I wanted to put out a small, six-page sample from my latest volume, which released on Valentine's—nothing terribly long but something I feel speaks to an important topic: paying workers. 

To read a summary for the entire volume and a brief history of its construction, refer to my Valentine's blogpost. If you want to read the whole volume, simply go to my website's 1-page promo and pick up your own copy for free. While you're there, you can also learn about the other volumes, project history and logo design/promo posters!

Update, 4/8/2025: The second edition for Volume One is currently being released, piece by piece. A new extended version of "Paid Labor"—along with the short 2023 essay "Cornholing the Corn Lady—Ghostbusters: Afterlife and Empire"—has just debuted. You can read both on my 18+ website. —Perse

Paid Labor: Summarizing Praxis as Something to Synthesize by
Paying Workers

"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; 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 negotiated labor exchanges and
boundary-forming exercises. 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- and culture-conscious worker solidarity. 

To that, Gothic Communists achieve proletarian praxis
through an iconoclastic recultivation of a bourgeois Superstructure: the
literal teaching of emotional and Gothic intelligence (the confronting of
trauma) through sex-positive sex work and art 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.

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. 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 Fischer'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.

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[1]," 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).

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. 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 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 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 that synthesizes praxis through habits
that, when funded, are formed again and again.

(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. 

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. 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.

(artist: Couple of Kooks)