#nia frome

[milfstalin]

Why are there so many trans tankies? What is the beef between trans studies and queer theory? This essay proposes to answer both questions at once by identifying homologies between trans (and other) criticisms of queer theory and Marxist-Leninist criticisms of Western Marxism. That queer theory broadly shares Western Marxist proclivities towards pessimism and theoreticism is exemplified in its treatment of categories such as normativity, the universal, the bodily, the virtual, and science. Trans people’s experience impels us to seek further afield for a theory adequate to our situation, rejecting the chauvinist anticommunism that other leftists take for granted, and discovering underappreciated benefits to “sympathizing with the monster.” From this deparochialized perspective, it makes as little sense for a Marxist-Leninist to be transphobic as it does for a trans person to be anticommunist.

The problem of recognition in transitional states is the difficulty of assigning to a definite set an object that possesses some of the features of two mutually exclusive ones, and the harms attendant on failing to do so. Socialism is not capitalism; hence capitalist traits are evidence of non-socialism, and vice versa. On this excluded middle hinges the standard argument against the socialist credentials of any given country: “Look, they’ve still got commodities. They’ve still got accumulation. They’ve still got bureaucracy, repression, and elites. They’re still impersonally dominated by the market.” Western Marxism [1] has found many reasons to be pessimistic about the emancipatory bona fides of Eastern Marxism [2], or what is sometimes called Really Existing Socialism. Lacking the experience of a successful revolution to draw on, it has focused its attention instead on the rather dismal question of why, in the words of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, “men fight for their servitude as stubbornly as though it were their salvation” (38). [emphasis mine]

[...]

When a trans person transitions, are they stubbornly fighting for their servitude? This is one “gender critical” take on trans women, certainly — that male fetishists get off at being subordinated, otherwise why self-identify into an oppressed class? But anyone who’s not transphobic tends to view trans people’s coming out of the closet as a brave act of self-affirmation, an obstinacy in favor of authenticity and salvation. This fundamental optimism may help explain trans people’s relatively greater willingness to break with Western Marxist orthodoxy in their evaluation of Really Existing Socialism.

[...]

The form of Flower’s dig at the trans left mirrors that of the old Trotskyist slogan “Neither Washington nor Moscow”: here it’s neither “liberalised, eclectic anarchism” nor “various Stalinisms longing for states and father figures” but instead a secret third thing, not yet dominant but superior to both inasmuch as it is neither psychopathological nor superstitious. On Flower’s view, those Marxists who still cling to outmoded Cold War campism have fallen prey to a false dichotomy, one that must be refused if we are to maintain a healthy and rational independence of thought. This independence is incommensurate with dogmatic (Stalinist) assertions of the kind “the USSR was socialist” or “the PRC is socialist”, just as it is incommensurate with dogmatic (anarchist) assertions like “no state could ever be socialist”.

What is the trans-theoretical equivalent of this argument to moderation? “We should not be so dogmatic as to say that trans people ‘are’ their ‘true’ gender, nor that they could never be.” Limbo, then. This is certainly one way of denying the law of the excluded middle: setting up shop in it, absolutizing it. The word my therapist uses to talk about gender transition is tránsito, a word whose naive translation from Spanish into English is “transit”. This implies the lovely metaphor of a journey from point A (in my case, man) to point B (in my case, woman). Compare this metaphor to the more abstract “transition”, which has no obvious physical interpretation. It’s understood that a tránsito is going to take some time, that one may be held up along the way (perhaps by some kind of natural disaster, or highwaymen), and that for most of the journey one cannot rightly be said to be in either A or B. That said: journeys end.

Gender performance, by contrast, does not. In Second Skins: The Body Narratives of Transsexuality, Jay Prosser charges Judith Butler (and queer theory in general) with “not explor[ing] the bodiliness of gendered crossings”, through which bodiliness “the transsexual reveals queer theory’s own limits: what lies beyond or beneath its favored terrain of gender performativity” (Prosser 6). This return to the body and its materiality could just as well describe the move from a Western Marxist preoccupation with ideology to the Eastern Marxist preoccupation with the complexities of building socialism after a successful revolution. [8]

[...]

