This blog post is part of “Make It Real,” a fifth promotion originally inspired by the three I did in 2024 with Harmony Corrupted and Romantic Rose: “Brace for Impact,” “Searching for Secrets” and “Deal with the Devil.” The first promotion was meant to promote and provide Volume Two, part one’s individual pieces for easy public viewing (it has since become a full, published book module: the Poetry Module). “Make It Real” shall do the same, but with Volume One/the manifesto (versus “The Total Codex” promoting Volume Zero/the thesis volume). As usual, this promotion was written, illustrated and invigilated by me as part of my larger Sex Positivity (2023) book series.
Click here to see “Make It Real’s” Table of Contents and Full Disclaimer.
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Concerning Buggy Images: Sometimes the images on my site don’t always load and you get a little white-and-green placeholder symbol, instead. Sometimes I use a plugin for loading multiple images in one spot, called Envira Gallery, and not all of the images will load (resulting in blank white squares you can still right-click on). I‘ve optimized most of the images on my site, so I think it’s a server issue? Not sure. You should still be able to access the unloaded image by clicking on the placeholder/right-clicking on the white square (sometimes you have to delete the “?ssl=1” bit at the end of the url). Barring that, completed volumes will always contain all of the images, whose PDFs you can always download on my 1-page promo.
Gothic Communism, a sample essay: “Cornholing the Corn Lady—Ghostbusters: Afterlife and Empire”
Edward Said’s book Culture and Imperialism was well received in the United States, but provoked some bad-tempered responses in the United Kingdom […] The reason for the bad temper, one might suspect, was that as the imperial power principally targeted in his book’s historical discussions there remained a legacy of colonists’ guilt in Great Britain. Particular exception was taken by British commentators to Said’s chapter, “Jane Austen and Empire,” and its triumphant conclusion: “Yes, Austen belonged to a slave-owning society.”
—John Sutherland, “Where Does Sir Thomas’ Wealth Come From?” Is Heathcliff A Murderer? (1996)
Picking up where “Trauma Writing/Artwork (opening and “Healing from Rape”)” left off…
Note: I’ve left this essay exactly as I wrote it, back in 2023, but supplied some addendums to “Paid Labor” directly after it. —Perse, 4/8/2025
This Gothic-Communist essay demonstrates me as the unideal reader of neoliberal canon. It was written in the spirit of fun, using the Six Rs and Four Gs to critique the Gothic mode of Jason Reitman’s canonical expression and a debate of sorts with ghosts of different kinds (and before I had coined ludo-Gothic BDSM, focused more on camp). Classic works are one such ghost, and one that must be invoked to say whatever one wants to say. But there are also the spectres of oppression and of Marx that can be invoked in a variety of ways: in the figurative language of dialectical-material analysis and historical materialism, but also thoroughly Gothic dialogics Sex Positivity prides itself at assembling and navigating. If the zombified spirit of Ronald Reagan is “alive” in 2023, then Angela Carter’s fateful, 1974 words ring truer than ever: “We live in Gothic times.” Allow me, then, a chance to express that now—by barbequing a sacred foal begot from the neoliberal 1980s: Ghostbusters: Afterlife.
Before we do, a note about Austen and Said’s bone to pick with her (as she is someone I’ve defended already in my thesis argument). My essay is iconoclastic, its proletarian praxis speaking to speaks to an enjoyment of the critical process on par with Edward Said’s “pleasures of exile.” Such a concept is hardly new, in the sense that Said riffed on Austen, “farting in Britain’s general direction” to say something larger about that country’s colonial guilt through their hypercanonical literature mom. That was new for the time (and useful to Gothic Communism for us). My essay does something similar in opposition to Gothic canon as something that is very much alive and well, and far less “quiet” than Austen’s Mansfield Park. Said is forced into, as John Sutherland puts it, “the awkward speculation, ‘Sir Thomas’s property in the Caribbean would have had to be a sugar plantation maintained by slave labour (not abolished until the 1830s)'” and the “dead silence [that] pretty well describes Mansfield Park’s dealing with Antigua” (ibid.); the Gothic is far louder because it’s working with a kind of language whose “silence” is anything but quiet.
Even with Said debating Austen’s “ghost” minus Gothic poetics, there’s considerable merit to arguing with spectres and the unspoken (re: Castricano’s cryptomimesis, or “writing with ghosts,” which I expanded to “writing with monsters”). Indeed, doing so is a time-honored activity that largely makes up what the Gothic is. And while Said’s dialogs are certainly not without weight, they’re also nearly two centuries further along than Austen’s. To that, it’s certainly true there’s a complete lack of urgency in Austen’s novel surrounding any kind of modern importance that Said assigns to postcolonial concerns. These would have been absent in Austen’s time, with her focusing entirely on the struggles of a rising class of property that was quickly becoming a class of people in a slave-owning society through a particular novelistic convention: white women inside the novel of manners. It shouldn’t really be surprising that she kept mum on certain topics; e.g., her pointedly roundabout and indirect conversation between Eleanor Dashwood and Colonel Brandon showcasing how neither can bring themselves to utter the word “duel” in polite company. But if her stories are any clue, she was profoundly apt at navigating the expanding-if-sequestered place of white women in an incredibly material world, and not without a considerable degree of irony (“It is a truth universally acknowledged…”) and dialectical-material analysis behind a veil that all women in her time were expected to wear by tone-policing white men; furthermore, as we have already explored in Volume Zero, Austen certainly wasn’t above critiquing the open, if deliberately moderate, bigotries of Ann Radcliffe’s own Gothic Orientalism (the further east you go, the darker it gets) when writing Northanger Abbey (written in 1803, published in 1817 after Austen’s death).
We shall press these Gothic voicings to our advantage in this essay. My point about Said is that I think he—ever in a hurry to outline the very-real and ever-pressing presence of American Imperialism in the Middle East—thoroughly underestimates/discounts the ubiquity (and degree) of the powerful forces that Austen was writing under as a white woman. It would be a mistake to lump Austen in with so many of her imitators and contemporaries, in part because her Mansfield protagonist, Sutherland rightly points out, “belongs to the Clapham Sect of evangelical Christianity, which hated plays and light morality only less slightly than it loathed slavery” (ibid.). Said’s overall conclusions certainly aren’t wrong about Imperialism, but his assertions about Austen are largely words put in her mouth by his pen (kinky), which he then argues with to make his point. The problem is, he assumes her silence to be indicative of a particular kind of guilt, when Austen’s shame at writing at all became a matter of legend after her death: “How could I possibly join them on to the little bit (two inches wide) of Ivory on which I work with so fine a Brush, as produces little effect after much Labour?” (source: Zoe Louca-Richards’ “Two Inches of Ivory: A New(ish) Jane Austen Acquisition,” 2020).
(artist: Touminnn)
That’s the problem with ghosts in regards to trauma writing and illustrations: they yield a fictitious, imaginary component to unspeakable systemic abuse supplied by the critic seeking to give said abuse voice, and Said’s invention (as with many invocations of Austen) is not entirely of the woman herself but her reputation and the spirit (and shackles) of the British Empire stretching into Pax Americana following the so-called “end of history” in 1991 (Culture and Imperialism and Spectres of Marx were both written in 1993). As with all Gothic histories, though, there’s a considerable amount of truth to had through a familiarity with what is being said, unsaid, or supplied through various cryptonymies that indicate a presence of trauma.
