#and even a bit of lenin | Explore Tumblr posts and blogs

babylon-crashing · 1 month ago

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the psycho'vac

I. In a glass case in the dark in an alcove in the dark in a church in Rome, in Sienna, in Florence, bits of saints mummified like the monkey's paw or Daniel Dravot's withered head sat in the dark waiting for the faithful to pass by, tourists to gawk at, for children of archeologists to be terrified by. Outside the Uffitzi one could buy postcards fragments of Bosch's Last Judgement (1504) reaction against sexuality that was creeping back into the faith – every where lusty, fleshy figures were being torn apart, swallowed whole by frog-eggs, tossed into pits of fire and snakes, onto pitchforks and trees of thorn while the saved, the fleshless, desiccated, loosely built creatures closed their eyes and lay upon the ground to pray.

II.

It starts while you sit in an outdoor cafe near the great clock in the ex-Lenin Square, forever at 11:45, while swallows who nest in the ruined eaves dart low, dark sickle-flashes, sweeping, skimming. Your notebook is open, pen cast down. You sip at the tiny cup of bitter coffee-sludge (when you are at a friend's house the old tatik takes the finished cup from your hands and reads the ground-stains, having you press your thumb into the hot residue, always with the curious shapes rimming the inside lip.) There is a smell thunder in the air. It starts when you walk down one of the city's mud streets, the rain coming down for four days nonstop. You stand in a crumbled doorway, a truck rumbles past full of cabbage heading for the market, spraying mud and gravel into the air. The wave-like clouds come down off the nearby mountains, things urgent and low to the ground, overwhelming the ruined factories and caved-in apartments, the one-room emergency boxes families of eight or twelve had been living in for the last seven years. It starts as you walk down the street. Under your boots, laying in unmarked graves, thousands of bodies, crushed and buried, their calls bubbling to the surface. Waiting for someone to hear.

III.

After the first baby in the orphanage you work at dies, then the second and finally a third, you go on a walk. It has been lightly snowing. Behind the city lays the broken rail yard. Even though there is no penicillin at the rail yard and none of the doctors who refuse to come to the orphanage to heal "things" as they call your babies will be there, you walk without a hat in the late afternoon gusts. You climb up through an abandoned cab engine, the iron sticking slightly to your gloves, its wooden passenger carriages trapped under a fallen wall. The train - its olive green and chrome and red 1940s Soviet art deco - slightly covered in wet-powder. At your feet, in the lee of the cab engine, dozens of empty hypodermic needles. Beyond the cab, the twisted rail lines; toppled buildings and other ruins; open pits of crude oil sunk in the ground; a whole roundhouse with the roof caved-in. It looks like a temple. Something holy, but you who never believed in the sacred or the holy, who saw ghosts as simply cultural abstractions. When you reach the roundhouse you find nothing inside but rubble and years and years of snow.

IV.

Humor. An US Embassy worker, an American working for a Foreign Aide organization and a Peace Corps Volunteer run into each on the street. Soon an Armenian friend walks by.

"This morning for breakfast," the Armenian said, "I had Frosted Flakes with milk."

"You had Frosted Flakes?" cried the Embassy worker,��"How did you get Frosted Flakes in Armenia?"

"Oh, I bought them at the black market store near my house."

"You had milk?" cried the Foreign Aide worker, "How did you get milk?"

"Oh, I mixed the powdered milk with water."

"You had water?" cried the Peace Corps Volunteer, "How did you get water?"

All winter long you were in isolation

watching it grow. You had given up

on the poetry brought in the 40-pound

box from home. You had not spoken

English in over three months, ever since the first

frost coated your pillow – there was no heat

in your hut, the rains turned to ice.

You wore your jacket and thermals and gloves

to bed and gave up on poetry. Reading

a poet writing about wasted sex no less

in San Francisco was a hateful thing.

Reading a poet, in Berkeley, where they

have everything, speculate on her fat

soul was a hateful, too. Under your floor

boards the dead called out your name, until

vodka, Russian water, kept the their

voices at bay. Intolerable, how clear they

came in. All of them complained,

griped, belly-ached in a language

untranslatable until your perception:

It was a cross between Armenian

and Russian that the old women spoke

down in the market.

VI.

It is sad to see these old people one, two, three generations apart from their children. These haughty, thin old people unable to speak of these things anymore, needing always to speak around them, as if at the dinner table to speak with clarity would make the magic happen all over again. To listen to them submerge their magic, to protect their children. There was a woman, nearly a hundred, who lived in a nearby village. As a baby she had escaped the Young Turks' Genocide in 1915, had witnessed the USSR rise and fall and had lost eighteen children and grandchildren in the earthquake. You visit her, she speaks in the ancient language, the old Armenian words, "God has forsaken the Armenians" – and spends her time looking for her god among the graveyards where 50,000 of her people died in 4 minutes in 1988. You will be leaving soon, returning on a 32-hour flight. Numbers. Something is inside you. Parasite. You will be leaving soon, and she has no more use for the living. Her words drop away, become muddled, confused, a lexicon of secrets, you pass by gravestone after gravestone on the way to the surface, thousands of them, until there is no more room for air.

VII.

Of course, you

take it with you.

It grows hideous

inside you, even

after the Peace Corps'

doctors arrived and demanded

that you are Medically

Evacuated -- the ol' Psycho

Vac -- three days before your

twenty seventh birthday, you

take it with you. You have

grown thin now, fleshless,

desiccated. They do not

even let you say good-bye

to your babies, such is the state

they find you in. On the flight

back to DC you sit next to

a woman, Dutch ex-missionary,

who explains that sometimes,

the young men God has sent

to do his bidding go crazy.

They, who fear for the safety

of their souls above all else,

do not know how to take

care of themselves so far from home.

She knows this, she assures you,

she has seen it happen. As

the stewardess pushes the cart

for the evening's meal by your seat

the thing that rests inside you

gurgles once in agreement

and then is still.

][][

Notes.

This is it, my grand attempt back in 2002 to put words to my nightmare.

The poem starts out in Italy because that is where I learned, for the first time, about the religious fever dream that is Hell, when I accidentally saw the LSD-madness of Hieronymus Bosch's art and it blew my little brain at the implications of such a concept. It didn't seem like much of a stretch to link the mummified bodies of Bosch's righteous in that painting with the babies dying under my care.

The, "the one-room emergency boxes," are called "domiks" and are basically railroad boxcars used to house the vast homeless population suddenly needing protection from the cold. Gyumri was never really rebuilt and 30 years later there are families still living in their rusted-out boxes.