Trans studies has set itself apart from queer theory, to the limited extent that it has, by building on trans experiences, one of which is that gender is not all bad. Another is transphobia. Among the tenets of transphobia are the ideas that

trans people are lying and/or deluded about who we are,

trans people are sexual predators,

trans people are bullies (when we do politics), and

trans people will never “really be” men/women.

Trans people today are almost inevitably confronted with such claims at some point in our lives, often before even transitioning. Point four is the one that most resembles what Grace Lavery calls “egg theory”: “the type of reasoning that trans people use, prior to transition, to prove transition’s impossibility or fruitlessness” (383). Lavery makes the case that there is a trans-antagonism inherent to queer theory’s valorization of universality and virtuality. Not everyone is trans, and transness is not merely virtual (although it often begins that way). The point is well-taken. But particularity is not synonymous with individuality, and problems of signaling and collective action still arise in a world where not everyone is trans: to what extent do one’s own subjective prospects depend on how one perceives other trans people’s success or failure at transition? Trans theorists have been loath to cede any ground to the theory of social contagion by answering “greatly”, and yet trans people have instinctively expressed a solidarity that in this case outstrips theory. That is, there is a general recognition that to deny the reality of any one trans person’s gender-claim is to weaken them all. It is not a matter of indifference to me whether another trans person is misgendered. [emphasis mine]

Much of the Western left has handled the question of socialist transition by saying that Eastern Marxism is lying/deluded about what it is and ruling Communist parties are predatory bullies, but socialism might someday be possible. Michael Parenti, in his book Blackshirts and Reds, calls this “left anticommunism”. He writes: “Left anticommunists find any association with communist organizations to be morally unacceptable because of the ‘crimes of communism’” (48) and “Like conservatives, left anticommunists tolerated nothing less than a blanket condemnation of the Soviet Union as a Stalinist monstrosity and a Leninist moral aberration” (46). Thanks to the internet, trans people cannot go very long without being reminded of problematic, even horrific things done by other trans people. Some of these reports are true, while others are fabrications. They have inured trans people on the ground against demonization, the preferred tactic of professional anticommunists. This has had the obvious consequence of trans people coming to sympathize with monsters.

As Susan Stryker writes in “My Words to Victor Frankenstein Above the Village of Chamounix: Performing Transgender Rage”, a foundational text in trans studies, “The very success of Mary Shelley’s scientist in his self-appointed task thus paradoxically proves its futility: rather than demonstrate Frankenstein’s power over materiality, the newly enlivened body of the creature attests to its maker’s failure to attain the mastery he sought. Frankenstein cannot control the mind and feelings of the monster he makes. It exceeds and refutes his purposes” (248). Here the good doctor works as a perfect stand-in for Marx, or Marxism before 1917, while his remorse is the tradition of Western Marxism, which has fixated on the question of what went wrong. [12] Marxism-Leninism is, of course, the monster. [13] Faced with threats and obstacles that had never appeared on paper, Really Existing Socialist states were forced to make terrible trade-offs and adopt a monstrously long view of the struggle for communism. [14] The party of remorse can afford to have clean hands; those who would survive under imperialist encirclement cannot. Optimism and realism, I said earlier. Survival is possible, but you are going to have to change. [emphasis mine]

[...]

Adorno and Horkheimer are not wrong to observe that there is a monstrosity to progress narratives in general — to adjudge an ending superior to a beginning implies the justifiability or nonessentialness of whatever crimes were committed along the way. [16] Another less monstrous option is to attribute those crimes to other, counter-progressive, forces, but this is inconsistent with a transition narrative in which the individual telling it matures, insofar as it is a sign of maturity to accept responsibility for one’s mistakes. Trans people coming off what may be decades of untreated dysphoria often struggle with self-loathing and, like any recovering addict or depressed person, have to reconcile ourselves to past mistakes in a way that neither cancels them out (which would be irresponsible) nor absolutizes them (which would be paralyzing, another dodge). A nuanced, non-moralizing view of individual errors is easily extended to encompass collective errors, especially when those are found to be anticommunist inventions or exaggerations (as is generally the case). [17]