Keep this in mind as we proceed onto Ghostbusters, picking a bone with how American neoliberalism and Hollywood abuse Gothic poetics in order to uphold the status quo in fairly standard regressions. For them, and for Radcliffe as a spirit to evoke married to global Capitalism, ghosts are things to summon, feel anxious/fearful-fascinated about (through the ghost of the counterfeit), then exorcise in defense of the status quo using the process of abjection—to cut off Medusa’s “head,” in so many words, of which invoke a manufactured imaginary past that upholds a particular place and time as sacred: the conservative 1980s as copy of itself wherein copies of the imaginary past are reduplicated now to send us spiraling backwards into the self-same myopia; i.e., the scared, commercial-minded brains of white women, but especially the vulnerable consuming public inheriting the commodified fears of said women as taken from oppressed groups (and nature), repackaged, and sold back to the middle class.
These poetics are things to reclaim through our own pedagogy, which requires dialectically-materially scrutinizing “Ghostbusters: Afterlife and Empire.” The film, then, offers up its own Medusa to behead, commenting as it does so on the veneration of old clichés within bourgeois praxis and Cartesian thought as parts of the larger Gothic mode: Halloween as a canonical ghost of itself that is conjured up and vanquished in the same breath. Ghostbusters: Afterlife offers up blind war pastiche to canonically requote of an older version of the same basic franchise and its ghostly Medusa. This time around, Gozer—a ghostly “corn lady” (of the harvest, Halloween)—is coercively demonized, blamed for the downfall of all things by a mad “dirt farmer” whose own selfish legacy is restored to greatness when Gozer is exposed as “real.” Made material, she must be stopped—if not at her made-up temple than in the cornfields she imbues with ghostly menace (questioning elite sovereignty by challenging middle-class essentialism regarding these fields and their assorted yields). Her subsequent summoning and slaughter is hauntological torture porn; i.e., the fascist myth of the conspiratorial Great Foe both weak and strong confirmed and validated during her ritual sacrifice by the ghost police: the Ghostbusters. They’re playing with spectres of the Medusa so they can pimp her!
(artist: Alex Milne)
Thoroughly sexist, these Enlightenment pillars of reason can so barely get past Gozer’s short, dyke-ish hair that anything else is unimaginable: “Hey, flap top!” As such, they see Gozer exclusively as an agent of chaos upending the order of American civilization reduced to a localized portraited of itself; i.e., an illegitimate terrorist threat to the Cartesian romance of the New York cityscape, but also the American Midwest and its endless farmlands acquired through genocide. To this, any sense of counterterrorist power is omitted on purpose, Capitalist Realism robbing our ghost queen of a critical voice/pedagogy of the oppressed. She isn’t a source of legitimate female rage bucking at canonical war and rape, but an unironic plague on American crops and essentialized culture covering up American atrocities. Displaced, disguised and disseminated by neoliberal, Patriarchal forces, the symptoms of Capitalism-as-a-disease in Afterlife are gaslit, gatekept and girl-bossed by the bourgeois men behind the curtain. Afterlife is their own narrative of dynastic power exchange and hereditary power rites—the master plan/grand design as a self-confirming prophecy that recruits children to war, shames non-conservative values and Gothic expression with regressive Gothic poetics, and turns scientists superstitious in canonical worship of oscillating pastiche both narrow and broad; para, meta, and diegetic; liminal expressions that are automatically colonized; etc.
If anyone thinks I’m being unfair to Reitman, he a) lives in a historical period well after Said wrote Culture and Imperialism—i.e., when the horrors of America’s business-as-usual have been covered up not once, but repeatedly through myopic Gothic nostalgia; and b) speaks quite loudly through Gothic nostalgia to accomplish bourgeois aims. Purely by design, neoliberal Capitalism relegates linguo-material play along formalized lines that colonize everything into black-and-white/us-versus-them Cartesian dualism, heteronormativity and settler colonialism; Reitman’s ghosts trumpet a pro-state Gothic dialog to speak to American conservatism as a particular invention useful to the elite through a warlike consumer base bred on Gothic canon. Its (mono)mythic structure appropriates peril through these various means, with a particular ludic, sexually dimorphic structure—indeed, a war plan straight out of the Metroidvania model: miniboss keys (the Gatekeeper and Keymaster) that lead to the Big (female) Bad. Meanwhile, the Ghostbusters work as wizard-warrior “ghost cops” (on call, like Samus Aran to vanquish pirates for the Federation). In this case, personal responsibility frames the Ghostbusters as working-class “rebels” (whitewashed fascism) that seek and destroy Gozer and her generals in order to return to a “better” time—i.e., “the Regan years when the economy was good” and moral panic was high; when the children of yesteryear were taught to fight ghosts, but also see them as something to “fight with” using toy weapons. Miniatures for real weapons, these knights-templar-in-training would have been taught to worship their order as sacred, seeing their cutesy ghost enemies as simultaneously dangerous. In other words, the enemy is both weak and strong and hooks kids on the displaced, dissociative violence of appropriated, canonical peril. They’re conditioned to worship old dead men and their ghostly simulacra, but also their warlike, Enlightenment view of endlessly bloody worship being consciously sold back to them. Don’t think; react and consume!
The cultural result is a mire of canonical Gothic doubles—recycled clichés in support of a larger commercial model’s parallel space/chronotope: dumbly abject monster battles with complicitly cryptonymic scapegoats, carceral hauntology and sex-coercive family values. So while the single, white mother is dumb as a brick and shamed for being poor and single, her child returns to the violent traditions she rejected; in love with a man she never met and a time in which she never lived, Phoebe overlooks the stigmas of these times appearing in the present: how extramarital sex is shamed and fetishized as ongoing wish fulfillment for the parent-age workers, the local nerd promised wild animal bitches and the women compliant unto these entitled dweebs. It’s the hellish ghost of Ronald Reagan in action, his Vampire-Zombie Capitalism turning the younger generation towards the very traditions the previous generation had grown jaded towards; i.e., all the bullshit and false splendor that Reagan (and men like him) promised in Gothic forms: the Gatekeeper and the Keymaster. All of this is enacted paratextually by a diegetic meta-performance that comments on the men behind the curtain, of the curtain, on the curtain, in service of the Symbolic Order as set in stone. Jason Reitman follows in his daddy’s footsteps—just like our little, ace girl boss, Phoebe, follows in her grandfathers’ footsteps—and both registers channel Reagan who serves Patriarchal Capitalism and its appropriated perils, monsters and confusion. The sum of their patchy teamwork of concentric deceptions is an age-old Gothic cliché: the lie told by pirates to scare people away so the thieves can loot and plunder in plain sight (Radcliffe’s refrain). Egon is the patriarchal lie told using their neoliberal war chest—a staggering amount of industrialized artifice and narrative guile dressed up as “movie magic” and worshipped by apathetic nerds of all sorts:
(exhibit 18b: Sorry to burst your bubbles, here, but this ain’t “movie magic”; it’s canonical bullshit. “Brought to life” is also a bit of a misnomer, though the illusion still lives on inside the minds of target consumers who worship the process. As an artist, I can respect its power, but am leery of its abuses. Regardless if these were the best or most effective techniques, make no mistake: The studio used expensive, time-consuming methods to bring an actor’s likeness back to life, using that privatized “ghost” to sell the story of what Ramis played a smaller part in—not once, but over and over within a database of wax sculptures for the Gothic theatre of canonical war. Within that grander narrative, the real horror [for me] is watching the cute and intelligent Phoebe slowly turn into a little dog of war for Grandpa “Ramis,” controlled by an ascending ladder of vertical puppeteers. It’s frankly awful stuff, on par with watching John Ford [middle bottom-middle] curl his claw-like hands around Belinda Palmer’s body. Maybe Chinatown [1974] was “all fake.” However, just like Judy Garland before her, the reality behind that scintillate rainbow [and plausible deniability of the 4th wall] remained terribly bleak: Polanski was a rapist and everything was done for profit by corporate Hollywood goons and paid actors who looked the other way.