#poetry #poem #psycho'vac #peace corps #armenia #gyumri #memories

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soup-mother · 1 month ago

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i really wish lenin had made even more references to Australian animals, like to the point it was a bit obnoxious

*guy who wants to remind everyone he knows what a platypus is* "this ideology is some sort of twisted amalgam, much as the Australian platypus was first thought to be by English biologists"

#my post

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hannibalismos-jaaneman · 1 year ago

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throw back to when you said richard was smarter than henry. im not disagreeing w you but i /gen wanna know why you think that. bc most people in the fandom would say henry (mostly i think because his aesthetic). i personally have never really thought about it.

anon MULTIPLE reasons. MuLTiPlE-

richard was naturally smarter because he attended high school. why is that? henry dropped out in junior year i believe and that year is so darn crucial, you make most of your friends in that time, you become comfortable in your class, with your teachers and within your family at that point. like your real personality and image starts forming in that year. junior year defines your social status and even tho henry was richer, richard still attended high school which means he was just that more emotionally intelligent than henry.

henry was apolitical and socially unaware. richard being from the suburbs had really been a part of the world and not just been a passive observer, unbothered by shit going sideways around himself because his daddy had money. he is canonically a socialist in 80's capitalist usa that's insane, that means he had an understanding of finance and floating monetary systems which was basically being revolutionized in the 80's. the structure of the us economy was changing, there were socio-cultural revolutions going on, feminism, the end of the black panther party, marxist-leninism, over-consumerism, hippie culture, fucked up geopolitics and the sins of the american government, i could seriously go on about how politics must have fascinated him at that time.

also, can i just say that although he dropped out, richard did about a year and a half (i think?) of pre med, that means he had stem related aps in high school and he must've scored well in them as well as his sat to actually land a pre med college.

richard was actually good at greek, that was actually why julian let him in the class besides the fact that he was prettier than all them pretty bois in hampden.

ONLY PERSON IN THE GREEK CLASS WHO GRADUATES™.

he's actually the only person amidst all of them who realises that they are going insane.

he didn't want this life, he actually wanted to be successful in his life but every twenty-something person makes bad decisions.

he's not completely innocent, nope, but he's incredibly inquisitive and he has a way with people. like all of them tell him something that they wouldn't tell anyone had they not been like him. and yeah most of the fandom still thinks that they were trying to set him up for their crimes but there's a separate explanation for why i think that's not actually true and it's voiced by someone else i'll try to link that here.

richard is also indeniably loyal yet extremely shrewd. as i said earlier, he has a way with people and that's because he understands them and unconsciously his attitude changes towards them, making them naturally trust him. like judy and sophie instantly just trusted him to do shit for them and talked to him. like it was the 80's, every other normal guy was a serial killer but they never really gave a second thought about it. same was the case with francis. like ik francis can be a bit of a dummy but he sure as hell fell for richard's- idk- richard-ness.

he was kinda like this weird glue between the nerds and the rest of the college. like soon after richard joins college, the greek class starts interacting with people outside the group, like, sophie, judy, cloke, bram, jack, spike, laforgue, roland. like idt that they would've ever interacted with anyone but each other had richard not come into the picture and that just makes him like a little bit more of the human element in the group and i believe that indeed does make him smarter than not only henry but the rest of the class as well.

#anon <3 #anon asks #asks #my asks #tsh #the secret history #donna tartt #richard papen #henry winter #winterpapen #literati

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ioletia · 2 months ago

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Yesterday I came across a tankie transfem. Which, when you think about it, doesn't really make a lot of sense. Of the states that tankies usually idealize, none of them would allow a transgender person to exist in them. Do you think Maoist China would have been accepting of anyone even the slightest bit outside the perceived normal? No. Stalin criminalized homosexuality; do you think trans people would have been that much more accepted? No. You could argue that under Lenin, the USSR was a bit more accepting of the LGBTQIA+ peoples, but he died pretty quick and was replaced by Stalin- who, again, criminalized and gulaged that shit.

The issue is that authoritarians always go after the weakest groups- such as minorities. They demonize them, ostracize them, and/or end up murdering them. And, unless our gay bombs and dysphoria lasers are in production, the LGBTQIA+ peoples will remain a minority.

Marxist-Leninists or, as they are more easily branded, Tankies, forget that the authoritarian vanguard party are still authoritarian in nature. Before the "one party socialist utopia" pipe dream is realized, there will be blood- and, as history has shown, that blood is often ours (the LGBTQIA+ and minority populations). This is of course assuming that said pipe dream would even allow us to continue existing.

In other words, if you're LGBTQIA+, a minority, a disabled person, whatever, and consider yourself a Marxist-Leninist... Maybe look at the history of that shit. Because theory and practice are two different things.

#tankies #I honestly think some of these people are just trolling #Like they always have some anime character as their profile picture and are almost exclusively transfem or mtf #Mind you #You can criticize capitalism without diving into authoritarian Marxist-Leninism #It's like the party for leopards eating faces #Tankies the authority will eat your face #As I get older I really don't think these pipe dream socioeconomic theories hold any water #Capitalism is here to stay #We can only hope that it tires itself out before the world is fully and completely uninhabitable #But if you are going to delve into these theories...#At least be aware of how fucked you'll be if they actually reach fruition #The only people who will survive the “revolution” are the able-bodies cis heteronormative peoples #Of which there are like two of those on tumblr #leftist hypocrisy #Not all leftists just that specific intersectionality of tankie transfems

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i-am-dulaman · 10 months ago

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petition for that long rant on revolutions here, i really enjoyed the way you laid out your facts and explained the first rant and am not too good at reading theory myself (i am still trying tho) thanks!!

Okay okay so the problem with revolutions is they get messy. Real messy. You get counter-revolutionaries, moderates, extremists, loyalists, and everything in between. One revolution turns into 5, and even if your side wins, its almost guaranteed to have been tainted some way or another along the way.

Take the first french revolution. It started as civil unrest, the estates general initially called for reform of the french state into a constitutional monarchy similar to Britain. Even king louis XVI was in support of this. But extremists wanting a republic and counter-revolutionaries wanting absolute monarchy clashed and things became more and more chaotic and violent. Eventually the extremists won, the jacobin reign of terror ensued, and 10s of thousands of people were executed. Now don't get me wrong, i am all for executing monarchs and feudal lords, but look what happened a few years later; Napoleon used the political instability to declare himself emperor, a few more years later his empire had crumbled, and the monarchy was back with Louis XVIII.

Or take the 1979 iranian revolution. It started as protests against pahlavi, who was an authoritarian head of state and an American pawn. As the protests turned into civil resistance and guerilla warfare it took on many different forms. There were secularists vs islamic extremists. There were democrats vs theocrats vs monarchists. Etc. Through all the chaos, Khomeini seized power, held a fake referendum, and declared himself supreme leader and enforced many strict laws, particularly on women who previously had close to equal rights. Many of the millions of women involved in the revolution later said they felt bettayed by the end result.