The basic question is whether the deconstructive method will be applied purposively or incontinently, as determinate or abstract negation. The former, deconstructing the gender assigned to one at birth, or deconstructing anticommunist common sense, answers to a specific telos. The latter, deconstructing all categories of gender and sexuality, or deconstructing all “grand narratives”, is not subordinated to any political project and thus tends to become a sovereign principle and a source of hostility to all particularity in favor of the smoothness of the virtual. [18] Socialism’s validity as a category is dependent on communism being a genuine possibility that is not immediately realizable. If communism is already in effect everywhere in a virtual sense — that is, if everyone is already queer — then Really Existing Socialist states are left with nothing to accomplish, and nothing in particular is justified for them to do — i.e. trans people are merely reaffirming the gender binary. [emphasis mine]

Alternatively, if socialism is a valid category, then we have an obligation to understand it on its own terms. Doing so troubles the self-serving betrayal narratives that have mediated the reception of Marxism in the West. Of course, betrayal narratives are not exclusive to any one tendency — to have one’s unrealistic expectations dashed generally precipitates the search for a scapegoat. That said, Eastern Marxism is much more concerned with tempering those expectations with realism, and thus preventing future “betrayals”, than Western Marxism, for which each new departure from the utopian ideal is merely a license to double down on it and “return to Marx”.

I will highlight three especially villainous figures for Western Marxism, the Great Betrayers, and ask what makes them trans, rather than queer. The first Great Betrayer is Friedrich Engels, who is charged with grossly oversimplifying Marx’s subtle and nuanced thought in the name of popularization, positivism, and Hegelianism (Piedra, Sheehan). As the author of The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State, he is also sometimes credited with founding Marxist feminism (Carver 479). His principal theoretical sin is to have affirmed the dialectic of nature, implying a natural teleology to which queer theory cannot subscribe, worried as it is about who might be left out. Trans people’s horse in this race should be obvious: an undialectical take on biological sex is the argumentative basis (though probably not the affective one) for most transphobia. [19] We need nature to be dialectical, imbricated with its putative other, the artificial, and not simply self-identical. Humanity’s self-making is our whole jam. [emphasis mine]

The second Great Betrayer is Joseph Stalin, who represents Socialism in One Country, the Great Purge, a social-conservative turn against the rights of women and sexual minorities, the cult of personality, and victory over Nazi Germany in the Great Patriotic War. His opposite number is Trotsky, who stands for Permanent Revolution, proletarian class independence, sectarianism and martyrdom. Trotsky’s superiority, once so self-evident to a certain generation of Western leftists, is no longer secure. That Trotsky valued offense over defense, Western Europe over Eastern, and the pure proletariat over prospective class allies have come to be seen as dogmatic and chauvinist (Korolev). Of the modern-day “class reductionists”, most come from a Trotskyist or quasi-Trotskyist background; [20] hardly any are Marxists-Leninists, since these tend to be woke on the national question at least. Trans people, known for having a fair amount of skin in the game, have often responded positively to a version of Marxism that valorizes “committing to the bit”, i.e. sticking it out and making it work however you can, as opposed to others that valorize armchair quarterbacking and a vision of global revolution that cannot survive but by passing the buck and hoping to get bailed out. [21] In the words of Fred Hampton: “It’s not a question of violence or non-violence, it’s a question of resistance or non-existence.” Transphobia makes trans people feel embattled; feeling embattled makes us sensitive to the need for allies and for grit; those alliances and that grit can’t be sustained without a deontology: killing Nazis has to count for something. That Stalin turns out, on closer inspection, to be a much better Marxist than his reputation suggests is only proof that capitalists are better at identifying threats to capitalism than the Western left is. [22] [emphasis mine]

The third Great Betrayer is Deng Xiaoping. As in the two previous cases, Deng kept something precious alive — “But at what cost??” In his case, at the cost of risking the appearance of detransition. Looks, however, can be deceiving. [emphasis mine] I will argue that trans studies has a stake in understanding Reform and Opening-up on its own terms, as a strategic feint in service of long-term socialist transition.