So, think of the workers, you animals! Protect them, whoever they might be. Don’t turn them—and by extension, the audience—into heartless monsters concerned with illusions and dreams of revenge. Mckenna Grace might turn out just fine; the smaller role they play as Phoebe remains part of a larger cover-up of systemic abuses that happen inside and outside of the film industry. Moreover, Afterlife‘s grander ’80s hauntology romances the very real and very terrible things not just under Reagan’s administration, but the continued existence of the United States and its unholy union of state and corporation already spread across the entire planet.)
Canonical praxis, in this case, is Phoebe: our little Velma-to-be, a detective-warrior debutante seeking revenge (Gozer killed her surrogate dad, Grandpa Egon). Phoebe’s asexual appropriation keeps her chaste, superstitious and curiously leery of ghosts, but converted into neoliberal Capitalism’s fiercest warrior during the formulaic narrative. From skeptic to true-believer, she gradually takes up Egon’s baton and—ever the dutiful grandpa’s girl—begins to listen to the ambiguous whispers of the past. Egon is invisible for nearly the entire film; his instructions are not. Their doubling and voice-in-the-walls disembodiment work as a cryptonym for the tyrant as a rehabilitated monster—a sweet old man and not the worst of the bunch even though the movie presents him that way to “disprove” it later. This requires a naïve, child-soldier host, but also a bogeywoman—”the muffin to toast,” the Corn Queen to cornhole for threatening the kid: ol’ Gozer. Gozer is the movie’s scapegoat, its wicked old witch (which the film’s token girl of color calls “pretty woke for 3000 BC”—hauntological xenophobia layered over the present as an already-reinvented place being reinvented again and again).
In this case, Gozer is someone the new recruits must train to confront, starting with smaller cute ghosts, then the bigger terror dogs (the false rebellion of angsty teens hating their parents only to forgive them, crumbling the dogs to dust). From here, our child heroes exhibit the worrying traits of a police force in-the-making: Phoebe makes quick work of main street, she and her rag-tag team driving like a bat outta hell as they capture the ghost for destroying private property—privatizing said property through a “boundaries for me, not for thee” approach that has them locked up, then forgiven (the token black cop is never mentioned again) and rearmed to “save the world.” Reitman dresses up the wacky medieval hauntology of something as ridiculous and vile as the KKK, presenting “us versus them” in neoliberal dogma; i.e., cute kids slaying “ghosts” on par with Tolkien’s orcs: an endless manufactured enemy wherein nature is divided into good/evil, familiar/alien halves, commodified and pitted against itself—their lynching performed on both sides of a settler-colonial argument until the end of time, naturalized (e.g., “We are the only people on Earth asked to guarantee the security of our occupier. While Israel is the only country that calls for defense from its victims.” —Hanan Ashrawi). In the process, he burns the town partly to ash by inventing a bigger evil to justify his babyface team’s centrism—their moral position as simply “good.”
(artist: Vincent van Gogh)
Meanwhile, Reitman’s ghost of the counterfeit is the usual hysterics tied to nature as colonized, then rebellious: Gozer and all her abortive offshoots as hidden among the corn rows; i.e., Jim Crow but also the Archaic Mother as imported from older times and “other” places. Their rage concerns the burn-to-ash policy of Capitalism on its frontiers mirroring fabled U.S. enemies in whitewashed, homegrown domestics (themselves standing on stolen land and scorched, blood-soaked earth): the food of slaves (corn bread, oil and meal, etc) treated as fine cuisine stolen from the Indians, given to African slaves and romanced by a white, utterly privileged dialogic equipped with its own forms of imaginary bondage: the fearful reverence of such places and their hauntings (re: Jameson’s describing of the canonical Gothic [I would steelman] as a “class fantasy (or nightmare) in which the dialectic of privilege and shelter is exercised”). At home, it’s all fun and games; on the front, people are dying in ways utterly alien to these New York transplants “exiled” to Oklahoma (a war camp whose “dirt farm” raises soldier children out of the soil in pursuit of the state of exception). War and rape; “lions, tigers and bears, oh my!” While the thinning of the membrane and confrontation with spirits during the fall harvest is utterly at home in the Gothic imagination, its evocation in Pax Americana‘s “Southern Gothic” becomes mired in repressed forms of settler-colonial guilt that complicate the poetics at hand: a plantation fantasy haunted by dead Indigenous peoples, rebellious workers, assorted minorities and African slaves, but also the corpses of their “ghosts.” From the predominantly white middle-class perspective, the unspoken inhabits a place where genocide never stopped, and whose dialogics about it use Gothic poetics in ways Austen only parodied. In 2021, we’re left with “There’s no place like home” for these menticided little twerps, the latter taught to worship abject war and rape sold as cute, “totally rad” and fun. It’s Reagan’s neoliberal Halloween stuck on repeat: cheap, bad candy to munch down and absorb as brain-rotting fuel.
Throughout this setting of appropriated harvest phantasms (and their endless commodifying and consumption) lingers a tangible spirit of death that never left after American (thus global) slavery supposedly “ended.” Clearly it didn’t, and Said is ultimately proven right by insisting that we move beyond the frustratingly quiet past works to finally say the quiet part firmly out loud: Austen’s “happy ending” as Sutherland calls it, was itself a ghost, and a sorry one that Austen avoided by dying in 1817. If Austen was more interested in the British class system while she was alive than openly interrogating British Imperialism (which, let’s face it, she clearly was), we are not beholden to those same limitations; and furthermore, we can hold Austen accountable because of that.
(source)
All this fantastical revenge is happening now in 202[4], after the Pandemic, the War on Terror, the Gulf War, Reagan’s Contra Affair (and James Cameron’s Aliens rescuing Vietnam’s “failure” through its own famous girl boss) and various other manufactured crises—instated behind the scenes and apologized for through canonical praxis just like Ghostbusters: Afterlife. Moral panic is a bourgeois, sequel enterprise. Under it, war and rape are canonically Gothicized as beatified horror monsters, lairs/parallel space and phobias tied to manufactured crises. As instructional material that breathes into Americanized culture and its bellicose social customs, these “gargoyles” tell you
- what to fear—the extramarital sex, foreigners, and ghosts
- who to worship and fear as a dangerous, vague, nebulous target—the Archaic Mother, Gozer the Red-Scare corn lady disassociated through canonically “quaint” Halloween rituals
- who to love and fear—the Ghostbusters, the centrists of a righteous cause, their quant melodies and moral actions being a catchy veil for fascism
- how to fight and kill (to do or die, not question why)
Combined, Reitman Jr.’s façade veils Capitalism’s continuous Promethean design, displacing routine collapse and pinning it on a female bogey person (“It’s whatever it wants to be” is a double insult having survived for nearly 40 years: Gozer is what the men want her to be, then constantly misgendered by Reitman’s neoconservative old farts). Not only does this cryptonym disguise fascism’s “return” (having never actually left); the entire production harnesses all Four Gs to silence female critics as workers exploited under Capitalism. Instead of sex workers with collective power, they become reduced to abject, queernormative scapegoats—wicked old witches who eat children, possess babes and ostensibly sacrifice either for old nameless gods in hauntological New York or Oklahoma (a site for American genocide as is); i.e., Gozer’s temple a counterfeit made by a creepy old man to revive the elite’s liminal hauntology of war.
(exhibit 19a: Various stages and actors in two productions nearly 40 years apart).
As a larger production, the sacrificial theatre benefits Patriarchal Capitalism. Workers are enslaved within a patriarchal Symbolic Order through the Gothic mode as canonized. This canonical praxis portrays them as either Gozer or the Ghostbusters (us-versus-them)—either waiting to spring forth and eclipse everything else, confounding the stupid and the faithful, whose canonical icons will not save them unless the boys get back together and save the day. That’s the canonical synthesis present in Reitman and company’s intended targets: the children of today urged to become future war orphans, brides, soldiers, victims, and other exploited parties (we will unpack all of these things during the roadmap, primer and in Volume Three, I promise).
