Persephone's (Gothic) Insights
The horror blog about metal, videogames, and sex.

Anarcho-Communism vs Marxist-Leninism (re: State Vampirism—compendium, SFW version)

This blogpost reuploads the opener/compendium to my essay series, "State Vampirism," in a SFW format. Lacking outright pornographic/nude images (only the tops of some butts and underwear), it remains otherwise identical to the NSFW version on my 18+ website.

My research/activism into anti-Capitalism concerns various essays I have written on Marxist-Leninism, but also personalities; i.e., when critiquing Marxist-Leninism alongside Capitalism for its historically predatory qualities tied to state models (which an-Coms reject); e.g., when preying vampirically on women, queer people and care/sex workers (unpaid labor) similar to out-and-out capital, which rapes* by design: state vampirism = feeding through the state mid-abjection†, be it openly capitalist or Marxist-Leninist (and their profit/productivity motives). My theories concerning state vampirism/feeding borrow directly from Marx' ideas of vampirism‡, using them to critique the likes of Lenin, Stalin and Mao, but also the man himself (a noted anarcho-Communist) for leading to such persons; i.e., by camping him (and his followers) in ways ML apologia dogmatizes (re: "Making Marx Gay," 2024). For the sake of organization (and time), I have divided these critiques into essays; i.e., in conjunction with my Sex Positivity book series after it concluded, on June 2025 (re: "It Began with a Whisper"). This subpage only contains essays (and several YouTube videos); click here to access all of said series' promotional content. Likewise, these essays only concern state vampirism; I've written smaller essays on vampirism in my Undead Module (e.g., "Mandy, Homophobia and the Problem of Futile Revenge," 2024) and my entire sub-module on vampires, "Eat Me Alive" (2024). For a live reading featuring the most recent version of this page (as of 2/3/2026)—i.e., that ties to current activism, specifically rape prevention through survivor testimonies—consider watching my YouTube video, "Response to Lady Izdihar on Survivors and Speaking Out (re: the Epstein Files)" (2026).

Concerning Keywords: My arguments rely on various keywords I've previously coined, which here present in bold while color-coded (usually only once, while stressing their keyword status; e.g., ludo-Gothic BDSM, Metroidvania, or the palliative Numinous, etc). While some are given here, in abridged form, "Paratextual (Gothic) Documents" (2024) provides all neologisms, in full.

*Meaning (from my definition) "to disempower someone or somewhere—a person, culture, or place—in order to harm them," generally through fetishizing and alienizing acts or circumstances/socio-material conditions that target the mind, body and/or spirit) […] Rape can be of the mind, spirit, body and/or culture—the land or things tied to it during genocide, etc; it can be individual and/or on a mass scale" (source: "Psychosexual Martyrdom," 2024). By comparison, ludo-Gothic BDSM is "My 2023 combining of an older academic term, 'ludic-Gothic' (Gothic videogames), with sex-positive BDSM theatrics as a potent means of camp [on and offstage]—specifically rape play by placing "rape" in quotes, mid-Gothic (where rape [and playing with it] is ubiquitous)," and generally in pursuit of palliative-Numinous forces/echoes of the Gorgon felt during the Promethean Quest (source, abridged: "Paratextual Documents," 2024). Monopolies are a myth, the only certainty that such things are fought over using themselves: canon-vs-camp. To camp "rape" is to place rape in quotes, then, using Gothic's campy motives and means;

Camp = rape play to reverse abjection, and "we camp canon because we must" (from Colin Broadmoor to me, 2021 and 2023). This happens by enjoying taboo things, specifically by playing with them in subversive ways that liberate sex work (therefore all work): enjoy "harm" without endorsing its unironic forms, subversive play a necessary form of critique, during ludo-Gothic BDSM, regarding things normally played without thought (me vis-à-vis Anita Sarkeesian's famous adage) (source: "Sharing the Blame," 2025).

by placing it in quotes, workers can reverse abjection (as I argue, 2025), ergo profit to a dialectical-material degree (so many of the "spectres" Marx spoke of actually being women, ethnic minorities, Indigenous People, the disabled, and queer folk). To this, abjection = us versus them/alienation and fetishization serving profit through capital/the state raping workers by feeding on them. The rape occurs; workers camp it to transform the curse, mid-unheimlich (one often concerned—as Gothic historically-materially is—with live burial to a mechanically fearsome degree: the grinding up of so much living stuff with unliving stuff welcome-to-the-machine, below).

(source: "Persephone's Silksong Symposium," 2025)

†Which state predation and revolutionary action both rely upon to function; i.e., "on the Aegis" as something to further or reverse, mid-vampirism, through paid/unpaid labor (re: me, vis-à-vis Julia Kristeva). To that, abjection (us versus them/alienation and fetishization) is one of four main Gothic theories my book series utilizes—the other three being hauntology (retro-future), cryptonymy (show/hide) and chronotopes (time-space) alongside smaller theories (e.g., Jerrold Hogle's ghost of the counterfeit and Barbara Creed's monstrous-feminine [Gorgons and Amazons, as I study them]—which we'll supply in the full definition of state vampirism, in "Some Key Terms," alongside the definitions for capital/the state, Marxist-Leninism, the Promethean Quest, etc).