[...]

A queer reading might revel at the way China’s system seems to combine capitalist and socialist features before universalizing this insight and declaring such categories themselves unstable or outmoded. By contrast, a trans reading must tarry with China’s particularity: after surviving the Cold War through a strange diplomatic maneuver, learning the hard lessons of the Soviet Union, [24] and compromising on all but the essentials of socialist governance, China now stands poised to overtake the capitalist and imperialist West, having secured the well-being of its people (through world-historic anti-poverty campaigns), [25] a commanding lead in the transition to a green future (Hawkins and Cheung, Nace, Margolis, Foster et al.), [26] an unprecedented ability to direct the economy towards political objectives (Koss, McGregor), and the ongoing panicked outrage of both ruling parties in the US (Greve and Gambino). This is the result of long-term strategic thinking, a commitment not only to the spirit of Marxism-Leninism but also to the local quirks and ironies of its implementation, as denoted by the term “Socialism with Chinese Characteristics.”

Trans Marxists know we have particular characteristics. We know that this does not obscure our view of the universal, but sharpens it. We know that dogmatism, insisting on something after it’s been shown not to work, is an impediment to flourishing. And we know that socialism has powerful enemies who have made their hostility to transition abundantly clear, such that not taking them (or their bad faith) into account is a moral abdication. As Valerie Solanas once said (getting at the heart of communist morality): “I consider it immoral that I missed. I should have done target practice” (Third). Just as a trans person makes accommodations to the deeply non-ideal social reality that surrounds them, Really Existing Socialist states have had to make accommodations to a deeply non-ideal situation both at home and abroad. These “zig-zags” are sometimes cited as proof that there is no underlying principle but only rank opportunism at work. But this inference is too hasty — survival has always demanded adaptability, sensitivity to one’s environment. It cannot mean pure theoreticism or book-worship. [emphasis mine] The point of contact between the demands of theory and the demands of practice is strategy. “Strategy” is shorthand for everything that lies at the root of Marxism-Leninism’s theoretical monstrosity, whether this is called totalitarianism, instrumental rationality, teleology, kitsch, or “pragmatism and dogmatism” (Althusser 171). [27] Those who reject Marxism-Leninism take issue with its self-certainty and its philistinism, and the way these can be linked to violence. But another way to say this is simply that Marxists-Leninists have not shied away from wielding state power and have had the gall to really believe they can subordinate the (necessarily imperfect) exercise of that power to the ultimate goal of world communism, i.e. that holding power is not mutually exclusive with being communist. Trans theory that ceases to repress its sympathy for the monster must therefore become unabashedly strategic in its outlook.

[...]

Strategy implies economy and an awareness of both left and right errors (prodigality and miserliness). Trans people don’t have the luxury of acting or theorizing like we’re out of the woods; between here and there lies a long march over treacherous terrain. In these circumstances, it would be as foolish to overestimate our resources as it would be to underestimate them. Trans people already have some critical distance regarding the old saw about the master’s tools never dismantling the master’s house, insofar as embracing the signifiers of a gender opposite the one we were assigned at birth implies taking up tools of questionable provenance. If what it takes to dismantle a house is a bulldozer, I don’t much care who the thing “belongs” to. By the same logic, it is supremely wasteful to disdain tools that have been proven to work. This can be understood in two ways: on the one hand, the revolutionary tradition holds valuable resources that we cannot overlook (including, for example, the ineluctability of the party-form and the necessity of its democracy and centralism); [28] on the other, even our non-revolutionary past holds kernels of rationality that we would be remiss to ignore. Thinking like a monster means seeing like a state, the lumbering quotidian literalness of which is anathema to queer theory. To the trans eye, however, there is not so great a distance between realness (realidad) and royalty (realeza). Safety and freedom for trans people can be won only through the constitution of a more just society, and there is no reason to forswear any of the means traditionally employed for the founding of political orders if we are not ashamed about wanting to do so. That is, as long as we’ve defeated the inner voice that tells us it’s wrong to want such things (since it’s probably just our own servitude we’re pining for anyway, right?). [emphasis mine]