The Numinous tableau of 1984 has become a bit more laid back in 2021, but the costumes in 2021 are far better (especially Gozer’s). Cosmetic preferences aside, Afterlife still concludes with a big battle—one that summons a seemingly invincible Gozer by a pointedly impotent, false man (Fu Manchu-meets-Colonel-Sanders, Ivo Shandor). Faced with her, the “real men” and their wonder weapons must send Gozer back to Hell. Everything happens much as Ivan did it forty years prior, except Ivan’s son directs the recuperated ghosts of the past—our soon-to-be-dead old-timers—to clear their names (and clear up the thoroughly bogus spat they had with dear-departed egghead “leader,” Egon Spengler) by vanquishing the mythical “wandering womb.” They do this by ejaculating proton “streams” (or fiery chains) all over it. It’s a veritable “séance bukkake,” an abject pissing contest that Gozer just has to sit there and take (which reactionary audiences in 2016 refused to do when an all-girl term castrated the Stay-Puft Marshmallow Man). She’s their sorry Sphinx cum dumpster, their unhappy toilet and punching bag to gloriously assault as the Ghostbusters reunite the nuclear family and teach the next in line to fight as they do: like a Roman boy.
Transformed into a tomboy tin soldier, Phoebe hugs Ghost-Yoda Egon; he smiles, proud and satisfied and his zombie Jedi pals pat themselves on the back. The world is saved, personal responsibility reliably venerating the ghost of the tyrant (of the tyrant of the tyrant…) in a broader narrative of the crypt. Everything leading up to this—the trail of ambiguous-but-ultimately-appropriated clichés and fragments—are illusory intimations of a Gothic chronotope that presents the bloodline as literal and figurative: a concentric-holistic dynasty of power exchange and hereditary rites felt on the para, meta and diegetic registers intersecting messily on a singularity of converging fakery and wreckage. Phoebe’s glasses double her grandfather’s just as her actions do, seeing through “his” eyes; the proton packs are a celebration of mad science as weaponized; the vintage “hearse ambulance” a hauntological fossil that venerates American car culture for the dumb, white American teenager driving stupidly through a corn field. It’s propaganda for dumb kids tied to bigger fish to fry: Gay Communism (a cryptonym-inside-a-cryptonym, the cosmic sexpot intimating a desire to quell the combined spirits of native Indigenous peoples and diasporic African slaves haunting the same cornfield).
To that, Gozer is our prehistoric bitch come back from the dead, doomed to play the part of the composite monster bullseye. A starlet censored with burn scars and protoplasmic bubbles, she is liminally abject: a giant cock-tease and mind-fucker, hag-dragon-lady chimera (we’ll explore the chaos dragon as a Patriarchal concept more in Volume Three, Chapter One). Even so, Gozer is the Pygmalion artist’s nightmare creation, a canonical “inkblot test” where patriarchal dudes simultaneously wet their pants and get hard, uncannily aroused at the thought of war and rape towards a shapeless, endless foe:
(exhibit 19b: Artist: Paolo Giandoso‘s concept art for Ghostbusters: Afterlife. His womb state and Archaic Mother are abject, entirely devoid of criticism for the franchise. It is “blind” pastiche; mute, nefandous, and complicitly pro-war/-rape.)
For an ideal audience, “Kill it with fire!” is a lazy joke hiding another ghost of the counterfeit: scorched earth; “kill all, burn all, loot all[1].” By framing Gozer as naughty Pandora “needing” to be put back into her box, Reitman silences critics of war, rape and its etiology through displaced, cartoon shows of force (which can be enjoyed, but should not be internalized or endorsed by us—in politics or our social-sex lives). Gozer’s eyes do not see; drugged and lobotomized, she is a deaf, dumb and blind, bourgeois queen—a vampire-zombie clone on par with Raleigh Theodore Saker ‘s schizophrenic soliloquy from Sublime’s Robbin’ the Hood (1994):
We’ve got you in this fuckin’ movie to exterminate all the lunatics all at once with a filtering system of a God. We’re the psycho-semantic police. You can’t even see us. How in the fuck can you do anything about it? We’re pure intelligence, you’re not. You’re biological product of a cosmological universe. You’re molecular matter, I constructed you. Fuck you. I made you up, you didn’t make me up, you got it backwards. You know who you are? You’re fuckin’ semantic blockage. That’s what made you up. You’re a fuckin’ programmer named Christine Gontarek who fucked up. She sucked my cock, fell in love, and she was locked in. She’s gonna get her second chance to suck my cock again. If she turns me down, she’s gonna go straight to Hell, she won’t pass “Go”, she’ll never fuckin’ win. She’s the cunt that thought she was God, but that’s okay. I don’t give a shit, as long as she sucks me off when I tell her, ’cause she’s my zombie. I captured that motherfucker, and she’s my cassette (source).
Gozer is Reitman’s Gontarek, the functional Egeus from A Midsummer Night’s Dream begging the ancient privilege of “Athens.” Replacing a legitimate antiwar/-rape critic with a canonical shadow puppet, Reitman has all-in-one given us an angry sexpot to spank and a tentacle “chaos dragon” to banish to the shadow realm. The fabrication is a special-effects-driven, “plastic reality” (as Julie A. Turnock calls it, 2015) of revived ’80s neoliberalism—one presenting Gozer the Archaic Mother as little more than a seasonal slaughter of the ghost of the harvest. This shoddy double stands in for actual fascist/neoliberal harvests; i.e., happening all the time behind the veil, but also on its surface, in plain sight. It’s one’s own doubts and fears being cheaply “vanquished” with military optimism as something to wish for and worship until the end of time: the zombie myth of the “Good War” rescued yet again.
Meanwhile, the world slowly keeps dying while America colonizes itself (and everything around it) in pursuit of the neoliberal trifecta: infinite growth, efficient profit and worker/owner division. Along with the other three, and the state monopolies, the entire product is a mendacious call to war chorusing to a larger war horn, a “false flag operation” as slick and alleged as Nancy Reagan’s legendary blowjobs (which, though Samantha Cole is writing about them in 2021, hail from an unofficial bibliography nearly thirty years prior). An open secret tied to the annals of power, Afterlife‘s semantic wreckage and bad-faith doubles amount to a narrative of the crypt that belies a paradox and madness beyond what science not only can’t explain, but gaslight, gatekeep, girl-boss—re: Hogle’s warning of a vanishing point, an endless “place of concealment that stands of mere ashes of something not fully present.” Speaking truth to power starts to feel unnatural, alien; it becomes forgotten, papered over, buried by canonical pastiche. Gozer could be whatever it wants and make whatever it wants, except those in power perpetually code her as a victim or a scapegoat (for female hysteria and dark, abject poetics that challenge the status quo) over and over and over. They can’t hide her rage but they can sublimate it into something useful to Capitalism: a punching bag to make male workers feel good by killing dark gods and getting the girl by taming nature as sometimes “getting out of hand” (with Cartesian forces needing to keep nature and monstrous-feminine poetics “in hand,” thus under control in lucrative, ultimately genocidal ways).
In service of this false claim and its manufactured consent, Afterlife unironically plays out like a slick military recruitment video—a horror movie sequel of the capitalist, mass-produced sort, versus the horror “one-offs” of iconoclastic praxis/counterculture addressing social-sexual unrest tied to buried trauma. To that, it’s less early George Romero and more Zack Snyder, with daddy’s-boy director Reitman telling you what to think, but also what to say, what to do and what to stand for—to fear in relation to the state’s out-of-joint enemies. It’s garden variety moral panic, resold as “fresh, hip” nostalgia by “faithful” canon post-excavation—a canonical strategy of elaborate misdirection, a “historical document.” This emotional/Gothic stupidity and privatization must be challenged by intelligent, Gothic-Communist workers. The same goes for appropriated peril and moral panic; war and rape, menticide and waves of terror; the semantic wreckage of the narrative of the crypt and its liminal prisoners, queer scapegoats, lady ghost hostages—all met with iconoclastic doubles in service of Gothic Communism as something to develop towards during oppositional praxis: our “archaeologies.”