(source: Rana Indrajit Singh's "Base and Superstructure Theory," 2013)

‡"Capital is dead labour, which, vampire-like, lives only by sucking living labour, and lives the more, the more labour it sucks" (source: "Limits of the Working-Day," 1867). I would add that capital sucks in ways that alienate the ruling class and workers, harming both; e.g., capital doesn't enrich the bourgeoisie, it makes them dependent on those they exploit: hopelessly addicted and out-of-touch, while simultaneously lobotomizing workers (see: my Undead Module for a thorough exploration of this idea). I digress. Marx was a philosopher and so much of philosophy is poetic. In this respect, Marx was also a Gothicist, but he wasn't gay enough for our tastes (or aims); re: "Gothic Communism's chief aim is to be campier (thus sexier and funnier) than Marx; i.e., camping his ghost to develop a holistically intuitive anarcho-Communism begot through a widespread, collective and solidarized emotional and Gothic intelligence/awareness that recultivates the Superstructure and reclaims the Base [above] through intersectional resistance and de facto (extracurricular) reeducation: the Wisdom of the Ancients, or cultural understanding of the imaginary past, endemic to this organizational process, and not one any particular group can monopolize (through violence, terror and monsters, etc)" (source: Gothic Communism series abstract). Our dialectic, though material, is of the alien—one Marx, to some degree, actively ignored/omitted from the narrative by being homophobic (re: "Making Marx Gay"). "Undead," then, is dualistic insofar as we receive state force in ways that drain us, but also give us the ability/position to drain back when "hugging Medusa"; i.e., by killing our darlings in ways plenty have done—meaning besides myself critiquing men like Stalin, Chomsky or anyone else enacting and/or apologizing for dictators[3], Imperialism and the state; e.g., from Plato's Republic VII (c. 360 BCE), Milton's Paradise Lost (1667), Mary Shelley's Frankenstein (1818), Frantz Fanon's Black Skin, White Masks (1952), Howard Zinn's A People's History of the United States (1980), William Blum's Killing Hope (1994), David Smith's Endless Holocausts: Mass Death in the History of the United States Empire (2023), and Gabriel Rockhill's Who Paid the Pipers of Western Marxism? (2025). Marxism—including Marxist-Leninism—isn't beyond reproach, nor is it "immortal" or somehow impervious to capital's zombifying effects, mid-vampirism. Dissect it, then make your own monsters more conducive to an all-inclusive and ultimately post-scarcity world; re: Marx' "stateless, classless, moneyless society" also raceless and gender-non-conforming (as I posit); i.e., saying to each other and the world, "land back, labor back, sex back," but also "trans people are people," ACAB/ASAB/ABAB, and "sex work is work," etc: while interrogating state predation (which Imperialism is) and its effects on revolution, from generation to generation. Rome wasn't burned, overnight; and meanwhile, "the state is straight" but also white and male (re: "Understanding Vampires," 2024)—with various tokenized modularities (and persecution language) that gentrify and decay over time, state's-rights-vs-worker-rights during a non-zero-sum game. The basic struggle never changes, but like a vampire comes in many different shapes and sizes:

(artist: Robert Ingpen; cited: ibid.)

You have the basic ideas, above, to "get the gist." So I'll give you the essay list. However, given their sensitive and secretive nature, I'd like to unpack them some more afterwards, and after giving you some keywords to mull over. After all, "[r]eturning and reflecting upon old points after assembling them is a powerful way to understand larger structures and patterns (especially if they're designed to conceal themselves through subterfuge, valor and force). It's what holistic study (the foundation of this book) is all about" (source: "Shining a Light on Things," 2023).

Table of Contents

  • Preface Postscripts; or, Capital Cheapens Life (and Sex Work): A History of the World in Seven Cheap Things (2017), TERFs and the Epstein Files
  • Essays from My Undead Module (Concerning Zombies and Vampires)
  • Series Essays
  • Relevant Essays from My Book Series (Concerning Zombies, Vampires and Demons)
  • Some Key Terms; or, Defining State Vampirism at Length
  • Further Unpacking State Vampirism, Rape and Camping It
  • Footnotes

Preface Postscripts; or, Capital Cheapens Life (and Sex Work): A History of the World in Seven Cheap Things, TERFs and the Epstein Files

Gothic (gay-anarcho) Communism is a holistic, intersectional discipline that—among other things—champions universal liberation through a healthy stewardship of nature (fighting global warming as a symptom of Capitalism). One concerned with Gothic poetics' aesthetic (argument) had in duality during dialectical-material analysis, it stresses sex work under capital as something to iconoclastically liberate from state power—namely how capital/the state cheapen life while moving money (and resources) through nature to nature and workers' detriment. Patel and Moore lay out the basic idea; I apply it specifically to sex workers camping our own rape, reversing abjection (thus state vampirism) during ludo-Gothic BDSM—i.e., per Marx and myself, Capitalism alienates and sexualizes everything (which "Some Key Terms" and "Unpacking State Vampirism" each explore). Analyzing the larger historical-material problem those factors perpetuate, "State Vampirism" gazes through the unpaid labor umbrella—care/sex work and natural forces, but focusing on sex in light of ongoing abuses committed by the state pimping nature as monstrous-feminine: TERFs/fascist feminism (tokenism, a specialty of mine; re: "Regarding Tokenism and Fighting It," 2025) and the Epstein files (originally postscripts in "Unpacking" but moved into this preface, for their relevance).

(artist, left: Bay Ryan; right: Persephone van der Waard)

P.S., My work [and that of my friends/partners involved in said series; e.g., Bay Ryan, above] is influenced by a variety of thinkers. Chief among them—as far as the territorial, Cartesian nature of capital preying on nature as monstrous-feminine (re: "Nature Is Food," 2024)—is Patel and Moore's pivotal work, A History of the World in Seven Cheap Things. I strongly recommend you read it (at least the portions I cite[1]). I especially enjoy Patel and Moore's exploration of nature as something capital/state powers historically-materially exploit, by design. To that, shortage is ultimately a form of control, and one the ruling class (and their vampiric structures of invasion) dress up however they like—often through the language of order/disorder (order/chaos, civilization/nature, etc) as something to routinely "correct," under Capitalist Realism; e.g., burning the witch, beheading the Gorgon or bridling the Amazon[2]. All describe money's movement through nature-as-abject (re: me vis-à-vis Patel and Moore, Cartesian dualism pimping nature as monstrous-feminine out of desperate revenge). Or, as Atun-Shei Film explains, in "I'm Not Worried About the Second Civil War" (2026): "Our entire way of life is predicated on unsustainable ecocide and rampant, unchecked Imperialism" (source). I respond: "Hit the nail on the head, comrade. Society must change from the ground up, the modes of consumption altered to move away from the very demands taxing the planet to death. [...] You can't scapegoat capital, 'in small,' or otherwise 'slay' it in some shape or form; it must transform from inside" (source YouTube community post, Persephone van der Waard: 3/15/2026).