Or the Russian Revolution. It started as protests, military strikes, and civil unrest during WW1 directed at the tsar. He stepped down in 1917 and handed power over to the Duma, the russian parliament. This new provisionary government initially had the support of soviet councils, including socialist groups like the menshiviks. But they made the major mistake of deciding to continue the war. Lenins bolsheviks were originally a very tiny group on the fringes of russian politics, but they were the loudest supporters of peace, so they gained support and organised militias into an army and thus began the russian civil war. Lenin won and followed through on his promise to end the war against germany, but its a bit ironic that they fought a civil war, that killed about 10 million people, just to end another war.

Im not saying any of these results were either bad or good. They all have nuance and its all subjective. But the point i am trying to make is that they get messy. The initial goals will always be twisted.

France wanted a constitutional monarchy, they got an autocratic emporer.

Iran wanted democracy and an end to American influence, and well they ended american influence alright but also got a totalitarian theocrat.

Russia wanted an end to world war 1 and got one of the bloodiest civil wars in history.

I cant think of a single revolution in history that achieved the goals it set out to achieve.

But again, im not saying this is necessarily a bad thing, just a warning against revolutionary rhetoric and criticisms of reformism. Sometimes revolution is the only option, when you're faced with an authoritarian government diametrically opposed to change, then a revolution may be worth the risk. But it is a risk.

But if you live in a democracy, claiming revolution is the only way is actively choosing both bloodshed and the risk of things going horribly wrong over the choice of peaceful reform.

So when i go online in some leftist spaces and see people claiming revolution in America or UK or wherever is the only way out of capitalism I cant help but feel angry.

I know our democracy is flawed, and reform is slow and can even go backwards, but we owe it to all the people who would die in a revolution to try reform first.

I know socialist reform is especially hard in our flawed democracy where capitalists own the media, but if we can't convince enough people to vote for socialist reform what hope do we have of convincing enough people to join a socialist revolution. Socialism is supposed to be for the people, but how can you claim your revolution is for the people if you can't even get the support of the people?

So what I'm trying to say is; if youre one of those leftists that are sitting around waiting for the glorious revolution, doing nothing but posting rhetoric online - at least try doing something else while you wait. Join your labour union, recruit your coworkers, get involved in your local socialist parties, call your local representatives (city council, senator, governor, member of parliament, whatever) and make your opinions known, push them further left, and keep pushing.

#thank you anon this waa fun #also when i say i cant think of any revolution in history that achieved its goals #im not counting wars of independence #i know americans call the american war of independence the revolutionary war but its not a revolution l #(for reference - the first rant that anon mentions is a reblog a couple days ago about the communist manifesto)

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mesetacadre · 2 months ago

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Do you know where the stereotype that trots are fixated on selling newspapers comes from?

Saw a lot of people posting jokes about it here and then at a Palestine protest I went to the trots were selling their newspaper, so I have seen it happen in the wild, but I've been curious what the origin of this stereotype was.

PS I've enjoyed reading the articles you've posted, the one about Yugoslav volunteers in Spain was really interesting

Thanks about the articles! I have another translation in the #brigades tag about the arrival of the XI Brigade in Madrid, though it's not as direct a translation:3

As I understand it, it comes from an uncritical application of Lenin's emphasis on the newspaper in his works pre-revolution. It was a very important aspect of agitation because it provided a source of income and was a very effective way of transmitting more complex positions, as well as keeping members and workers informed on the state of the worker's movement, from a class perspective. Nowadays, while newspapers still hold most of these benefits (in my humble opinion), it is neither the only possible way for communicating Party positions nor as crucial. But most trotskyist groups don't take their own conditions into account a lot (totally uncharacteristic for them lmao) and just do literally what Lenin said. Most communist parties with any base wider than a group of friends will probably have some form of newspaper or publication, but trotskyists generally stand out because of how much importance they place on it. One time I was with a trotskyist in a room with other people, he brought out this comically large and thick newspaper, and sold it for like 7 cents to the only person that showed even a little bit of interest.

#ask #anon

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eldar-of-zemlya · 1 month ago

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A few days ago, I realized that I’ve spent my last three birthdays in three different countries—each one a temporary home, but never quite the real home. And since today is my birthday, it feels like the right moment to share my story—a story about growing up queer in Russia, navigating an absurd system, escaping it, and constantly being on the run. It’s a long journey, but one that I hope will offer some insight as I reflect on where life has taken me so far.

Illustrated by yours truly.

I was born in Russia, in a small countryside town that sits right on the border between Russia, Ukraine, and Belarus. Like many families in this region, mine is a chaotic blend of Slavic identities, plus a bit of Tatar heritage on my father’s side.

We come from a long line of Orthodox priests who were repressed and executed by the KGB during Stalin’s regime. The only branch of our family that survived had to be constantly on the run, changing towns and professions to avoid persecution as the children of “enemies of the nation.” I guess that’s the family curse I’ve never been able to escape—always searching for a homeland and always running away from it.

My father was an artist and my mother a university professor. My father was so absent from my life that when my parents separated when I was five, it took me two weeks to notice he was gone. My first question wasn’t even about him—it was about our dog. “Mom, where is Julie?… And where is Dad?” After that, my mother had to return to work to provide for me, so I spent most of my early years at my grandmother’s house, left to my own devices.

In pre-school, I was obsessed with Michael Jackson, rewinding the same VHS of his music videos until it barely played anymore. In primary school, I had a bunch of Tokio Hotel’s songs burned onto a floppy disk by my mother’s colleague, who had access to the new wonder of the time—the World Wide Web. I’d wait eagerly for their music video to play on some random music channel, glued to the screen in our cramped, Soviet-era Khrushchyovka apartment. That’s when I stumbled upon something that started a chain reaction that, in hindsight, brought me to where I am now.

The lower third of the screen briefly flashed a title: “LM.C — Ghost†Heart (Japan).” At first, there was nothing particularly strange about the music video, except maybe that it was from Japan. But when the two “girls” began singing with a voice that was unmistakably male, I realized they weren’t girls at all. There was something captivating about how they embodied both masculinity and femininity so beautifully at the same time. I didn’t even know the word “androgynous” back then, but I instinctively recognized that the same thing that had drawn me to my previous interests was now pulling me toward them.

As soon as we finally got our first slow dial-up connection, I searched for LM.C. That’s when an entirely new world opened up to me—J-rock, Visual Kei, a genre of Japanese music that focused on extravagant stage costumes where musicians often wore dresses and makeup. I was immediately hooked.