(exhibit 19c: model and artist: Cara Day and Persephone van der Waard. Gothic canon invokes the monstrous-feminine to fetishize and annihilate it. It is within this complex space that sex-positive implementations of the same hysterical poetics [and famous monsters] must come to light. Gozer isn’t just a bad girl to spank, and Cara isn’t just a piece of ass. There’s sex-positive power in what they can subvert and express while turning a buck.)
This essay is just part of iconoclastic praxis more broadly. It was impromptu, written after watching the movie having already internalized my own manifesto. This is my magic, my voice. But my voice also includes various artwork, collages, slang and epigrams as things for me decolonize and reclaim in complex liminal ways—to synthesize with my own cultural habits and general social-sexual skills/synthetic oppositional stratagems like girl talk, community (anti-fascist) defense with a larger end goal in mind far beyond just my meager life. My iconoclastic art becomes a weapon to fight the bourgeoisie and their propaganda as Gothic Communists do: to encourage direct solidarity by sex worker propaganda in opposite to nation-states, neoliberal corporations and their complicit proponents; that uses my manifesto and its demonstration of social-sexual synthesis and Humanities education as something to teach high emotional/Gothic intelligence—all to benefit workers as co-conspirators in service to themselves, not some higher, vertical authority. That’s proletarian praxis!
Paid Labor: Summarizing Praxis as Something to Synthesize by Paying Workers (feat. Delilah Gallo, Rae of Sunshine, and Feyn Volans)
“America’s not a country, it’s just a business. Now fucking pay me.”
—Jackie Cogan, Killing Them Softly (2012)
This mini-section (six pages) offers a brief repose before we dive into the rest of the volume. While the manifesto has already covered a lot, I’d like to stress the labor value of sex work as a paid means of synthesizing praxis; i.e., when preventing state abuse through sex work a valid service that should be monetarily compensated for its labor value. This includes artwork, writing and sex work as indiscrete categories illustrating mutual consent; i.e., as a paid enterprise between two consenting workers negotiating their separate rates for a combined exchange; e.g., this book and its combination of the three, illustrating how intersectional solidarity works: together through a variety of creative practices that support one another through informed, negotiated and paid labor exchanges and, by extension, boundary-forming exercises to exhibit through the results.
Note: The second edition of Volume One contains a 2025 addendum (about eight pages); i.e., one featuring my friends Delilah Gallo, Rae of Sunshine, and Feyn Volans. I befriended these persons through the project, paying them to appear in this book series, including the pages ahead. —Perse, 4/8/2025
To it, Capitalism sexualizes everything to pimp nature as dark alien whore, antagonizing nature as monstrous-feminine with nature as monstrous-feminine (whores policing whores; re: “Policing the Whore“) while putting it cheaply to work; we alien whores must facilitate a reversal, upending tokenization through our own dialectical-material exchanges (and their assorted price charts, below):
(artist: Delilah Gallo)
Note: Developing Gothic (gay-anarcho) Communism requires paid labor by design. It is a stupidly important idea—so much so that I not only would start every volume PDF with examples of illustrating mutual consent (and outline the concept in “Paratextual Documents” to be read on its own), but would also release this small essay solo, right after Volume One released on Valentine’s 2024. To it, the dialectical-material context of universal liberation during ludo-Gothic BDSM is paid labor during sex work; i.e., as something to learn about from the exhibits being displayed. I promote them and they promote me, but the models are always paid in some shape or form, and always to what both parties agree to ahead of time.
To it, the 60+ models in this series (and all of the promotion material advertising their work through my usual channels; e.g., the “Hailing Hellions” interview series) have all been paid—most with money and all with art, promotions, and various out-of-pocket expenses that come with running a non-profit series like Sex Positivity. All the work I do, then, goes towards helping other sex workers while turning the cycle of doing so into an object lesson: sex is a service, and one that deserves to be paid (and otherwise treated with respect) while having the whore’s revenge; re: by camping canon on the Aegis. To get paid and be allowed to live and speak out (re: “Survive, Solidarize and Speak Out“) is our revenge; i.e., against profit and all it causes in service to the state and itself (the elite and their cops [class, culture and race traitors recruited from working bodies] pimping us).
Furthermore, education is funded, expressed and shared anisotropically in both praxial directions; i.e., during the fascist’s bad game of dress up versus the liberator’s good (e.g., the Medusa’s revenge fantasy versus the monomyth hero’s). Given life and flesh, the larger struggle takes shapes in small; i.e., one that—once discovered through holistic study—points, like a Gothic castle, concentrically and ominously to larger things that labor-in-small attaches structurally to (re: whores versus pimps, Medusa versus “Caesar” and his ghosts of “Rome”):
(exhibit 20a2: Artist: Ziibing. From Ancient Egypt to the United States, capital is a pyramid. The same basic shape conveys across a myriad of sources that continue to evolve, mid-constant; e.g., Virginia’s “Community Solutions to Sexual and Domestic Violence” and “11th Principle: Consent.” Propaganda is propaganda in praxial opposition, synthesized through daily habits; i.e., with worker rights versus state’s rights [cops and victims] speaking in cryptomimetic echoes during the cryptonymy process [and hauntologies, chronotopes] that further or reverse abjection “on the Aegis.” The state rapes; workers challenge said rapes by making consent sexy in gentle and/or strict forms.
Exploitation and liberation occupy the same space, then, existing dualistically during liminal expression [which the Gothic conveys through oscillation]. To it, the state and its tools rape nature through the Gothic mode, but also the bourgeoisie’s intended play and bad BDSM freezing the Superstructure in place; by comparison, Gothic Communism liberates nature through the same mode recultivating the Superstructure—thereby using emergent play to camp the canon during ludo-Gothic BDSM: weird canonical nerds vs weird iconoclastic nerds. Whores are nerds, but nerds who aren’t whores control those who are using the same language their captives weaponize to liberate themselves.
[artist: Rae of Sunshine]
During this larger struggle on the same Aegis, iconoclastic nerds pit subversive and poetic forms of violence, terror and monstrous expression against state proponents [and their futile monopolies]! So when the Man [or his token extensions] come around, show him your Aegis! Clothed or not, power [darkness, and knowledge] take many forms [re: “From Composites and the Occult“]! It’s code, but also something to consume preferentially in Plato’s cave—what the Bible calls [and treats like] “forbidden fruit.” So “eat the fucking apple,” as Maegen McAuliffe O’Leary would say! Become the exception that bends the rule, subverting it to workers‘ collective benefit; i.e., as stewards of nature, thus ourselves, pushing steadily towards post-scarcity while enduring manufactured scarcity as we raise emotional/Gothic intelligence and class, culture and race awareness! To do so, which is not a zero-sum game, we whores barter in beautiful lies mixed with truth; i.e., with those most ancient of currencies policed within the Imperium [and its plastic frontiers]: sex and force as things to perform! Castration—however poetic on its face—goes both ways, and always sits adjacent to actual harm haunting the comeliest of actors on and offstage.
Context matters, flow [of power] determining function; ours—both solo and together—pointedly illustrate mutual consent through dialectical-material scrutiny summoning the avenger in endless ironic forms thereof: Galatea’s Aegis embodied through darkness visible—both the angel and the devil seeking infernal salvation turning capital [and its mirror syndrome] on their sorry heads! Be the apple to “eat” in a polity of ways! The madness of Medusa isn’t a madwoman in the attic, lying in state and trapped helplessly there, but a danger-disco party to take, like the vampire exiting its coffin, outside itself: during the liminal hauntology of war as dualistic! As such, each of us embodies a castle to wage war from, and often to music; e.g., Perfect Blue‘s “Angel of Love” giggling as it stabs capital in the balls. “Stare and tremble!” as we whores work together minus a pimp “protecting” us, fucking to metal to mess with our enemies to our heart’s content!