P.P.S., This work has been ongoing since the rise of the anti-trans movement, in the late 2010s. My book series concluded, June 2025, but maintains small-form research, artwork and essays like those shown here. As of January 2026, the exposure of capital and state predation have only peeled back any attempt at concealment; i.e., with the DOJ's infernal strip-tease of e-mail correspondence had among Jeffery Epstein and friends; e.g., Robert Trivers, one of the masterminds behind the anti-trans movement—one essentially planned by "chaser billionaires" to have more sex slaves (mainly trans women, below):

(source skeet, Dragonfish: January 31st, 2026)

"Your leaders are all child grooming monster men and yet somehow I'm the 'degenerate'?" asks Eva Android, "on the Aegis" (source skeet: January 31st, 2026); i.e., a trans sex worker anisotropically and apotropaically bouncing bad accusations back: towards the elite, mid-abjection, by using Medusa's mirror shield in reverse (our bodies normally dumping grounds for state abuse): "When Perseus slew the Medusa he did not – as commonly thought – put an end to her reign or destroy her terrifying powers" (source: The Monstrous-Feminine," 1993).

(artist: Eva Android)

"Show him your Aegis," indeed! Use it to freeze the real pimps in place, the whores of the universe (and their ancient labor struggles) taking back what's theirs. In doing so, the body suddenly becomes armor and weaponry through paradoxical exposure: like the Amazon and the Gorgon, subverting their canonical function by enacting countercultural propaganda through public nudism; i.e., to some degree required by revolutionaries, yet happening behind various buffers showing and hiding this-or-that (re: "Introducing Revolutionary Cryptonymy" and "Transgressive Nudism," 2024 and 2025). Thereupon, workers shield behind the canvas, the phone screen, the polaroid, etc, as see-thru and invisible; therein, workers fight back using what they got, sex workers using their bodies to raise awareness and motivate teamwork:

First, sex work as revolutionary action, namely the prevention of rape through public nudism advertising labor struggles, housing disputes, reports of sexual abuse, and so on. In times of monsters, whores are monsters to reverse abjection with, thus are what cops/those acting like cops (traitors, including token traitors) to further abjection will police to varying degrees: scapegoating the whore as the initial and ultimate victim to blame for capital's woes. To that, class war is ass war, "on the Aegis"; i.e., class war via sex work (with intersections of culture and race), the whore's revenge occurring by raising emotional/Gothic intelligence and awareness to reduce rape on a societal level (re: intersectional consciousness† during said revenge) (source:  'The Wolf Is Loose: Honoring Renee Good (and All Victims) by Fighting Back," 2026).

†"A neologism I coined, one meant to combat various forms of reductionism (class, culture and race); i.e., by building on Marx' notion of class consciousness: combining class with culture and race consciousness (awareness) to raise emotional/Gothic intelligence while synthesizing praxis" (abridged, source: "Paratextual Documents"). 

(artists: Cuwu; cited: "Challenging the State's Manufactured Consent and Stupidity (with Vampires)," 2024)

Keeping Creed in kind—and my past work on reversing abjection during ludo-Gothic BDSM, which "State Vampirism" explores—I respond to Eva's skeet: "Verily. The ruling class are the pedos and pimps they blame their victims of: under capital, which rapes by design. / Listen to trans people/sex workers; i.e., the people trawling through the Epstein Files to tell the world what we already knew" (source skeet, vanderWaardart: February 1st, 2026). Or as Tyler from the Internet writes, "As all this disgusting Epstein shit starts surfacing more and more, I hope we don't lose sight of the fact that apparently every major media outlet knew everything and instead spent their time money and energy attacking the trans community" (source skeet: November 12th, 2025). Many trans people are sex workers, but also victims of sex trafficking denied by mainstream media: "And one of the first survivors to step forward to try to stop Epstein? A trans woman, who was promptly mocked and vilified by the New York Post, New York Magazine, the courts and law enforcement" (source skeet, Danielle Froom: November 12th, 2025). They will rape you if you let them, then blame you for it; the power is yours to prevent that, but you must fight back—exposing whatever atrocities you can, including state proponents smearing you to defend the usual abusers signing their checks: silence is genocide, assimilation poor stewardship.

(ibid.)

Whatever atrocities come to light aren't strictly "new" but date back to older imperial forms; i.e., East and West, capital and state models' "16th century ecology" demanding worker exploitation through profit and productivity alike: "As Patel and Moore astutely point out, care work is historically unpaid, undervalued and overexploited under capital and systems of different nominalities; I extend this to—or rather focus on—sex work as something to fight for while doing it (re: my "Hailing Hellions Q&A" series interviewing sex workers of different marginalities)" (source: "Concerning Marxist-Leninism (versus Gothic [gay-anarcho] Communism)" from "Raising Awareness," 2025). To it, "Gothic, language shows and hides at the same time; e.g., 'skull' = 'theft' in Radcliffean terms, and 'Amen' = 'Seig Heil' in Christofascist terms. Code is code" (source skeet, vanderWaardart: February 2nd, 2026). The same goes for us.