And I wasn’t alone. There was a small but growing community of J-rock fans across Russia, even a few in my small town. Some were teens, others pre-teens like me, and even a few adults. We would gather on Lenin Square—the heart of our little town—dreaming and talking about Japan, anime, and J-rock. My mom often came with me to our local meet-ups—not just to show support, but for safety. We were what others called “non-formals”—subculture kids. Our high platform boots, chains, band shirts, and unconventional looks made us stand out in our post-Soviet town, often attracting unwanted attention. People would make snide comments, and the police would sometimes chase us off. Once, one of the guys in our group got ambushed by gopniks, and they ripped chunks of his long hair out of his scalp. Being different was dangerous in the Russian countryside.

I was always open about the bands I listened to, which earned me the label “the weird kid who listens to Japanese transvestites and watches cartoons for kids.” (Honestly, I was ahead of my time. Nowadays, kids get bullied if they don’t watch anime.) Through all of this, my mom was incredibly supportive. I would sew Visual Kei-inspired outfits from fabric scraps and even dyed my hair red once. That might seem normal now, but back then it made me the laughingstock of the whole school. Even the teachers thought I was strange and probably wished they could get me in trouble. But there was nothing they could do aside from making the occasional snarky comment about my looks. Our country didn’t enforce a school dress code, and I was at the top of my class, so they had no grounds to discipline me.

Naturally, discovering anime led me to yaoi and slash fanfiction. At the time, our country was still relatively free, and LGBT stories weren’t illegal yet—considered strange, disgusting, and perverted by some, but not illegal. Somehow, I could relate to the characters, even though I was a straight teenage girl, which was incredibly confusing. I wanted to be a man, have a male body, and yet I was also attracted to men. My confusion with gender and sexuality was overwhelming, and I was stuck in a linguistic bubble, trying to make sense of myself with whatever scraps of information I could find in Russian. I read about “tomboy,” “butch,” “femboy,” and even “fag hag,” but none of it quite fit. Then, one night, I stumbled across the Wikipedia entry for “trans man.” I’d heard of trans women from scandalous Russian talk shows and the occasional foreign film, but trans men? At that time, the Russian Wikipedia article on “trans man” was just a single, pathetic paragraph. I could hardly believe it was a real thing, but deep down, I knew this was the answer I’d been searching for.

People often ask trans individuals, “When did you realize?” But for me, there was no single moment. It was a process of piecing together feelings I’d never had the words for—kind of like that scene in The Man From Earth when John Oldman, a man who’s lived for 45,000 years, is asked by a therapist, “When did you realize you were a caveman?” and he responds, “When I heard the word ‘caveman.’”

As always, I turned to movies to understand myself better. I found a clunky Russian website called KinoPoisk (Film Search), typed “LGBT” into the search bar, and watched every movie that came up. That’s how I discovered Hedwig and the Angry Inch, Breakfast on Pluto, The Rocky Horror Picture Show, Priscilla, Queen of the Desert, and many more. Seeing LGBT characters on screen—characters who felt what I felt—was everything to a lost, confused teenager in the Russian countryside.

Over time, my obsession shifted to TV series fandoms like Doctor Who, Torchwood, and Star Trek. And when Sherlock BBC came out, my mom joined me, and we both dove headfirst into fandom life. She also started reading fanfiction, and before long, she was writing it herself. After all, who better to write fanfiction than a middle-aged Russian literature professor who knew everything about storytelling?

Gradually, my fixation shifted from Japan to Great Britain, and my mom was right there with me. Despite not knowing a word of English, we watched everything we could find featuring our favorite British actors. It became our shared dream to visit England someday, but we didn’t have the money. My mom’s salary was $250 a month, and she was supporting me and our elderly grandmother, who had a pension of $80. But that didn’t stop us. I remember surviving on instant noodles and cheap yogurt for an entire year just to save up enough to travel to the West and see it for the first time.

In 2012, we finally made it happen. We signed up for a cheap bus tour that went through Europe—Poland, the Czech Republic, Germany, Belgium, France, and the UK. It was life-changing. We saw a completely different world, cozy old towns that Russian cities had lost in WWII bombings, and we saw freedom. The first time we flew to London on our own, we bought tickets to a theater play featuring Mark Gatiss. Who would’ve guessed that on that very day, David Tennant, Steven Moffat, and his wife, Sue Vertue, would also be there! I awkwardly approached David Tennant and, in broken English, told him, “You are my lovely Doctor” (I meant to say “favorite” but didn’t know the word back then).

We ended up returning to London every year, going to theater plays with Benedict Cumberbatch, Tom Hiddleston, Andrew Scott, Rupert Grint, and others. We stayed in cheap hostels and survived on McDonald’s, but we were living the dream.

As time went on, LGBT rights in Russia only got worse. Books, movies, and TV shows that even mentioned LGBT topics started getting blocked under the guise of protecting children from “LGBT propaganda.” But what these government suits failed to understand was that if I hadn’t discovered all those things as a confused teenager, I might have ended my life. When the repression began affecting fanfiction writers, we had to be cautious. One girl in our town was sentenced under the new law simply for having a photo of two guys kissing in her VK (Russian Facebook) photo album. My mom was a university professor and the sole provider for me, an underage kid. If it was discovered that she wrote slash, she could’ve lost her job, gone to prison, and I could’ve been taken away. It was terrifying. I watched our vibrant community being slowly choked out, and I knew it was now or never. I had to transition while it was still legally possible, and I could only do that if I moved to Moscow, where the only trans center in the country was located.

After graduating, I deliberately skipped one of the mandatory exams, which made it essentially impossible for me to get into any university in Russia. My mom, always understanding, accepted my decision, but the rest of the family was devastated. I was one of the best students in class, scoring 100/100 on my Russian and English final exams—something that seemed like science fiction (well, I learned my English from science fiction, so…). And here I was, with these grades, choosing not to apply to any university but instead to work in a shop.

Transitioning was expensive—around $1,500 for all the tests and evaluations—but I knew that if I stayed in the countryside, I’d be tempted to give up, settle down, and try to “fix” myself. As Dr. Frank-N-Furter taught me, “Don’t dream it, be it.”

As soon as I turned 18, I moved from the countryside to Moscow. To receive the official F64.0 diagnosis—“transsexualism”—I had to endure a grueling year-long process of psychiatric evaluations and tests, just so I could change my documents and flee the country. By then, I was already passing as a guy, which made job hunting infinitely more difficult. I tried toy stores, cosmetic stores, hotel cleaning… but no one wanted to risk being prosecuted for “LGBT propaganda” by hiring someone as gender-ambiguous as me. After endless rejections, I finally found a place that didn’t care whether you were gay, straight, or trans. That’s how I ended up working at a sex shop.