[artist: Feyn Volans]
For example, the material here between Feyn and I was negotiated, and subsequently honored through a cum tribute that I gave them; i.e., upon me offering and them accepting [watch it, here]. The Medusa, in her Numinous form, cannot be killed, imperfectly extending that immortality to her smaller offshoots who are, themselves, often quite substantial [and whose rage and joy know no bounds]! As such, Feyn, Rae and Delilah are all awesome, inside and out, thus worthy of worship! Go support them, promoting them yourselves in connection to us promoting the same notion back at you! Segregation is violent; exposure through “violence” behind buffers gives us the paradoxical means to speak out despite being kettled [the Medusa was a power bottom, dead ass]!
[models and artist: Delilah Gallo, Feyn Volans, and Rae of Sunshine; and Persephone van der Waard]
Whatever the form, Gothic Communism has money behind it [not much, as I am unemployed (thus relatively poor), but enough to make a difference]. Likewise, tribute, for us isn’t canon that maintains the status quo; it’s Satanic apostacy Numinously altering such things through the very code classifying whores as “degenerate.” Power is infinite; as something to reclaim during ludo-Gothic BDSM, it occurs through play as infinite, thus exchanges that tender play in all its forms: as paradoxically something to afford and actualize, during calculated risk; re: putting “death” and “rape” in quotes [and, just as often, hyphenating those with food, sickness and war, etc; re: sex, drugs, and rock ‘n roll during ludo-Gothic BDSM relayed in modernized forms of “ancient” forebears]. In short, every temple for play [or foreplay] that seeks and summons the Medusa—as dark mother/whore to undermine capital’s abusive parentage—has its price! “O, whistle and I’ll come, my lad!” That’s what she said [or any gender a whore chooses to perform and/or identify as to make trouble with]!
[artist: Delilah Gallo]
To that, sex is a weapon on a social-sexual gradient—often public nudism to illustrate a larger [a]sexual point about trauma as something to interrogate in small while walking collectively away from Omelas; i.e., speaking as we do about ongoing struggles repressed by the state pimping us through ourselves as monstrous; e.g., sex in public as “art porn” reworking the Wisdom of the Ancients; re: a cultural understanding of the imaginary past to broker [thus achieve] universal liberation during intersectional solidarity [no scapegoats]. If you want to critique power, you must go where it is—where the state, ever and always, concerns power as something to exploit, mise-en-abyme.
The fact remains, if we didn’t have power to take, they wouldn’t frame us as aliens to harvest. We must humanize that, which requires camping our own holocausts that show the state as inhumane in response to our shenanigans; re: by putting “rape” in quotes during the dialectic of the alien [which ludo-Gothic BDSM entails]: as a paid, informed, countercultural enterprise, and one with Gothic an-Com goals, hence aims, challenging internal/external bigotries, stigmas and biases with taboo things “hugging” the alien [which Medusa is]. By extension, to develop Gothic Communism means to network, fuck and teach through art [which porn is] funded by workers for workers. They kettle us; we kick them in the delicates! To protect nature, we destroy the only thing they love: control! “Now this is happening!”
“That’s how I roll!” Yeet that fucker into the drink—a double-take simulacrum of ourselves the elite use to ravish us, sans irony! Hoist them on their own petards!
The elite are killer babies already stuck in the Man Box [which privatization relies upon]. From Teslas to a living wage for sex workers to anti-police narratives in your favorite piece of media, make them cry by taking back what they took from you; i.e., as something fun and memorable because it’s reclamatory. That being said, people [from all walks] dig the Gothic because it’s quick and dirty but also sexy and fun[ny]—a skeleton of funny bones and boners! Whatever the ghost, camp it; kill the image the state wants you to remember it as. Break Capitalist Realism on your wheel, making not just Marx, but Medusa and monsters gay!)
Capitalism is a fractally recursive pyramid scheme operating on all registers, and all sharing the same goal: exploitation and theft (which class, money and state mechanisms are, by design). We must challenge these in duality using the same language the state does; or, as I write in “Goblins, Anti-Semitism, and Monster-Fucking,”
(artists: Avram Finkelstein, Brian Howard, Oliver Johnston, Charles Kreloff, Chris Lione, and Jorge Socarrás)
Silence is death[2]; for Capitalism to work, it needs a victim and a cop for which to buy silence with. To that, victims can become cops through oppressor misuse of oppression language to silence others with; re: DARVO and obscurantism; e.g., the Star of David adorning Zionist war machines and dropping bombs on Palestinians and Lebanese people, while playing the universal savior and victim, and policing anyone who might use their language incorrectly. Different voices need the ability to speak up and out for themselves and others, thus coexist, lest capital divide and disorganize us to keeping doing what it has, is and always will do: rape worlds and the world by sowing division to move money through nature (source).
As such, the ghosts of rape haunt the counterfeit furthering or reversing abjection, mid-cryptomimesis. In turn, the oldest form of exploitation is the whore, making their speaking out the oldest form of worker struggle against exploitation; re: spectres of older genocides speaking to current ones (and their hauntologies). Silence is genocide, and sex workers educate from de facto (extracurricular) positions against genocide (thus profit); i.e., through the work they do; re: as paid, said payment giving workers a voice during the whore’s paradox—to speak out while being stolen from and lied to (which money is designed to do, the American dollar effectively blood money as capital [dead labor] feeds on living labor with pieces from living labor). All messily unfurl while taking land and labor back through one’s virgin/whore labor expression—to illustrate the better treatment of nature as monstrous-feminine during the whore’s revenge; re: the Medusa hyphenating virgin-whore in small! The Gorgon, then, is a composite of moods; per the cryptonymy process, its re-education of workers happens gradually-in-opposition across a variety of cryptomimetic censors, barriers and screens, their show/conceal double operation denoting the palliative Numinous and its assorted Communist spectres camping Marx—gentle or strict, dom or sub, mommy or otherwise—in small:
(artist: Delilah Gallo)
Some whores fuck back; on the Aegis as half-real (on and offstage), whores are monsters to help through strange appetites and appeals—e.g., as witches, vampires and goblins, among so many others (undead, demonic and/or animalistic); i.e., to pay and consequently learn from, mid-exchange, while playing with demons and the dead as half-real propositions! Unionize and disseminate; disrupt through what the state cannot tame; paganize and protest what pimps prohibit, glutting themselves on our stolen worth! Medusa lives through us, the Gothic speaking commercially and poetically not just through deprivation and size difference (re: tremendous obscurity and decay), but also through Ozymandian embodiment: bad echoing puns of neo-medieval castles, “torture,” live burial, nightmares and dungeons, etc, playing with rape-as-commerce to get to the bottom of things! So often, the colonizer looks like us in bad faith, and vice versa! Use that to your advantage! —Perse, 4/8/2025
To that, “Paid Labor” briefly discusses an important refrain to solidarized labor under sex positivity: “sex work is work,” which needs to be paid, but many different kinds of work constitute sex work because Capitalism sexualizes all workers. As such, “sex work” can be summarized as collective, iconoclastic worker action against the heteronormative, settler-colonial status quo: art, porn, prostitution, writing (and intersections of these devices) when collective negotiation and expression of worker rights and boundaries happen through informed, class-, culture- and race-conscious worker solidarity enacting ludo-Gothic BDSM towards those ends. Women’s work (sex or otherwise) is historically unpaid and demonized; re: for the women/people treated as women. Take it back on the Aegis, anisotropically reversing terror/counterterror (during as[s]ymmetrical warfare, below) to serve whores, thus nature!