(artist: Tim Jacobus; cited: "'Death by Snu-Snu!': From Herbos to Himbos, part two," 2024)

Through cryptonymy furthering or reversing abjection, Gothic commonly communicates in show/conceal-style code and in staged, half-real language, onstage and off; i.e., kayfabe, for all intents and purposes, concerns the Gothic camping of piracy and death as home; e.g., Medusa's head essentially the Jolly Roger tied to female/monstrous-feminine bodies with a bandit, bastard and/or barbaric character come home: as abject, apocalypse, alien invasion—vampire (the matriarch-in-question tiring out an aging rapist while feeding on him). The same goes for the world of combat sports, in general; e.g., the UFC owners' aging institution courting the reactionary side of their own fandom (Zombieman Jay's "The 14 Principles of Fascism Used by the UFC," 2026). The fact remains, all war predicates on deception, including class war favoring worker rights or state's rights dressed up but also functioning openly as bread and circus; i.e., naked lies, whereupon canon or camp/good actors and bad utilize the same cryptonymic, hauntological and chronotopic devices for different dialectical-material aims; re: furthering or reversing abjection, wherein function = flow of power through an anisotropic terror/counterterror binary serving workers or the state: by using the "ancient," pimp/whore language of sex and force—commonly repackaged as "sex, drugs and rock 'n roll," and all to maintain/tear down status-quo norms in taboo, predator/prey language; e.g., rape "epidemics" historically enacted through nonstop moral panic, xenophobia, and persecution mania, the same devices camped dualistically in paradoxically  anti-predatory ways by survivors of police-state abuse pimped under constant surveillance. To some degree, rebellion performs "under their jailor's nose."

Series Essays

  • "Preface: Gothic (gay-anarcho) Communism; or, Synthesizing Emotional/Gothic Intelligence through a Sex-Positive Gothic Mode" (originally 2024; released blog-style April 2nd, 2025): The preface to Volume One explains, by and large, what separates Gothic (gay-anarcho) Communism from Marxist-Leninism; but also, it stresses the importance of killing our darlings/past heroes in favor of a better worker mindset towards universal liberation. Discusses a few things Gothic Communism tends to avoid, theory-wise. Gothic Communism strongly dislikes pure poststructuralist/psychoanalytical (e.g., Freud, Jung and Lacan) and Marxist-Leninist models (though it employs many of their ideas in an-Com ways); i.e., not only do these models tend to be dated, vaguely abstracting and sexist/queerphobic (as Stalin and Freud both were, above), but they are far more common in Gothic academia than I would like.
  • "Understanding Vampires: 'What Is (Problematic) Love?'; or, Positions of Relative Ignorance to Relative Clarity (feat. Bad Empanada and Marxist-Leninism)" (August 20th, 2024): A deeper dive into the struggle between not just total ignorance and knowledge, but warring schools of thought—i.e., Marxist-Leninism and anarcho Communism—and how vampirism manifests under an-Com principles that often, fall under fire when trying to escape the closet of state forces (and outmoded forms of Communism). Includes various subchapters on state vampirism tied to Marxist-Leninism and capital.
  • "Raising Awareness: Regarding Bad Empanada and His Fascist Behaviors (and Marxist-Leninism versus anarcho-Communism)" (October 17th, 2025): "Raising Awareness" concerns YouTuber Bad Empanada and his open bigotry towards trans people and other minorities. It began as an e-mail to individual content creators on YouTube, but I figured I may as well share its dossier on my old blog and 18+ website (a more secure means of archiving information than Google Docs). I've also updated and expanded on this post repeatedly from its e-mail form—adding substantial portions from my own Gothic (gay-anarcho) Communist corpus, my friends and I critiquing the Marxist-Leninist approach, specifically its sexist, queerphobic and otherwise exclusionary/reactionary elements that Bad Empanada currently contributes to; i.e., by punching down at me, but also my friends; e.g., while worshipping massive creeps like Mao Zedong.

  • "Concerning Venezuela (and State Vampirism)" (January 3rd, 2026): This short essay covers the US invasion of Venezuela, enacting state predation. "Concerning Venezuela" examines the larger vampirism taking place—state vampirism and those who enable it (not just politicians)—but also how to dialectically-materially expose and challenge state power/feeding under Capitalist Realism pimping nature/workers treated as "of nature" (under Cartesian thought): by holding each other accountable!
  • "The Wolf Is Loose: Honoring Renee Good (and All Victims) by Fighting Back" (January 8th, 2026): Ice agents in Minneapolis murdered Renee Good, yesterday—shooting her after asking her to leave the vicinity of an ongoing ICE raid. This essay fights back, exploring the fascist ramifications to honor Good: by revealing the state rot she exposed in death, while touching on historical and poetic examples, side-by-side (as the Gothic does). In doing so, it focuses on state vampirism through a lycanthropic/werewolf critical lens.

  • "Anarcho-Communism vs Marxist Leninism, a Critique; or, Charlitics: a Queer Marxist TERF and SWERF" (January 29th, 2026): A video response to the YouTuber and Queer Marxist, Charlitics, who is a TERF and a SWERF punching down at a trans sex worker academic/activist and her friends (above). This video discusses. He's also a Bad Empanada fan. Go figure. You scratch a SWERF and a fascist bleeds. Update, 2/1/2026: He blocked the video for defamation claims (above):  "Nothing says 'I am really smart and correct' like abusing YouTube censors to silence criticism. Imagine this kind of thin-skinned behavior in academia, blocking rival argument on reactionary grounds while ALSO playing the victim card (re: DARVO[*]). Classic" (source skeet, vanderWaardart: February 1st, 2026). In response, I've chosen to focus on something more positive—chiefly the very identity politics this person devalues, which I tied to class, culture and race struggle across a polity of marginalized peoples; e.g., immigrants, emancipated slaves and their descendants, Indigenous Peoples, and various marginalities of class, culture and race (Persephone van der Waard's "The Value in Showing Intersectional Solidarity When Combating Fascism," 2026).