Another salutary effect of sympathizing with the monster is that it helps weaken the association, posited by some reactionaries, between imperialism and LGBTQIA+ rights. If we think (like good Leninists) in terms of continents and epochs, it will soon enough be a very bad look to have carried water for US imperialism. The trans movement, as part of the broader alliance to which it belongs, has a responsibility to follow its best instincts and head off, to whatever extent it can, the linking of “gender ideology” with the cultural, economic, and military bullying that has characterized the West’s relation to the Rest. This means being at the forefront of challenging State Department narratives about official enemies of the US (which trans tankies are already doing). It also means shedding the faux-universalist investments of Western Marxism and understanding internationalism in terms of a mediated rather than immediate unity. Trans people everywhere have a stake in the existence of proletarian power anywhere [29] and must not let ourselves be pied pipered into fighting for our class enemies through ham-fisted and trumped-up identity appeals. What unites anti-imperialism and trans liberation conceptually is their rejection of chauvinism, that is, overidentification with the geographical or biological accidents of one’s birth. [emphasis mine] Practically, our struggles are united by the hard work of keeping in touch, of recognizing each other for what we are and acting accordingly. The protocols we develop for waging this struggle, which include (in trans politics anyway) the principle of self-ID, are meant to help us act collectively in conditions where building trust is costly.

Taking Eastern Marxism at its word, following the Great Betrayers out of the Garden, also, perhaps counterintuitively, brings us closer to Marx (reports of whose innocence have been greatly exaggerated). A scientific approach to the problem of transition from one mode of production to another does not consist in merely condemning the (universal) former and praising the (virtual) latter, but in grasping the material basis for the stubborn persistence of social relations we all know need to go. [emphasis mine] The difficulty of replacing one way of doing things with another is easy to underestimate — toy models abound. Marxists who hold state power are the only ones likely to incur consequences for their model’s lossiness and departure from reality. Marx was an inveterate critic of moralism and utopianism on the left, a legacy that has been inconsistently upheld by his followers.��[30] Many of these seem to forget that the commodity form, for example, won’t be abolished overnight; it is a symptom of the current configuration of the productive forces, which must itself be changed, an undertaking rife with troublesome path dependence (Xue 93–121). It is easy enough to demand, say, the abolition of the family or of patriarchy — the much harder job is to figure out how and why these structures have been so successful in reproducing themselves, and to identify which present social tendencies can be aggravated that will undermine the conditions for their reproduction. For trans studies to become properly materialist, this analytical program must be conjoined to the political one of winning consensus and hegemony for gender liberation, since “theory also becomes a material force [only] once it has gripped the masses” (Marx). [emphasis mine]

I leave to others the question of whether this circuitous return to Marx evinces a “longing for a father figure”. How about longing for states? Yes, guilty, I think the proletariat should have state power — is that controversial? [emphasis mine] As to the “crudely religious attitude”, let him who is without sin cast the first stone. [31] We all have moral ideas about who’s good and bad, what’s helpful and harmful, and which evils most urgently need opposing. The idea that there is any part of the Marxist tradition that is uniquely lacking in this trait, whether it be for good — i.e. the self-flattery of those who consider themselves the only true non-moralists — or for ill — i.e. the nihilism that is often projected onto the bad object Marxism-Leninism — is delusional at best, racist at worst. A better argument, something more than name-calling, would try to account for the outsize appeal of “Stalinism” among trans people, and perhaps connect this trend to its expression in the dispute between queer and trans theory. This I have tried to do. He that is able to receive it, let him receive it.

[marxistcomedy]

[komsomolka]

curious how failures in some aspects of socialist states/polyamory relationships (or the very phenomenon of detransitioners regarding trans people) are treated as valid grounds to completely devalue and deny them the moral right to existence. the clear tell of attack mechanisms under which reaction operates against marginalized ways of life.