Note: The rest of this piece is largely as I wrote it, back in early 2024. —Perse, 4/8/2025
(artist: Fired Up Stilettos)
To that, Gothic Communists achieve proletarian praxis through an iconoclastic recultivation of a bourgeois Superstructure with ludo-Gothic BDSM: the literal teaching of emotional and Gothic intelligence (and the confronting of trauma by raising awareness) through sex-positive sex work and art; i.e., as a sheer democratization of development through worker solidarity (the state, by comparison, is not historically democratic, but serves the interests of the elite).
Now that you have access to my thesis (from Volume Zero) and the manifesto as a simplified form of my thesis arguments, I want to spend the rest of the volume supplying a teaching roadmap concerning synthesis and Volume Two giving a Humanities primer concerning monsters (our so-called “booster rockets” before we fully “take off,” in Volume Three).
However, before getting to those, let’s summarize the role of oppositional praxis in relation to our manifesto’s thesis and its execution as a fundable operation in either direction: Sex coercion happens through privatization—specifically the privatization of sexual labor (exploiting it) and emotional labor (siphoning it out of workers’ heads) in canonical forms for the state’s benefit; i.e., exploiting the emotionally unintelligent who surrender their labor and their rights, but also who try to own or control those around them in service to the state during crisis and decay. The historical-material result are scapegoats, fear and dogma that turn people against one another and who cannot tell friend from foe, but also who see everyone as a potential threat, in threatening places, with canonical threatening language: the ghost of the counterfeit and process of abjection’s hauntologies, chronotopes, and cryptonyms.
Meerloo once called these totalitarian tactics “menticide” and “waves of terror” in relation to thought crimes, which we briefly introduced during the manifesto but will articulate more in the roadmap (along with thought crimes/venial sins and several other germane ideas that will be useful in the navigating the primer and Volume Three). Capitalism doesn’t just alienate workers from the products of their labor and from nature; it uses canon within capital, flowing money through nature to alienize either in relation to the other as hopelessly divided, blind and lost. As a consequence, workers are divided from their labor value, including ludo-Gothic BDSM as something to fund (e.g., this book’s exhibits).
The historical-material effect is reliable: destroying the material world as incumbent on nature actually being preserved by people having some connection to it to start with. Sever that through a quick, inadequate paycheck in a scarce setting and nature is a regular casualty (followed by workers, of course). Capitalism rapes the mind by constantly terrifying it in regards to deprivatized labor and nature; sex positivity is the long road back to reunion, a wending iconoclasm that starts with sexual labor (media) as a communal, intersectional, healing process that needs payment to work.
Furthermore, there isn’t some final destination where things happen “at the end”; it develops over time in active, ongoing and incremental ways that happen through iconoclastic art, general creativity and Gothic imagination; i.e., a conjoined process of rising emotional intelligence within the larger community and their artistic output, whose sexual labor and Gothic negotiating power are adequately compensated. The elite hate unions for this very reason. Without workers constantly slaving to the grind, everything stops; the money stops insofar as infinite growth is challenged by basic human needs expressed in Gothic terms.
Capitalism frames the meeting of the latter as unthinkable through worker imaginations myopically centered around elite needs during recuperated Gothic nightmares; i.e., Mark Fisher’s hauntologies, or cancelled futures, blaming past worker actions for what capitalist greed always leads to: violent rebellion when enough is enough. Teach people they have rights and military urbanism won’t fly.
(artist: Eugène Delacroix)
We’ve discussed the framing of past revolutions through Gothic canon as “terrorist” according to state interests. But however violent those in power (or with power) will mark our emancipatory attempts to be, our “breaking of church windows” is not concerned with abstract rebellions or wanton violence, but literal human thought as materially reshaping itself and the world through iconoclastic praxis: various artists, relating back and forth across space and time, in liminal, sexy-spooky ways; i.e., Gothic counterterrorist poetics. If that is “violent,” then so be it. “In the absence of justice, there can be no peace.” Nation-states and corporations do far worse every day through their usual monopolies as bought-and-paid for but also endorsed by the regular paying public.
Not only do our combined efforts require informed engagement with the past as hopelessly complicated when reimagined in the present; the reclaiming of artistic language and labor as already-colonized must be repeatedly conveyed and funded by those born into the present. Such persons drink up information like thirsty little sponges (some thirstier than others), which poses a problem insofar as the flow of money is concerned. History is littered with the graves of really stupid kids who dug graves for others in the bargain. From the Hitler Youth to the Khmer Rouge, to clean-cut Ike-Age kids and the Jonestown disciples, children don’t discriminate in what language they acquire.
This includes the language of commerce, which the children of the future must not acquire their understanding of from canon; its authors, the elite and their proponents, only manipulate and blame us for “the dismal tide” of fascism’s arrival and subsequent “war on degeneracy and Modernity”—will only groom them to become not just “killer baby” soldiers, but idiotic heroes starring in “their own” productions; e.g., Ashley Williams from Army of Darkness (1992): “Impunity is the apex of privilege. I say this in regards to consumers whose Ash-worship is perpetually reinforced by spiritual successors” (source: Persephone van der Waard’s “Army of Darkness: Valorizing the Idiot Hero,” 2019).
There is, as usual, money behind canon’s routine brain drain. Together with submissive, tokenized sex slaves, such heroes and their canonical legacy destroys the material world for profit, nature included (with us being a part of nature, including our connection to our bodies, society and the ecosystems around us). We must not only not listen to the elite; we must challenge their pedagogy’s financing with our own, which they will criminalize, including our very thoughts as criminal. Otherwise, the perfect soldiers become the stuff of nightmares: automated patrol machines, walking guns and infiltrators intimated by their human-yet-dehumanized counterparts.
More to the point, they currently hold the purse strings of disposable income, which behooves us to assist those who would pay us; i.e., to help them see us as human, not as sex machines that, when paid, reliably “put out” even when that wage is throttled to unlivable extremes: wage slavery and labor theft insofar as worker desperation is preyed upon by other workers with the means and mindset to do so. They think tipping is “optional[3],” especially regarding sex work (which honestly waitressing and other thankless service professions functionally are; i.e., “women’s work” as a component of extended beings [those of nature] for Descartes’ thinking beings [white cis-het men] to exploit).
(artist: Persephone van der Waard)
It’s true that wealth redistribution is fundamental to developing Communism, but it still requires empathy as something to recultivate through mechanisms that have become thoroughly commodified; i.e., Gothic poetics, including implements of objectification and abuse, but also recuperated voices of rebellion such as rock ‘n roll. Yes, money keeps the revolutionary lights on, but stripping is not consent. In conjunction with that productive adage, blasting metal shouldn’t be a shortcut to sex; i.e., the expectation of automatic sex just because Rob Zombie is blaring from the stripping stage.
To that, a constant mindfulness of intersecting factors is required to enact ludo-Gothic BDSM. Faustian bargains are generally relayed through the acquisition of unequal power as something to display through wealth as given in bad faith; e.g., the supplying of collars and rings, but also blood money as something to recognize and weigh when choosing to accept it under theatrical conditions. So while taking payment from slavers who have you on the hip isn’t a bank heist, singular payments from chudwads has, to some extent, been laundered; i.e., the latter shouldn’t be discounted for what that money can go towards: something better than where it started from.
This includes turning ourselves into something during ludo-Gothic BDSM that accurately represents our struggles, not the desires of those enslaving us with an inadequate wage, or wages that are tossed about as a cruel (and cliché) means of reminding us that we and our bodies (and their morphological and cosmetic expressions through Gothic poetics) are somehow “owned” by those paying us; i.e., white knight syndrome through the “rescuing” of sex workers. Tips shouldn’t be an excuse to make these kinds of ipso facto possessive statements; when given in good faith, they will let workers express themselves for themselves through a class- and culture-conscious mindset whose rebellious expressions and room for understanding and confronting trauma includes all oppressed workers.