*Fascism betrays through austerity to conduct Imperialism in bad faith, and does so regardless of cosmetic; re: Hitler's Nazi Germany or Stalin's Soviet Russia. Neither was ultimately friendly nor emancipatory towards women or queer folk, any concessions previously offered ultimately rescinded over time. In the present, Charlitics calls me a counterrevolutionary while insisting he's fighting for the equality of all peoples: "Have fun continuing to be a counterrevolutionary ghoul that harasses people based on unfounded assumptions" (above); i.e., "I'M the victim/true revolutionary and YOU'RE attacking me/undermining rebellion!" It's DARVO and obscurantism—the kind used by Stalin and his ilk, past and present, to conceal their betrayal of the cause; i.e., while simultaneously targeting those actually pushing for Socialism in practice and not just "on paper"; e.g., Trotsky murdered by Stalin, the latter a career bad actor who befriended and betrayed whoever he needed to get whatever he wanted: "Two, Trotsky was a prominent figure of the Russian Revolution—one where Stalin, who betrayed Trotsky and Lenin, would prove himself a counterrevolutionary in bad faith; i.e., by accusing others, mid-DARVO-and-obscurantism" (source: "Raising Awareness"). Such things operate part-in-parcel:

Betrayal, then, is an important and reoccurring theme in Stalin's work, as he had Trotsky murdered in 1940; i.e., by having the killer pretend to be Trotsky's friend: "[Trotsky] was sitting at his desk in this studio in Coyoacan, Mexico, when Ramon Mercader – a Spanish-born Soviet agent, posing as Trotsky's friend but really under Stalin's orders – attacked him in the back of the head with a mountaineering ice pick" (source: Mee-Lai Stone's "Leon Trotsky Assassination Scene, 1940," 2013). More to the point, this occurred before Operation Barbarossa; i.e., when Stalin and Hitler were still pals, assassinating their political enemies in cold blood while divvying up the world stage to conduct state vampirism with state machinery on multiple fronts: behind a sham of Socialism, be it the Nazi or Soviet brand. It's very "Pot, meet Kettle," betrayal and consolidation of power away from workers a central theme in fascist activities. Fascists betray and generally by killing their friends in bad faith, sucking them dry. By betraying Trotsky and Lenin but also the very idea of Socialism that Marx and Engels laid out (warts and all), Stalin had effectively become the West's bête noir—a titanic scapegoat for them to leverage against future revolutionaries, cursing Socialism to a panoply of manufactured failures (and Red Scare) decades into the future. By that same token, Stalin's betraying of Communism (and steady homophobia) around the globe effectively gifted the CIA with their own counterrevolutionary blueprint: for counteracting world revolution themselves, after his death. Monkey see, monkey do—with bourgeois concessions towards workers in the West gradually dialed back over time, Bretton-Woods peeled away by neoliberalism into fascism cannibalizing those very same workers (and their children) (ibid.).

"Looking into #Trotsky's fate and the use of 'counterrevolutionary' as a #DARVO label used against him—but also #gay people as #Stalin's [chosen] enemies—you can see similar #queerphobia nowadays; i.e., in people who hope you don't recognize the fascist dogwhistle: 'an enigma wrapped in a mystery'" (source skeet, vanderWaardart: February 7th, 2026). Code is code; "counterrevolutionary," when used by Stalin and his apologists, is code for "degenerate" targeting enemies of state bureaucracy and those pining for it (see: footnotes but also the entire "Note on Trotsky (2/7/2026)" [abridged, above] from "Raising Awareness," v1.71). Bureaucracy is the engine of genocide—not just the Nazi Holocaust, but Soviet purges and American Manifest Destiny as different sides to the same die. Betrayal is betrayal, rape is rape; re: the state rapes by design, lying about it through code taken from older coders.

Relevant Essays from My Book Series (Concerning Zombies, Vampires and Demons)

"State Vampirism" delves into topics explored already by my book series—namely feeding and trauma in my Undead Module's sections on zombies and vampires. So I'm including some of those here, too (the whole module is germane, but these examples in particular touch on things "State Vampirism" prioritizes). There are several essays on vampirism from Volume One, as well.

Volume One (Manifesto and Instruction)

Volume Two, part two: the Undead

Volume Two, part two: Demons

  • "Idle Hands, part two: "Vampires and Claymation (feat. 'Midnight Vampire')" (December 24th, 2024): Lays out the basic idea of demonic, whorish revenge with vampires, whose blood libel it explores in Takena's "Midnight Vampire" (and reconsiders some ideas of tokenization per some of our thesis arguments that apply to all demon types).
  • "Idle Hands, part three: Goblins, Anti-Semitism and Monster-Fucking" (December 30th, 2024): Examines the vengeful, monstrous-feminine qualities of blood libel per goblins; i.e., their being "of nature" in ways that can be policed or avenged by theatrical agents waxing demonic poetic while playing with darkness visible. Explores these dualities first in Tolkien canonizing evil labor policed by good (orcs and goblins [vengeful-Jewish-coded slaves and whores] vs humans), followed by our own work and others camping him: through such "monster-fucking" play as highly chaotic/acid-Communist (e.g., Ween and SpongeBob), before weighing in on some transitional arguments that segue into "Forbidden Sight," part two (which discusses the making of demons, vis-à-vis Shelley's Frankenstein).
  • "Call of the Wild, part one: Hunter and Hunted; or, Nature vs the State" (February 9th, 2025): Outlines the different animal types (separate from undead and demonic) and revisits their broader settler-colonial relationship to the state as something to challenge.

Some Key Terms; or, Defining State Vampirism at Length

I decided to codify state vampirism into something more concrete; i.e., similar to my other neologisms (re: "Paratextual Documents"). Here it is and one other term (others given already or given deeper inside):

(artist: Storm Thorgerson)

state vampirism

A new term I coined regarding state predation, one fusing older Marxist language to queer Gothic theory (with Marx being a homophobic Gothicist; re: "Making Marx Gay," 2024); i.e., to articulate said predation and challenge it during ludo-Gothic BDSM. State* vampirism = feeding through the state mid-abjection†, be it openly capitalist* or Marxist-Leninist (and their profit/productivity motives). These are largely questions of aesthetic, wherein flow of power determines function in service to workers or the state. Either can do vampirism through the abjection process; i.e., as anisotropic (determined by direction), but also apotropaic (reducing harm) for one side or the other—unfolding messily during a terror/counterterror (cop/victim) binary allowing for all manner of violence, terror and morphological expression (re: Weber, Asprey and me; see: "The State: Its Key Tools" [from "Paratextual Documents"]): sex and monsters, policed and monopolized through state force or liberated by worker force "dressed up," onstage and off. When the state feeds, however, it rapes workers by design, and always in defense of nuclear home feeling alien under Capitalist Realism: taking power away from workers to exploit and drain them as "of nature" (under Cartesian thought—forever demanding an alien to exploit, replacing old settlers/natives with new variants [of giver/receiver of state force] from modules of colonizer and colonized, alike).