I could write a whole TV show based on that year of my life—armed robberies, kidnapping attempts, constant workplace drama, and a psychotic manager who was stealing from our salaries. None of us were even officially registered as employees. I’d work 24-hour shifts back-to-back, sometimes spending more than 48 hours at the shop, sleeping on the floor during the three-hour break we got at night. There were zero regulations, but despite everything, I made good money, and most importantly, I finally felt like I belonged.

Our team was a ragtag group of rebels—kids fresh out of high school or from poverty, who had come from all over Russia to the Capital, searching for a better life. What united us was a shared desire for freedom in a country that was becoming more and more totalitarian.

While working, I was constantly attending the “Center of Personalized Psychiatry,” where I felt like a guinea pig for doctors who knew nothing about gender identity issues. It seemed they had simply found a vacant spot to make money off devastated and depressed trans people. At the time, there wasn’t even an official document format that could be submitted to the government to allow a legal sex change. So, I had to jump through every hoop they put in front of me—filling out ridiculous questionnaires that asked whether I preferred pink or blue as a kid or if I played with dolls or cars. They explicitly told me to answer “how I thought they wanted me to answer” if I wanted to get approved for hormone therapy. So, for them, I liked blue, played with cars, and watched football and boxing.

When I finally got approved for hormone therapy, I ran into another obstacle: the financial burden of getting a prescription from the center for every testosterone shot. The prescription itself cost almost as much as the medication. Desperate, I turned to sketchy websites from “pharmacies” that constantly changed their URLs. That’s how I started getting testosterone through drop-offs, which we called “bookmarks.” I’d pay for someone to leave it under a bench or behind a tree. It was risky but much cheaper.

After enduring the year of evaluations, I finally received the long-awaited free-form paper from the center stating my diagnosis and the basis for changing my documents. But just as I was preparing to submit it, the government decided to overhaul the process. They introduced an official format for the document—good in theory but disastrous for my timing. Worse still, they added a new requirement: you had to have had top surgery before you could legally change your gender.

I was devastated. Top surgery had always been a dream of mine, but I was sure it would take years to save enough money—it cost $1,200. That’s when my mom stepped in and offered to cover it with her savings. I cried so much. I wanted the surgery, but I knew we didn’t have the money to spare.

At that time, my mom said something that has stuck with me ever since: “We never have money, but at least we have the life we want.”

So, I did it. But my happiness was overshadowed by guilt. I felt guilty for spending so much money, for leaving my job, and for being incapacitated during my recovery—unable to even help my mother around the house. By then, my mother had already started working at a university in Moscow, and after being able to provide for myself at 18, I suddenly felt like a burden. My mother, however, never saw me that way; she was incredibly happy for me. We agreed not to tell the rest of the family about my transition just yet.

Returning to my hometown in the countryside to change my documents was an experience in itself. I fully expected to be treated with hostility, but to my surprise, the civil workers made no comments. I later learned that I was the second person to transition in my town—the first female-to-male—but they acted professionally. The only comment came when I visited the citizen registry center, where old women, who had probably worked there since Soviet times, were running the show. My mother went with me for support. When I silently handed the new-format document to the elderly woman at the desk, she studied it carefully, then looked up at my mother and, smiling, said, “You have a boy now? Congratulations!”

This all happened during the summer. I was jobless, with new documents, and the next step in my plan was to flee to the West. Around that time, a friend sent me a random ad for a filmmaking program at Tallinn University in Estonia. I had never even heard of this tiny Baltic country before, but it was part of the EU, and the tuition was surprisingly affordable. I never pictured myself making films, but I knew I wanted to do something creative, so I applied the day before the deadline, not expecting much. To my shock, I soon received an invitation letter.

But there was still one more step—changing my foreign passport. In Russia, we have a national passport (in Cyrillic) and an international passport (in English), which allows travel abroad. To change the international passport, I needed a paper from the military conscription office, stating that I, as a newly-registered male, didn’t have to serve in the army and was free to leave for studies. Of course, I didn’t have such a paper, since I had never been registered for conscription in the first place.

This led me to our local conscription office. As soon as I explained the situation to the lady at the desk, she told me to stay quiet and led me to her boss. The military commander, sitting in his shabby countryside office under a portrait of Putin hung on a wall with peeling paint, was utterly confused.

“But I can’t issue him this paper because he was never registered as a conscript, which should’ve happened when he turned 15!”

“But he was a she when he was 15, sir…” his young secretary chimed in, causing the commander to spit in frustration and slam his fist on the table.

They were in a real bind. If I had transitioned from male to female, it would’ve been easy—they’d just throw my case out of the archive. But there were no regulations for how to handle female-to-male trans people.

“Okay, I think I have an idea of what we can do. When can you come back to my office?” asked the commander.

“Um, maybe tomorrow…” I hesitated.

“No ‘maybe’!” the commander shot me a stern look. “You’re a man now, so be specific.”

Suddenly feeling like James Bond, the commander deemed my case his secret mission. The next day, I returned to his office and was briefed on his plan: he was going to falsify my conscription record, making it look as if I had been a biological male my entire life, complete with medical exams and military training. He assigned one of his lackeys to follow me through the necessary medical evaluations, ensuring no one asked me to undress. The doctors, who were in on the plan, discreetly noted what they were supposed to.

Eventually, I was invited back to the commander’s office for the final round of evaluations. With the blinds pulled down and the door locked, I stood in the center of the room, surrounded by a circle of white-coated doctors—urologists, proctologists, allergists, you name it.

“Take off all your clothes,” the commander ordered.

“Well, I’ve seen a film or two that started like this…” I thought to myself.

“Now, spin around—slowly,” he continued.

And there I was, with my ass naked, turning in a circle like some Frankenstein’s monster as the doctors scribbled notes in their notebooks.

“Did everybody see everything?” the commander asked, and the doctors nodded quickly. “Okay, dismissed.”

In the end, I was issued a military ticket marking me as category “B”—not suitable for mandatory military service (probably due to having a cunt, according to their reports), but eligible for drafting in case of war or a military operation.

With that, I received my new international passport and was off to Estonia.