The idea isn’t to “rescue” sex workers at all, but make their profession safer from class traitors, not just women. So while Megan Barton-Hanson isn’t technically “wrong” when she writes
There’s a common assumption that all women are victims who need to be “rescued” from the sex industry, but that’s not true. […] People think that women in the sex industry have no other choice, which for some people is sadly the case, but for a lot of women it’s a side hustle that they do alongside uni or running a business (source: “How to Be an Ally to Sex Workers,” 2022).
there’s a glaring omission in terms of whom she’s not including in her advocation: gender-non-conforming persons, non-white-sex workers and AMAB sex workers (e.g., trans misogyny). Betrayal isn’t always done on purpose, but intent doesn’t matter if a given expression leaves someone out, which Barton-Hanson pointedly does. Survival sex work needs to be acknowledged, not pushed to the side by those who have the luxury of a side hustle while going to uni or running a business (which most people lack the ability to do). Even so, it’s equally vital to remember that those operating through necessity vs privilege still deserve a living wage through the labor value of their services; i.e., sex work that goes against the profit motive as something that normally accommodates women like Barton-Hanson to the detriment of more oppressed groups (instead of saying “sadly” and shrugging one’s shoulders through a materially and socially superior position).
Obviously it’s in our material interests to collectively reject the brutal, “blood in, blood out” of state-mandated factionalism and class traitors: cops and other such rival gangs materially incentivized by the state to make war according to money’s flowing as something to dictate, and whose chicken hawk leaders endlessly recruit children for their own greedy ends tied to war (and rape) as a business. But nevertheless, the managing of canonized funds through reliably sanitized sources (tone-policing and whitewashing sex work) goes hand-in-hand with the utilizing of said funds for proletarian means: to teach future workers through its acquisition to be antiwar, anti-rape, and anti-state (which monopolizes sexual labor through terror, violence and bodies) according to the iconoclastic artwork we leave behind; i.e., socio-material lessons whose proletarian praxis, when synthesized and widely employed over time, sees the sex workers of the world (and by extension all workers) freed from the mental, physical and fiscal shackles of Capitalism: through a continuous, proletarian re-cultivation of the Superstructure during ludo-Gothic BDSM that, when properly funded, synthesizes praxis through habits that are formed again and again through pay to play (not to win).
Whatever the form, play is work, and should be compensated; i.e., as such. Class or otherwise, then, war wages through wages; i.e., brothel espionage appearing cutesy both as a raison d’être, disguise, and calling card (the whore a commoner position married to common forms of asymmetrical warfare; e.g., ninjas and guerrillas punching up against the owner class and their harmful arguments of culture and race, during controlled opposition)!
(artist: Nori Noir)
Said synthesis is meant to compound and accelerate from mounting financial backing (sex work, when allowed and encouraged, tends to pay quickly and well; i.e., is always in demand from persons with the means to pay for it). This includes receiving financial support from, not just the down-and-out, but the middle class at large: petit-bourgeois revolutionaries putting their literal money where their mouths are (unlike cis-het workers who say all the things they’d like to do to us without actually dropping a dime towards the Cause; keep your ceaseless flattery and pay out, please) to foster empathy towards sex workers through daily habits that cultivate empathy as a mindset, but also a reciprocal skill; i.e., tipping as the backbone to ludo-Gothic BDSM (as a form of paid labor exchange under Capitalism).
To conclude, paying all workers for their services is vital to revolutionary praxis because it permits and enables activism under Capitalism. Social-sexual activism happens through a liberating creativity tied to sexualized art as a form of reclaimed labor and collective, instructional worker action that materially survives after workers die; i.e., to fund, thus pass along the ability for workers—like little detectives—to sense and illustrate the “creative successes” of Gothic Communism as a paid operation: disinterring the skeletons of whores that empire is built on.
Unlike our bodies, which decay and rot, artwork doesn’t have to worry about falling apart, but its labor needs to be compensated. Paint literal skeletons if you must, but you can leave behind something more than naked bones: someone who lived and worked towards the payment of workers within the system as a means of confronting state trauma when synthesizing praxis; i.e., in ways that humanize the entire system of exchange through Gothic poetics that, when examined by future workers, reminds them that these bones were human, thus a) deserving of a wage and b) able to use that wages’ artistic results to develop Communism through Gothic poetics; re: ludo-Gothic BDSM. Camp is the death of canon, radicalizing it into something that liberates workers at the cost of empire and its bad-faith pimps. Medusa calls to you, “Come to the Sabbath!”
Everyone loves the whore; if not you, we will make your enemies (other workers) love us whether you want them to or not! We will fertilize that, our rot extending as the phoenix does towards new life (during the rememory process)! Capitalism is not destiny. Forge your own, instead!
(artist: Couple of Kooks)
Onto “Synthesis Symposium: Nature Is Food (opening and part zero)“!
About the Author
Persephone van der Waard is the author of the multi-volume, non-profit book series, Sex Positivity—its art director, sole invigilator, illustrator and primary editor (the other co-writer/co-editor being Bay Ryan). Persephone has her independent PhD in Gothic poetics and ludo-Gothic BDSM (focusing on partially on Metroidvania), and is a MtF trans woman, anti-fascist, atheist/Satanist, poly/pan kinkster, erotic artist/pornographer and anarcho-Communist with two partners. Including multiple playmates/friends and collaborators, Persephone and her many muses work/play together on Sex Positivity and on her artwork at large as a sex-positive force. That being said, she still occasionally writes reviews, Gothic analyses, and interviews for fun on her old blog (and makes YouTube videos talking about politics). Any money Persephone earns through commissions or donations goes towards helping sex workers through the Sex Positivity project; i.e., by paying costs and funding shoots, therefore raising awareness. She takes payment on PayPal, Patreon, and CashApp, etc; all links are available on her Linktr.ee. Every bit helps!
Footnotes
[1] The Three Alls being a Japanese imperial policy when imitating the West and expanding into Manchuria.
[2] Brooklyn Museum writes,
In 1987, Avram Finkelstein, Brian Howard, Oliver Johnston, Charles Kreloff, Chris Lione, and Jorge Socarrás founded the SILENCE=DEATH Project to support one another in the midst of the AIDS crisis. Inspired by the posters of the Art Workers Coalition and the Guerrilla Girls (both of whose work is on view nearby), they mobilized to spread the word about the epidemic and created the now-iconic Silence=Death poster featuring the pink triangle as a reference to Nazi persecution of LGBTQ people in the 1930s and 1940s. It became the central visual symbol of AIDS activism after it was adopted by the direct action advocacy group AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power (ACT UP) [source].
[3] A double standard, I should add, they would never apply to themselves; i.e., the fascist approach to rights for the white, cis-het male avenger (the middle class) scapegoating marginalized groups (often sex workers; e.g., my friend, Blxxd Bunny, getting bullied online by incels and MGTOW types) instead of attacking the system despite said system (and its owners) exploiting them. These hateful bigots see sex workers as “the real enemy” and anyone who helps them as a “simp”: a person who gives money to people who don’t deserve it (according to fascists) because their labor value is zero, thus literally doesn’t qualify as paid work; i.e., should be given to predatory men a priori while said men are venerated as the sole breadwinners. In effect, this demonization of tippers discourages public empathy towards sex workers, but also the act of financially supporting women at all (forcing them into unpaid domestic positions; e.g., the bedroom, the kitchen, or the laundry room, etc). Not only does this lead to domestic abuse by men who treat women (or people forced to identify as women) like chattel; it lowers class consciousness to the detriment of all workers, dividing the middle class and pitting them against marginalized groups.