*My work uses specific definitions of capital/the state. First, "capital," as my book glossary explains, denotes

[a] system of exploiting workers, nature and the world, whose resultant genocide and vampiric devastation is synonymous with profit for capitalists/the elite. The elite parasitize everyone/thing else to generate profit through Capitalism; or to quote directly from Raj Patel and Jason Moore's A History of the World in Seven Cheap Things (2017):

Money isn't capital. [...] Capital isn't the dead stock of uncut trees or unused skill. For Marx and for us, capital happens only in the live transformation of money into commodities and back again. Money tucked under a mattress is as dead to capitalism as the mattress is itself. It is through the live circulation of this money, and in the relations around it, that capitalism happens. / The process of exchange and circulation turn money into capital. At the heart of Marx's Capital is a simple, powerful model: in production and exchange, capitalists combine labor power, machines and raw material. The resulting commodities are then sold for money. If all goes well, there is a profit, which needs then to be reinvested into yet more labor power, machines and raw materials. Neither commodities nor money is capital. This circuit becomes capital when money is sunk into commodity production in an ever-expanding cycle. Capitalism is a process in which money flows through nature [emphasis, me]. The trouble here is that capital supposes infinite expansion [growth] within a finite web of life (source).

For our purposes, this "web of life" concerns the privatized, social-sexual exploitation of workers in monstrous language—something to be unironically defended by class traitors preserving Capitalism, thus the state as a means of maximizing capital for the elite (infinite growth); i.e., to serve and protect capital, not people, through the means of production/propaganda's current bourgeois hegemony [and subsequent Imperialism/all-around exploitation] under [Capitalist Realism/the abjection process].

By comparison, "the state" = nation-states, corporations and the nuclear model tied to vertical power structures, in some shape or form;

whenever I say "the state" in this book, I am referring to the state as both a current mechanism for capital, but also the status quo more broadly—a state of affairs that has evolved into its current form [...]: nation-states, whose sense of national identity in relation to capital had to evolve into itself from the Cartesian Revolution onwards (bringing with them modern war and globalization as they currently exist). In the here and now, the status quo involves corporations and religious institutions that operate with the state, the elite uniting them to serve their material interests. "The state" is an umbrella term, then, one that highlights a relationship between all of these factors (source: "What Is the Gothic?" 2023)

i.e., arranged at federal, state, and/or local levels, enacting vampirism through police-state brutality and surveillance, punching down out of ethnocentric models built on genocide alienating and fetishizing their victims (e.g., Tim Walz placating ICE in Minneapolis, advising them how best to feed; re: Persephone van der Waard's "Stay on Target: Abolish ICE + Capital + State Vampirism," 2026). Anarchism combats this by transforming vertical power into horizontal power across all registers.

†Again, which state predation and revolutionary action both rely upon to function; i.e., "on the Aegis" as something to further or reverse, mid-vampirism, through paid/unpaid labor (re: me, vis-à-vis Julia Kristeva). To that, abjection (us versus them/alienation and fetishization) is one of four main Gothic theories my book series utilizes—the other three being hauntology (retro-future), cryptonymy (show/hide) and chronotopes (time-space) alongside smaller theories; e.g., Jerrold Hogle's ghost of the counterfeit (re: "Raising Awareness" (2025),  footnote 1) and Barbara Creed's monstrous-feminine (re: Gorgons and Amazonomachia, as I study it). As a queer sex worker and academic, I dialectically-materially prioritize abjection and vampirism through unpaid labor—chiefly sex work, exploited by Cartesian dualism and its harmful, maximalist binaries under Capitalist Realism—but mention the other theories, too (access "Four Main Gothic Theories (the Four Gs)" for their longer definitions). In essence, capital/the state rape by design, which unpaid labor prevents by breaking Capitalist Realism mid-abjection; i.e., during ludo-Gothic BDSM having the whore's revenge (outlined further below [and which] "State Vampirism" explores at length): the return of something unresolved/undefeated to confront (e.g., Dracula, below).

There must always be rape under capital/the state, ergo something to rape; i.e., expressed as "enemy that stubbornly survives," and whose subsequent, alien/fetish, us-versus-them dialogs help facilitate the state's furthering of abjection, dogmatizing replacement and extermination to increasingly toxic degrees (capital dies by design, becoming toxic over time, including tokenism; e.g., TERFs; re: "Toxic Schlock Syndrome," 2025). Doing so ultimately causes harm as something to cryptonymically show and hide, hauntologize as "canceled" retro-future (e.g., cyberpunk), and poetically manifest in/mark as the Gothic chronotope (time-space). The typical result is home-as-castle, specifically vampire castle—an "ancient," uncanny site of alien feeding and whoring that canonically blames the whore-as-bandit, -bastard, -barbarian, what-have-you, DARVO-and-obscurantism; i.e., nature as whore-like, "cursed" generationally as Indigenous and unwelcome/not-of-this-earth, and all while shielding capital/the state (again, under Cartesian dualism) as vampirically pimp-like in the bargain (taken from Radcliffe's "skull" = "theft" approach). So is nature—framed canonically as monstrous-feminine whore (e.g., the Archaic Mother or femme fatale under Wandering Womb revivals)—the very revenge to fear by state vampires, thus police by traitorous pimps (which cops are) stealing from workers. In doing so, they punch down out of preemptive revenge: the pimps' revenge historically had—out from Divine Right into a Protestant ethic—into Manifest Destiny and Pax Americana at home and abroad (the state being white, straight and male under heteronormative, settler-colonial, and ultimately concentric, prison-like/police-state models; re: "Understanding Vampires," 2024). So do cops betray labor in pimp-like ways—chattelizing and feeding on them through Enlightenment-grade intersections of class, culture and race, but also "imbricating persecution language" (e.g., blood libel, sodomy, Orientalism and witchcraft; re: "Idle Hands," 2024); i.e., like food in ways states have categorized and gorged on since Antiquity into modernized forms of retro-future exploitation (re: "Nature Is Food," 2024).