I was incredibly happy. Every day, I would go to the old town square just to sit there, gazing at the medieval towers and thinking, “I made it… I finally made it!” It was everything I had dreamed of and more. No one cared how anyone looked, LGBT people had no restrictions, and I saw same-sex couples walking hand in hand on the streets. This was the “Western dream” I had been chasing my whole life. Yet, something seemed off…

Over time, I started to notice a certain level of hostility from the locals when they found out I was Russian. That surprised me, especially given that Estonia had been part of the Soviet Union and still had a population that was about 30% Russian. Slowly, I came to realize the harsh reality—in the history books I studied at school, there was only one mention of Estonia: “1940—Estonia, Lithuania, and Latvia join the USSR.” One sentence in a history book, which meant nothing to me at the time, encapsulated this entire country’s national tragedy. They tolerated the remaining Russian population, but the deep-seated resentment was clear. However, they failed to understand one important thing—most of those Russians were also victims of the regime, just like the Estonians, Latvians, Lithuanians, Tatars, and countless others.

I vividly remember a moment when I was having a meeting with my new coworkers. After learning I was from Russia, one Estonian girl said, “My grandfather was repressed by Russians during Soviet times.”

“Mine too,” I replied, dumbfounded. She seemed confused. As I later found out, while our governments had their own agendas, their government had theirs. She was never taught that millions of ethnic Russians were also arrested alongside millions of national minorities.

This was something I had never anticipated. For the first time in my life, I wasn’t discriminated against because of my LGBT status, but because of my nationality.

I learned to live with it. I tried to adapt, not speaking Russian in public. Fortunately, my studies were in English, and my course was international, filled with people from all over the world—the U.S., Egypt, Germany, Nigeria, Latvia, Turkey… Honestly, the three years I spent studying film there were the best years of my life. Our professors were amazing, outgoing, incredibly creative, and they became our friends.

Yet, no one in my course, not even my closest friends, with whom I spent every day, knew that I was trans or the real reason I left Russia. They simply thought I was a biological male. After what I had been through in my own country, I still hesitated to share this part of myself, unsure of how they would react. It took a toll on my mental health, constantly coming up with stories to fill gaps in my history. Eventually, it became too much, and three years into our studies, I told everything to my four closest friends. They were surprised, to say the least, but endlessly supportive. I can’t even begin to describe how much I love them for that.

For my graduation film, I made a documentary—something I never imagined I would be interested in. Initially, I had ambitions to become a fiction director, but once I discovered that documentaries weren’t all just talking heads and British-accented voiceovers, I became captivated by them.

My graduation documentary was about my family—specifically, about my grandmother. My family, aside from my mother, still didn’t know I had transitioned. It had been four years at that point. I had a beard, a deep voice, and yet they still didn’t know. Every time I called them, I would try to make my voice sound more feminine (the story was that I got sick, lost my voice, and it permanently damaged my vocal cords). I love my family, and it’s precisely because I love them that I do this. I don’t want them to be ashamed or ostracized from their community. They live simple, rural lives. When my grandmother was born, Stalin was still alive. She had survived famine, unemployment, and disease, so she would never be able to understand this whole “transgender thing.”

The documentary did really good, with this idea, I got to attend pitching with BBC, Al Jazeera, CBC, Vice and many more industry giants. There were so many promises from big film festivals, so many opportunities. By the time I had graduated and was working a well-paid job, I was hoping to settle down in Estonia after four years of living there. Despite the country’s mixed reception towards me, I loved the place. It finally felt like home. A small, cozy home where I knew everything and everyone, with both personal and professional connections. I was learning Estonian, aiming to get citizenship, and dreaming of the future—the entire European Union would be open to me.

And then, on the 24th of February 2022, the war started. I can’t begin to describe what I felt—fear, grief, confusion. It’s too dark of a topic to delve into.

While I was scared and cried every day for my friends in Ukraine and my family on the Russian border, the war began to affect me directly, as a Russian living in the West. Deals I had with film festivals fell through because they didn’t want to seem like "Russia sympathizers" by screening a documentary directed by a Russian. The fact that my film was about the struggles of LGBT people in Russia, and clearly anti-regime, didn’t matter.

One of my friends was spat on while on the tram for speaking Russian to her mother on the phone. Another was refused entry to a thrift store because she was Russian. A close friend of mine, a well-known Russian-Estonian actor, was assaulted in a café while speaking Russian with his girlfriend. A man approached him, demanding that he kneel and beg for forgiveness for “starting the war in Ukraine.” When my friend, in perfect Estonian (he came from a mixed family with an Estonian father and Russian mother), reminded him of the Estonian constitution and its protection of freedoms, the man scoffed and said, “All Russians should have been deported from the very beginning.”

And it seemed like the government shared his beliefs. First, my residence permit was terminated due to my Russian citizenship. When I applied for a worker visa instead, I was handed a notice saying, “You are denied an Estonian visa for the reason of posing a danger to international relations, inner security, and the health of the Estonian population.” It felt like they thought I was carrying some sort of “Putin virus.” And this happened right after my documentary had been featured in the national competition at a local film festival, where I was representing Estonia...

It was the 27th of December 2022. I was given three days to leave the country—to sort out everything from the past four years, my entire life there.

It was then that I fully realized how fragile safety and belonging can be when they rest on the whims of politics and nationality. The dream I had spent years building crumbled in days. I was lost. I had no idea what to do. I couldn’t return to Russia—especially not after making such a personal documentary. The new laws there equated "LGBT movement" with extremist organizations. It wasn’t even safe for me to visit a doctor as a trans person. If they supported the regime, they could easily report me to the police, and I’d be arrested simply for having the body I have. Worse, I could be sent to the war—ironically, I was still marked as a biological male in Russian military records.

With no options left, I packed a tiny suitcase with essential items, left the rest of my belongings with friends, and bought a one-way ticket to Serbia—one of the few countries that still had visa-free entry for Russians. After the war began and the regime tightened its grip, Serbia had become a haven for hundreds of thousands of young Russians fleeing.

I met the new year of 2023 alone, in a strange country, watching fireworks from the balcony of a tractor driver named Stefan, who had rented me his Airbnb in the Belgrade suburbs.

Serbia turned out to be a completely different world compared to my experience in Estonia. I was still hesitant to reveal that I was Russian, but to my surprise, when I did, people mostly hugged me and invited me for a glass of rakija. Serbia has a long history with Russia—we were “brother nations,” and the Russian Empire had helped Serbia a lot in the past. That sentiment carried into how the locals saw Russians. Now, with so many of us in trouble and seeking refuge, they welcomed us with open arms.

The country itself wasn’t prosperous; it reminded me of the Russia of my childhood—shabby, torn apart, politically charged. I loved the people, and they seemed to love me back, but I knew I couldn’t stay. There were still many conservatives, and when I asked a bartender at a local underground gay bar about the situation for LGBT people, he laughed and said in broken English, “Like Russia, but small better.”

