsheviks’ post-revolutionary decriminalization of homosexuality and support for research in sexology. It was the Russian Cosmists of the late 19th and early 20th centuries thought it was humanity’s destiny to conquer the cosmos in a seminal panspermia voyage.  

The near-simultaneous rise of New Left Marxism and of lesbian/gay liberation in the 1960s and 1970s resulted in a new flowering of lesbian/gay Marxist theory. John D’Emilio’s seminal essay “Capitalism and Gay Identity” (1983), linking “free” labour under capitalism to identity formation, was widely and lastingly influential.

Marx and Cosmic Berlin 

Karl Marx: His Life and Environment by Isaiah Berlin is his intellectual biography of Karl Marx. It has long been recognized as one of the best concise accounts of the life and thought of the man who had, in Berlin's words, a more "direct, deliberate, and powerful" influence on mankind than any other nineteenth-century thinker.

Isaiah Berlin's compelling portrait of the father of socialism has long been considered a classic of modern scholarship and the best short account written of Marx's life and thought. It provides a penetrating, lucid, and comprehensive introduction to Marx as theorist of the socialist revolution, illuminating his personality and ideas, and concentrating on those which have historically formed the central core of Marxism as a theory and practice. Berlin goes on to present an account of Marx's life as one of the most influential and incendiary social philosophers of the twentieth century and depicts the social and political atmosphere in which Marx wrote.

Marx and Cosmic Bordiga 

For the fundamentals for a cosmotarian orientation, consider society as a complex organism with various functions and organs that work together to maintain its coherence and stability. The brain of this organism is the collective consciousness that guides its actions and decisions. This consciousness is not the product of any individual or group but rather emerges from the social relations and interactions that take place among people.

Amadeo Bordiga puts forward organic centralism as a model of revolutionary organization that seeks to harness the collective consciousness of the people to achieve revolutionary change. This model rejects traditional hierarchical structures and instead emphasizes the importance of collective decision-making and action.

Organic centralism is rooted in the idea of cosmopolitanism, which holds that all people are part of a single global community and share common interests and goals. In this vision of organic centralism, the revolutionary movement is seen as a living organism that is constantly evolving and adapting to new circumstances. The movement is guided by the collective consciousness of the people and is not subject to the whims of any individual leader or group.

Overall, this theory of the brain of society and organic centralism emphasizes the importance of collective action and decision-making in achieving revolutionary change. It highlights the role of the collective consciousness of the people in guiding the movement and rejects hierarchical structures in favor of a more democratic and egalitarian model of organization.

Marx and Cosmic Pannekoek 

“Social Theory and Revolutionary Tactics”

1.) Solidarity 

2.) The spirit of organization - spontaneous order

3.) Replacing of egocentricity with spirituality of sacred democracy

4.) The essence of a renewed humanity

5.) The self-created order of ‘We the People.’

“The spirit of organization is in fact the active principle which alone endows the framework of organization with life and energy… it continually recreates an organizational form itself because it brings together the men in whom it lives for the purpose of joint organized action.”

“…the essence of a new humanity still in the process of formation… moulding them into an entity with a conscious purpose and with its own right. It lays the foundations of a humanity which governs itself, decides its own destiny, and as the first step in that direction, throws off alien oppression. It is within the [cosmotarian] organization that the new humanity grows, a humanity now developing into a coherent entity for the first time in the history of the world.” 

Spontaneous order, also named self-organization in the hard sciences, is the spontaneous emergence of order out of seeming chaos. It is a process in social networks including economics though the term "self-organization" is more often used for physical changes and biological processes while "spontaneous order" is typically used to describe the emergence of various kinds of social orders from a combination of self-interested individuals who are not intentionally trying to create order through planning. The evolution of life on Earth, language, crystal structure, the Internet and a “freed” market have all been proposed as examples of systems which evolved through spontaneous order.

In matters of social organization, spontaneous order is recognized as a significant and positive coordinating force- in which decentralized negotiations, exchanges, and entrepreneurship converge to produce large scale coordination without, or beyond the capacity of, any deliberate plans or explicit common blueprints for social or economic development.

A degree of order in society is necessary for individuals to survive and flourish. It’s easy to assume that order must be imposed by a central authority. The insight of libertarian social analysis is that order in society arises spontaneously, out of actions of thousands or millions of individuals who coordinate their actions with those of others in order to achieve their purposes.

Over human history, we have gradually opted for more freedom and yet managed to develop a complex society with intricate organization. Some of the most important institutions in human society- language, law, money, and markets-developed spontaneously, without central direction. Civil society- the complex network of associations and connections among people-is another example of spontaneous order; the associations within civil society are formed for a purpose - a self-created order of ‘We the People.’