Such things can be camped, of course, but exploitation and liberation share the same bodies, language and spaces of play—all of the above used in duality/dialectically-materially by good actors and bad, when-worlds-collide. Gothic Communism is a holistic device, its own neo-medieval/pre-colonial attitudes' Wisdom of the Ancients (as borrowed from Indigenous cultures' own Wisdom of the Ancestors) driving towards post-scarcity by combatting an intersectional problem; i.e., through intersectional solutions that reverse abjection accordingly—meaning through Gothic entropy and grey area, the ensuing pedagogy of the oppressed healing from "rape" (2024): by placing it in quotes, thereby speaking to state vampirism's tremendous obscurity, power and decay (the routine death/transfer of mastery in neo-feudal [fascist] forms) cloaking everything in darkness visible (the occupying army's structure of invasion, the former [and its vampirism] stemming from the latter). Through the ensuing battles (and cryptonymy/confusion)—one whose subsequent Amazonomachia (monster battle) unfolds during the oldest labor dispute as forever at odds/unresolved on both sides—a trademark tug-of-war ensues: land, labor and sex theft, by the state; land, labor and sex back by workers, both occurring "on the same Aegis" and by using a variety of monstrous-feminine poetics, vectors and objectives; re: "hugging the alien" during a dialectic of the alien, one predominated by the Gorgon and similar vengeful, pro-worker beings of nature come home to roost un capital's grave (e.g., Amazons and anal sex as terror weapons subverting their common state purpose, death-is-nothing-to-us; see: "Our Sweet Revenge," 2025).

(source: "Seeing Dead People," 2024)

The goal—for Gothic Communism, whose ludo-Gothic BDSM dialectically-materially checks state vampirism (and its historical-material atrocities against nature-as-whore)—remains intersectional consciousness and Gothic maturity. We can feed, too, paradoxically reversing harm through the same veiled, poetic elements' dualistic ebb and flow (which have no set function). In short, this is our mall, our vampire castle others invade, surveille and ultimately conquer, panopticon-style, by acting out so-called "protection" (mono)myths in bad faith (token or otherwise; re: the Belmonts). "House" and "vampire," then, are quantum propositions—ultimately shared by cop and victim alike, each surviving cryptomimetically* inside liminal territories while trying to feed, this-way-or-that (under state monopolies to essentialize or break, mid-abjection). Capital/the state, then, could be described as making workers undead in a variety of ways; i.e., that Gothic poetics and dialectically-material analysis and play help express during ludo-Gothic BDSM (e.g., ghosts, above; see: my Undead Module for a deeper exploration of zombies†, vampires† and ghosts†; and my Demon Module for the same thing but for demons† and beings of nature†).

*Re (from my glossary):

Defined by Jodey Castricano in Cryptomimesis: The Gothic and Jacques Derrida's Ghost Writing (2001) as,

A writing practice that, like certain Gothic conventions [e.g., Segewick's commentary on live burial as a timeless fixture of Gothic literature] generates its uncanny effects through the production of what Nicholas Rand might call a "contradictory 'topography of inside-outside'" [from Abraham and Torok's The Wolf Man's Magic Word …] Moreover, the term cryptomimesis draws attention to a writing predicated upon encryption: the play of revelation and concealment lodged within parts of individual words (source).

Castricano further describes this process as "writing with ghosts," referring to their nature as linguistic devices that adhere the sense of being haunted in domestic spaces: the house as inside, familiar and inherited by the living from the dead.

I extend this revolutionary voice to all monsters/nature as monstrous-feminine: "As Castricano writes of cryptomimesis [...] in regards to ghosts, I would argue the same notion applies to all undead, demons and animalistic egregores; i.e., writing with both as complicated theatrical expressions of the human condition under Capitalism [and the state]" (source: "Paratextual Documents"); re: Gothic Communism is holistic, "we are legion" a polity of unruly spectres. In turn, power is performative; i.e., exchanged paradoxically between a vortex of different aesthetics, their lopsided arguments concerning power's unequal arrangement—meaning under state models abjecting nature, had in duality versus nature reclaiming such things: to send power towards workers or the state, and generally at the same time. So do exploitation and liberation occupy the same bodies, spaces and costumes, mid-Gothic (which typically concerns power as unequal but also decaying away from state mastery into fearful unknowns); to critique power you must camp it, going where it is currently—i.e., by reifying it during ludo-Gothic BDSM, doing so in highly performative, quantum ways that break Capitalist Realism while "under its umbrella": "corruption" as data through preferential code, doubling nakedly as revolutionary action-in-disguise under surveillance, on and offstage (e.g., tactical frivolity and gay frogs; re: camp, Amazonomachia and kayfabe through revolutionary cryptonymy and transgressive nudism; also see: "Notes on Power" and "Doubles, Dark Forces, and Paradox" but also "Interrogating Power Through Your Own Camp," 2023). So do workers "summon Medusa"; i.e., as a front for different forms of exchange that aren't top-down, reversing the terror/counterterror binary to aid workers under state bondage (and whose subsequent "topping from below" embodies the Gothic [gay-anarcho] Communist MO, "on the Aegis").