My plan was to apply for a German freelancer visa—I was making some money from video editing and color grading on the side, and I had a solid portfolio. I knew political asylum wasn’t an option. When the war began, I had tried to apply for asylum in Estonia, only to be told, “Have you been stabbed for being trans in Russia? No? Then call us back when you are.”

In Serbia, Russians were allowed a 30-day visa-free entry, so I joined what fellow expats called a “visa-run.” Every 30 days, someone would drive a packed minivan to the Bosnian border. We’d cross, stay in Bosnia for 15 minutes, smoke, and listen to stories of fellow Russians who had escaped. Then we’d return to Serbia, and our stay would reset. The local police knew about it and didn’t care—nothing illegal about it. I remember one time when we arrived during the border patrol’s lunch break. A young lady leaned out of the control booth, sandwich in hand, and asked, “Visa run?” When we nodded, she smiled and said she’d finish her tea before stamping our passports.

I lived like this for a year and a half in Serbia. It was nearly impossible to find a job without knowing Serbian, so I picked up small freelance editing gigs. Meanwhile, I was on a long waiting list for a German visa. Serbia had become a temporary stop for many Russians, especially LGBT people, trying to find a way into the EU.

However, after what I experienced in Estonia, my rose-colored glasses were off. I no longer viewed the West as a utopia. Every country has its problems, and there’s no true freedom anywhere in the world. Sadly, I had to learn this the hard way.

Throughout that year in Serbia, not much happened. I was extremely depressed and isolated, unsure of where my life was headed. So, I turned to what comforted me most—movies. I fell back into Star Trek. There’s something about its retro-futurism that helped me cope—I could lose myself either in the future or the past and forget about the present. I also started drawing again. I used to draw when I was a teenager and active in fandoms, but it had never really worked out for me. I still remember the first time I posted my art online—the first comment I got was a bunch of crying-laughing emojis.

Drawing helped me escape. Even while I was posting K/S smut, there were times when I had no money for food and was late on rent, all while my hometown was being bombed almost daily by Ukrainian forces. Immersing myself in the fandom helped me cope with the harshness of reality.

I had almost resigned myself to the idea that I would never be able to enter the West again. But then, one fateful day, I received the email I’d been waiting for—I was asked to pick up my visa. I cried and laughed; I couldn’t believe it.

The move to Germany was difficult. It’s a huge bureaucratic country, but I made it. My story isn’t finished yet—I’m still waiting for my residence permit, and God, I hope I get it. I know a bit of German, and I feel safe here, so I hope to settle down for good. For now, I work on my small business and draw K/S fan art on the side, finding solace in the creative space I’ve carved for myself. I’ve spent years running, surviving, and rebuilding. Where fate will take me next—I can’t be sure. But I know that whatever comes, I’ll face it as I always have—one step ahead, always moving forward.

#lgbtq community #queer #trans ftm #star trek #lgbtqia #life stuff #transgender

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communist-ojou-sama · 8 months ago

Note

I mean you are right that extrapolating past onto future is not the sure way to find truth, but also the fact that after the downfall of empires what's left is states that inherit their functions and strive to become empires of their own is literally entire human history across the globe

You should really read Lenin's "Imperialism: the Highest Stage of capitalism" instead of having me explain it to you but by bit anon, but you see, there is not an Imperialism Switch in people's brains that makes them crave an empire once their state reaches a certain size, imperialism is driven, even in precapitalist times, by economic concerns, of social pressures of limited resources within one's own borders relative to the drive to grow the economy and have more wealth circulating around. Now that we live in a global society, there is no where to expand on a global level, and believe it or not non-Western economists and governing bodies are not animals and understand this. Short term, debt-based finance incentives slant toward eternal war and imperial competition, but powers interested in securing long-term prosperity are actually capable of recognizing that their interests lie in global co-operation, especially if they don't engender a social milieu of feverish worship of the market and it's mechanics. Therefore as far as I can see there's no reason to assume that in the 21st century there is no avoiding an immediate descent into inter-imperialist struggle. Hope this helps.

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libertineangel · 4 months ago

Text

A history & overview of communist groups in Britain

I've done so much reading into all the different splinter groups here, trying and failing to find one worth joining, that I might as well make all this accrued knowledge useful in case anyone wants to know what the situation is like (spoiler alert, it's a shitshow). I'll put it under a cut 'cause it'll probably get fairly long, and I'll tackle the Marxist-Leninist and Trotskyist sides separately 'cause they split in about 1932 and have barely had any crossover since.

I will not be unduly neutral or polite in my assessments, because Mao would call that liberalism and also it's no fun, so get ready to roll your eyes a lot and understand exactly what made Monty Python do the People's Front of Judea bit.

The (ostensibly) Marxist-Leninist side

In 1920, several smaller Marxist groups merged to form the Communist Party of Great Britain, the official British section of the Third International, and immediately set to work arguing with itself about the viability of parliamentarism, eventually adopting Lenin's position on the temporary utility of reformist unions & parties, which led them to spend several years trying - and even succeeding in a couple of seats - a strategy of entryism into the Labour Party, which is a phrase we will all get tired of by the end of this post; when Labour then lost the general election in 1924 it blamed the Communists and banned all their members, which sounds awfully familiar.

The CPGB did gain a fair bit of support & swelled its membership during the general strike of 1926 though, albeit in a handful of specific areas and industries, and then lost most of them again during the Comintern's Third Period because the workers didn't want to abandon their existing trade unions in favour of revolutionary ones. Did a couple of decent things in the 30s, fought at Cable Street and raised a small battalion for the International Brigades; they went back & forth on their stance on WW2 in line with the Comintern, supported strikes, actually reached their peak membership (~60,000, still tiny compared to their European comrades) during the war because they were the loudest anti-racist, anti-colonial voice around who did do a fair bit to raise public awareness of Britain's horrific treatment of India.

In 1951 they issued a new programme, The British Road to Socialism, which is pathetic reformist bollocks that insists peaceful transition to socialism is possible and sensible, and five years later the Soviet suppression of the '56 uprisings caused a massive split that saw a good 30% or so leave the party, causing them to return to the good old tactic of trying to push Labour and the unions leftward.

Nothing material really came of that and the Party declined further with the Sino-Soviet split, after which a minority of pro-China members left to form the Communist Party of Britain (Marxist-Leninist), which has since turned Hoxhaist (also surprisingly anti-immigration, and I'm fairly sure they're transphobic). Throughout the 70s they got increasingly Eurocommunist until even more revolutionaries got sick of them, and in 1977 another split saw the formation of the New Communist Party of Britain, which claims to still be anti-revisionist while also having spent the last 24 years insisting everyone vote for Labour (also from what I've heard they don't even email potential recruits back, so I doubt they'll survive beyond their current old membership, not that they'll be much loss because I don't believe they've ever actually done anything). Tensions between the Eurocommunist leadership and the Party membership continued to rise through the 80s until a final split in '88 produced the Communist Party of Britain, which is still extant today and still uses that silly electoral reformist programme from the 50s, and as an indicator of how that's going they earned 10,915 votes in the London Assembly elections this year, the third fewest of any candidate, less than half even of the fucking Christian People's Alliance (also their youth wing the YCL has marched alongside TERFs up in Scotland, they're the party that one author endorsed over Labour).