[ghelgheli]

Stuff I Read In April 2024

bold indicates favourites

Books

Transgender Marxism, ed. Jules Joanne Gleeson & Elle O'Rourke

The Monster Baru Cormorant, Seth Dickinson

Giovanni's Room, James Baldwin

Neocolonialism, the Last Stage of Imperialism, Kwame Nkrumah

Decolonizing Trans/Gender, b. binaohan

Yuri/GL

Even the Introverted Gals Wanna Get Out There! / Inkya Gal demo Ikigariatai!, Kashiwagi Tsukiko

Hello, Melancholic!, Oosawa Yayoi

My Girlfriend's Not Here Today, Iwami Kiyoko

Yamada and Kase-san, Takashima Hiromi

Chocolate and Kase-san, Takashima Hiromi

Kase-san Series, Takashima Hiromi

Love My Life, Yamaji Ebine

My Cute Little Kitten, Morinaga Milk

Short Fiction

The Monkey's Finger, Isaac Asimov

Everest, Isaac Asimov

The Pause, Isaac Asimov

And Come From Miles Around, Connie Willis

Oh Fanged Night!, Hijab Imtiaz Ali [link]

Palestine

Are we indeed all Palestinians?, Mohammed El-Kurd [link]

Point. Click. Occupy. Sophia Goodfriend [link]

‘Lavender’: The AI machine directing Israel’s bombing spree in Gaza, Yuval Abraham [link]

"Man-made hell on Earth", Jeremy Scahill & Yasser Khan [link]

A Mirror of Our Immediate Future, Erica Jung & Calvin Wu [link]

Queer &c.

Is “Gender Ideology” Western Colonialism? ,Jenny Evang [link]

Why are AMAB trans people denied the closet?, Julia Serano [link]

Beyond the Coloniality of Gender: María Lugones, Sylvia Wynter, Decolonial Feminism, and Trans and Intersex Liberation, Alex Adamson [link]

The Problem of Recognition in Transitional States, or Sympathy for the Monster, Nia Frome [link]

Against the Couple Form, Clémence X. Clementine [link] [and coda]

The Abuser's Guide to Transmisogyny, Wyatt Fractal Starlight [link]

The Logic of Gender, Endnotes [link] [and interview]

Rethinking Homonationalism, Jasbir K. Puar [link]

The Child, Jules Gill-Peterson [link]

Maternal (In)coherence: When Feminism Meets Fascism, Joy James [link]

Other

The Campus Does Not Exist, Samuel P. Caitlin [link]

What is an Author?, Michel Foucault [link]

Cuba Libre (1960), Amiri Baraka [link]

From the Nakba to Nasser, The Dig w/ Abdel Razzaq Takriti [link]

A 1962 Defense of the Berlin Wall [link]

The Staggering Ecological Impacts of Computation and the Cloud, Steven Gonzalez Monserrate [link]

[yourbelgianthings]

But particularity is not synonymous with individuality, and problems of signaling and collective action still arise in a world where not everyone is trans: to what extent do one’s own subjective prospects depend on how one perceives other trans people’s success or failure at transition? Trans theorists have been loath to cede any ground to the theory of social contagion by answering “greatly”, and yet trans people have instinctively expressed a solidarity that in this case outstrips theory. That is, there is a general recognition that to deny the reality of any one trans person’s gender-claim is to weaken them all. It is not a matter of indifference to me whether another trans person is misgendered.

nia frome, the problem of recognition in transitional states

(shoutout to @jeannie-youre-a-tragedy for cluing me into this article, yes it's long and i acknowledge i read faster than most people lol but it's really worth it if you get a chance! i've been meaning to read more communist literature and this was great)

[verybipurplerat]

There is a short essay written titled "The Swerve" by Nia Frome and it is easily one of my favorite breakdowns of this absolutely infuriating trope.

https://redsails.org/the-swerve/

can we stop doing this trope

[rishlurh]

WAIT WHOS THE FUNKY FOUR THEY SOUND SO RAD I MISSED SO MUCH FROME HERE

FUNKY ROOMMATES JOHNNY STORM, PETER PARKER, ANGEL AND NIA

KYNA CAME TO SCREAM ABOUT THE IDEA AND NOW WE DON'T SHUT UP ABOUT THEM

IT'S ALL UNDER THE 'THE FUNKY FOUR <3' TAG ON MY BLOG!

