Several weeks ago, I reasonably critiqued Meagan Day’s offhand dismissal of occult influences in socialist politics. In turn, a positivist Donald Parkinson rejected my idea that occultism has any meaningful relation to a successful movement: "We are all discussing the same reality, governed by the same laws that are ultimately discernible to us, and we can ultimately test our claims against the claims made by others in a universally legible way." I had initially written my letter in pique and somewhat tongue-and-cheek, but I found his critique generous. Fair: I was elliptical, so I will elucidate.

In Day’s original piece, she does ascribe some base utility to occultism and millenarian tendencies in "their observations about the coldness of capitalism and the need for a certain humanistic warmth in anti-capitalist resistance." Both she and Parkinson, however, believe we will not make it to a new world on a false path. But how do we know there is a path? This requires a faith in the world remade, a faith that is not so distinct from those of millenarian movements.

Are communists so replete with social allies and so scientific ourselves that we should scoff at everyone with millenarian tendencies? Hell, the average US voter is a millenarian every four years. And anyone concerned about the methodological validity of millenarianism should consider the immense political success of the evangelical movement for the US right (not to imply that they could or should be won over). As Hobsbawm points out in Primitive Rebels, “when harnessed to a modern movement, millenarianism can not only become politically effective, but it may do so without the loss of that zeal, that burning confidence in a new world and that generosity of emotion which characterizes it even in its most primitive and perverse forms.” Unless we can understand their beliefs as having an analogy to our own, our hope of reaching out to many sympathetic subcultural communities is nil.

Turning to an analysis of occultism: the ideal of scientific socialism, a tenet of Cosmonaut, should first be tempered by our understanding of existing scientific practice. As others have written, most science practiced these days is corporate, and imperial:

‘Believe the science’ appeals to scientific authority without reckoning with the many ways in which the science of the present is not only flawed, but is structured in the interests of the upper class. Because of this, the listener has no way of disentangling the faces of science: science as enterprise, and science as method.

Science, as we know it, produces knowledge that facilitates exploitation and pacification.

Worse, neither you nor I have any ability to meaningfully contest science. If we feel we have necessary critiques to the field of neuroendocrinology, for example, we will need equipment to measure and the space to use it. We will need years of training in experimental design and procedure and the state of the field. We will need rats to kill. We will need copious amounts of research literature to make the symbols we produce legible and legitimate to the scientific community. We will need a stack of names and dates to bludgeon our readers into acquiescence with parenthetical citation. The accumulation of these, I propose, is not available to the working class in the casual way that Parkinson implies. In fact, it is of a kin to the occult: an "aristocratic epistemology," as Parkinson describes it.

The problem for Marxists, though, is how a scientific method can be applied to organizing, party-building, and eventually overthrowing capitalism. To do so will require casting aside the trappings of imperial science that proliferate around us. It is difficult to know what that would look like. Parkinson argues that we can overcome our unscientific state of affairs by looking to the strategy of Marx and Engels “to develop and propagate a deeper understanding of the inner workings of society in dialogue amongst themselves as Marxists as well as with the scholars of ‘mainstream’ or bourgeois society.” But who is doing that work? I charge, however, that few, if any, formations in the US Left approach the level of rigor and discipline that would be needed to label them scientific. The establishment of clear hypotheses, the careful execution and measurement of experiments, the public review and criticism are simply not present (none of these are strictly required for science in its aristocratic form).

Occultism, however, is. I did not mean to imply that all of us should go out and memorize our star signs. Rather, we should understand occultism, or something in its shape, as a natural stage in the development of social movements. And if we want to understand that development (to further it), we have to know those influences as they appear. They are misted forms of organization and collective will that have not yet solidified into deliberate intent. Their influences do not leave when we ignore them. Hobsbawm again:

Lenin’s Bolsheviks owe more than they have sometimes admitted to the experience and methods of work of the Buonarottist-Narodnik tradition, though Marxist anti-ritualism has done its best to establish an atmosphere of deliberate and extreme matter-of-factness and colorlessness even in cloak-and-dagger activities.

That colorlessness is a kind of denial, for example, that the language of symbols and names needed for credibility in leftist circles has more than a whiff of sulphur about it. And conversely, we should understand any revolutionary consciousness produced by these beliefs to be honed, not negated, by scientific method.

I’m going to leave aside the charge that “the professional class is out to kill you” is a myth; I think the channeling of liberal political will into cynical figures like revanchist Gavin Newsom and the resurgent interest in utilitarianism that "abundance" thinking exemplifies demonstrate the US professional class’ satisfaction, even thirst, for mass death. But our central problem in this argument is that, contra Parkinson, “having to argue about bullshit” is the main work of the revolutionary scientist, for they live in a world that denies their vision. We do not have the luxury of liberals, who slept soundly for years in the foolish belief that fact-checkers and news anchors will surely save us all from fascism. Unfortunately for the serious, the scientist sorting truth from bullshit might look much like a haruspex playing with a bull’s intestines. We, and they, simply will not know until they are done.

-Rosa Riposto