The CPGB finally folded in '91 and its leaders founded a series of steadily softer left think tanks, while other self-declared Leninists went on to form the Communist Party of Britain (Provisional Central Committee), which is so small and insignificant I can't even figure out when they actually started; nowadays they are, to quote someone off Reddit, "a small and almost entirely male group of Kautsky enthusiasts and leftist trainspotters with a knack for the fine art of unintentional self-parody, who regularly publish articles defending Marxism against the feminist menace."

Entirely separate from all that shit, in 1972 a group of students inspired by Hardial Baines formed the Hoxhaist Revolutionary Communist Party of Britain (Marxist-Leninist), and honestly I don't really know much about them because nobody online seems to have any idea if they do anything and looking at their website burned my fucking eyes. There's also the Communist Party of Great Britain (Marxist-Leninist) (yeah a different one), formed in 2004 when a bunch of people got expelled from infamous union leader Arthur Scargill's party; they are so rabidly transphobic it makes the CPB look welcoming.

Finally, there's the Revolutionary Communist Group, which surprisingly formed out of the Trotskyist International Socialists (which became the SWP, we'll get to that soon); they're not a formal Party because they don't think the revolutionary situation here is developed enough for one, but they are fairly active in protests and pickets. Unfortunately, back in 2017 they dragged their heels investigating a member's sexual assault and then let the perpetrator back in after a two-month suspension and apology letter.

The Trotskyist side, if you can stomach it after all that bollocks

Modern British Trotskyism descends entirely from the Revolutionary Communist Party of 1944, formed by the merger of two smaller groups at the request of the Fourth International. They split after three years over the viability of entryism into the Labour Party, with the majority correctly seeing it as bollocks. Unfortunately, the majority RCP did fuck all afterward and grew disillusioned enough with the leadership to throw their lot in with the minority breakaway known as The Club, who kicked them all out again and proceeded to never do anything of note whatsoever (they eventually changed their name to the Workers' Revolutionary Party and imploded in about nine different - equally irrelevant - directions in the 80s when founder Gerry Healy was expelled for having serially abused women in the party for decades).

Followers of notable RCP member Tony Cliff (formerly the 4I's leader in Palestine) joined him in his new Socialist Review Group, devoted to Trotskyism but breaking from orthodoxy in favour of Cliff's theory of state capitalism that's silly even by Trotskyist standards that I don't think even the party itself really adheres to anymore. They changed their name to International Socialists in 1962, tried to appeal for left unity and got roundly ignored by everyone except a small Trotskyist group called Workers' Fight, which joined the IS, swelled their own ranks, tried to challenge the leadership and got thrown out again; they still cling onto existence as the Alliance for Workers' Liberty, whose existence I had completely forgotten until I saw a poster of theirs down my road and remembered I was in fact at the London Young Labour conference which banned them for refusing to properly investigate the repeated abuse of a teenage boy in their youth faction. The IS still tried to grow, but expelled what would become the aforementioned RCG in '72, expelled the faction that's now Workers Power in '74 (whom I have never heard of, which at least means I don't know of any awful shit they've done), tore themselves in half in '75 when Tony Cliff decided older workers were reformist and recruitment should focus on the youth, and in 1977 they renamed themselves the Socialist Workers Party. The SWP did do a few decent things, like form the Anti-Nazi League and organise Rock Against Racism, but to be honest those had a much bigger impact on the British punk scene than actual politics. Using charities and campaign groups to jump on bandwagons for shameless self-promotion is mostly what they're known for these days, along with making placards for any protest anywhere no matter how irrelevant they are to the party's platform; their membership and image among the left took a tremendous blow in 2014 after the Comrade Delta scandal, in which they were found to have covered up the National Secretary's repeated sexual abuse for years.

Followers of other notable RCP member Ted Grant joined him (after their expulsion from The Club) in his Revolutionary Socialist League, which believed in entryism into the Labour Party, and in 1965 it split with the 4I (because the 4I thought they were shit) to become Militant. They actually managed to take control of Labour's youth wing and successfully pushed the Party to commit to nationalising the country's major monopolies, but when Labour - on a platform of spending cuts and reformist liberal appeasement - lost the election to Thatcher in '79 they blamed it on the Communists and in December '82 they got blacklisted (which sounds awfully familiar). Took a while for that to sink in though, and Militant-affiliated members actually managed to take over Liverpool City Council through the mid-80s - they planned a massive amount of public works building, cancelling redundancies and other such things that sounded good but they really couldn't pay for, and tried to play bankruptcy chicken against Margaret Thatcher, which went as badly as you'd imagine and embarrassed them on the national stage (even if the people of Liverpool still supported them). Their last act was to help instigate the Poll Tax Riots in 1990, but that was one good deed to many for a Trotskyist group and they finally split in '91 - a majority decided they should finally sever ties with Labour and strike out on their own, while the minority insisted that entryism into the Labour Party really could net real national success if we just keep trying come on guys let's stay on the sinking ship history has taught us nothing!!!

The majority formed the Socialist Party, who have done nothing of note ever, and in 2013 they failed to adequately respond to sexual harassment within their ranks. In 2018 their international, the Committee for a Workers' International, experienced a split which it looks to me was over the old established leadership not getting with the times when it comes to women and LGBT+ people, and the majority went off to form the International Socialist Alternative, with the Socialist Alternative being its British branch; just last April the Irish section disaffiliated with the ISA because of its poor handling of abuse allegations against a leading member.

The minority stayed in Labour under the name Socialist Appeal, under the leadership of Ted Grant & Alan Woods, never really doing anything, and in 2021 Keir Starmer's left purge finally banned them, which was totally unrelated to their decision to finally strike out on their own this year as the Revolutionary Communist Party (yeah a different one). They're a money-grabbing newspaper-obsessed cult who've harboured abusers in five different countries, and to be honest I don't even see why they still exist now that they're no longer devoted to entryism considering that was the entire reason they split from the rest of Militant in the first place, they might as well reunify with the CWI or the ISA but far be it from me to expect insular Trotskyist control freaks to make sensible, practical political moves or to ever get the fuck over a split.

#uk politics #communism

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