[milfstalin]

There are, broadly speaking, two ways to go about defining socialism. One is more rationalist, exegetical — it begins with Marx’s description of capitalism and negates whatever it takes to be its core components. The other way is more empirical, historical — it takes Really Existing Socialist states at their word and seeks to identify what is distinctly progressive about them. Many partisans of the former approach smugly dismiss the latter, and vice versa. The problem for the former camp is that they can never beat the charge of perfectionism, of lacking realism and so being locked into world-weary pessimism and misanthropy, since fallen humanity keeps failing to push the communism button. The problem for the latter camp is that we can never beat the charge of apologetics — we specialize in support to such an extent that it’s hard for us to stay critical or advance the state of the art. Both errors can be avoided only if we can somehow bring both methods to bear simultaneously. To that end, I’d like to show how a more thoroughgoing rationalism, one that takes more seriously the necessity of beating capitalism, converges on the same results as Really Existing Socialist practice.

[marxistcomedy]

[marxistcomedy]

This widespread and enthusiastic adoption suggests that the basic components of Lovecraft’s vision really resonate with the denizens of late capitalism. Why is that? Fear of a brown planet was the template, the raw material, for all of [Lovecraft's] allegedly cosmic horror. The sense of inevitable decay that pervades his work is easily interpretable as nostalgia for an unperturbed white supremacy that seemed to him, as to many others of his time, to be on the way out. We’ve heard these concerns aired a thousand times, that the kids these days are less than human, that they’re destroying civilization, that they’re pitiless and impossible to reason with, mindless zealots enthralled by a false God. It’s obvious what kind of person likes to talk this way. All of which suggests that our first interpretation may’ve been too hasty, and we should instead turn to consider its diametric opposite (in good dialectical fashion): that Cthulhu isn’t capital at all, but communism, as seen from the twisted perspective of the reactionary classes it condemns to the trash heap of history. What happens to the tentacles and the ichor? Anticommunist propaganda is happy to furnish us with images of communist tentacles infiltrating the West — why not lean into that? The ichor, if it’s not abstract labor/money, has to be ideology, which can’t ever be completely insulated against. Unreason is easy enough to translate into more recognizable terms; it’s just dialectics, viewed from the perspective of an undialectical mind. Leftists have always had a thing for chaos theory and non-Euclidean geometries. The coldness and monstrosity of Cthulhu might well be seen as cardinal revolutionary virtues, translations of Lenin’s “patience and irony.” [M]y inclination is to find in favor of the second Cthulhu, for the simple reason that we shouldn’t grant our enemies cosmic eternity, not even as a conceit. If anyone is going to represent cosmic forces from the deep, it should be us, the communists, and not this small, stupid way of organizing production that currently afflicts us, which is ultimately no more than a historical blip. Lenin famously thought in terms of continents and epochs. If emulating him means adopting an Elder God mindset, or becoming cultists, that’s what we should do (I’ve been called worse). The goal of every communist is to make themselves into capitalism’s 𝖉𝖔𝖔𝖒.

from Nia Frome's Two Cthulhus (bolded emphasis mine)

People, especially games, get eldritch madness wrong a lot and it’s really such a shame.

An ant doesn’t start babbling when they see a circuit board. They find it strange, to them it is a landscape of strange angles and humming monoliths. They may be scared, but that is not madness.

Madness comes when the ant, for a moment, can see as a human does.

It understands those markings are words, symbols with meaning, like a pheromone but infinitely more complex. It can travel unimaginable distances, to lands unlike anything it has seen before. It knows of mirth, embarrassment, love, concepts unimaginable before this moment, and then…

It’s an ant again.

Echoes of things it cannot comprehend swirl around its mind. It cannot make use of this knowledge, but it still remembers. How is it supposed to return to its life? The more the ant saw the harder it is for it to forget. It needs to see it again, understand again. It will do anything to show others, to show itself, nothing else in this tiny world matters.

This is madness.

[marxistcomedy]

do you all know about the nia frome essay where she calls deng trans coded. its a really good essay