†Those whose unwelcome appearance, suddenly outside polite society's permitted spheres, convey an abject sensation of uncertainty and fear—one whose rising tensions, obscurity and decay notably tie the home-in-crisis to Numinous, Promethean extremes/notably trashy media speaking to polarizing circumstances under vaguely "Gothic," oppressive, war-stricken conditions (above), and whose ensuing unheimlich denotes ontologically several things at once: both "of the harvest" (where feeding occurs, mid-abjection) and a "grim" historical-material reminder that projects the fearsome past forwards, devouring the present in "cosmic," legendary-if-cryptonymic ways. Often a castle (re: the chronotope) or some-such retro-future design, house = vampire under alien discoveries that travel, circus-style, come hauntologically home during state vampirism; e.g., Percy Shelley's "bare and level sands" from "Ozymandias" (1818), or his wife's own famous novel speaking to the Gothic quest for Numinous power as something to describe capital with during ludo-Gothic BDSM (thus highlight state vampirism as normally occurring in secret):

the Promethean Quest (re: Frankenstein, abridged)

The Promethean Quest stems from Mary Shelley's seminal Frankenstein; or, the Modern Prometheus (1818—although I've explored it extensively in different media forms, besides; e.g., Metroidvania and Amazonomachia, below). [...] I further define/categorize Shelley's quest as follows:

the Promethean Quest [as Shelley writes it] critiques the Cartesian (mis)treatment of nature—indeed, the entire globe—as "already dead," owned and used by the elite; i.e., like clay to aggrandize the current ordering of things come home to roost. As such, its reckoning effectively concerns the canonical theft of power from the imaginary past, therefore Gorgon as trapped in Cartesian duality" [...] (source: "Power in Gothic: the Promethean Quest and Cartesian Thought" from "Nancy Drew Syndrome," 2025).

Like anything else, then the Promethean Quest has a pro-state and pro-worker function—with pro-labor variants having the whore's revenge, reviving the Gorgon during ludo-Gothic BDSM; re: chasing a Communist/palliative Numinous during the Promethean Quest: by stealing "fire of the gods" back from the elite, ultimately situating it among ourselves/ourselves among its dark transformative power (aka darkness visible, Milton's Paradise Lost [1667] having inspired Shelley's work a great deal). To this, Shelley's ideas rank among the most important in Gothic fiction and literary criticism, but also art and protest (of state vampirism) more broadly. Refer to "Celebrating Mary Shelley's Immortal Legacy" (2025) for all my work concerning the Promethean Quest.

Concealment/revelation work part-in-parcel with undead beings, then, who feed through circular returns to the land above ground, aka "of the living" but also those treated by the state as having (temporarily, anyways) basic human rights (the middle class and all the anxieties they experience, fearing the underworld should their own illegitimate fears nightmarishly come to pass; re: Hogle). By comparison, demons are summoned and banished routinely during the abjection process, which oscillates under capital, Capitalist Realism, and state vampirism (the "peristalsis" of state machinery sending power and resources flowing upwards). In turn, these basic poetic ideas Gothically reify power to then explore, scrutinize and dialectically-materially analyze a larger historical cycle, and generally by using ideas other thinkers before and after me collectively share and impart anew. The state exists to preserve itself by cannibalizing labor and nature as monstrous-feminine. What I describe as a giving and receiving of state force being things to assign, mid-apocalypse (re: "Police States, Foreign Atrocities and the Imperial Boomerang," 2024), Achille Mbembe calls necropolitics (2019): the state deciding who lives and who dies through the assignment of death warrants. Per Gothic's passage of time and rediscovery of undisclosed/forgotten implements of state power radiating this-or-that back into the world, doing so transpires in routinely alien language, but also status: alive, dead or (for our purposes) undead/the walking dead, mid-invasion (with Jordan Peele attaching the flying saucer's vaginal symbolism to mass hysteria, generational trauma/theft, and Biblical, cataclysmic shenanigans [above]: "raining blood, from a lacerated sky" to scapegoat state vampirism onto a far-off invader or barbarian—one paradoxically endemic to the land as rebellious/thirsty for blood, come harvest time).

Further back, the appearance of the living dead (with goblin-green skin, below) would be acknowledged by Romero, Matteson, and Fanon's Night of the Living Dead (1968), I Am Legend (1954) and The Wretched of the Earth (1961)—all speaking poetically to a similar return or doom, one where those ontologically "in Hell" rise to "walk the Earth" when the usual spaces of relegation read "no vacancy." Indeed, doing so happens routinely under crisis as baked into capital, thus tied to overloaded mechanisms thereof (e.g., jails or ghettos); i.e., pursuant to profit, productivity and police brutality exceeding their grasp, and which continually afflict the colonial subject with amnesia and wounds, all once. So do feeding and trauma engrain historically into state machinery—one whose harvest (and organs for harvest) have grown excessively "grim" over time, thus freezing those who look upon forbidden knowledge about the abjection process: as "putrid," employed and haunted by state actors through festering state devices, eclipsing themselves through fresh rot they refuse to debride until it chills and shocks them stupid (necrobiomes pillaged by those taking more than Mother Earth can give, turning her "feral" [or rabid, lycanthropic, etc] during state shift aka climate change, mid-Capitalocene; re: me vis-à-vis Patel and Moore; see: "Nature Is Food"). It "stretches," the ensuring Realism essentializing capital's fear of nature/end-of-the-world pulp media despite the hellish sensations: all part of something bigger despite the cryptonymy at work.

(artist: Lucid-01; cited: "Ladies First; or, the Grift of False Rebellion," 2025)

Agamben, for example, warned a permanent "state of exception" (2005), one that—during fascism/the Imperial Boomerang (when Imperialism comes home to empire)—reduces people visibly to an old-but-normal function of state control: a suspension of the normal order to facilitate the feeding process, thereby reducing human beings (and other animals) to abject garbage during inhumane policings of nature (what Creed and I call monstrous-feminine and Foucault "bio-politics"); i.e., to alien dump sites of feeding on garbage under state control/monopolies called "bare life," "zoe," and "homo sacer," etc: as terms collectively explored by myself alongside Agamben, Foucault and others within the Gothic mode, both in and out of academia (all the way back to Marx' spectres, Shelley's Creature, Radcliffe's banditti and Milton's Satan, etc; re: "skull" = theft but also abject exchange, from the living to the dead, inside a larger ongoing cycle/mirage that workers alienate from/fetishize-to-sublimate inside). Homo sacer dates back to Ancient Rome, for instance, yet describes similar, more recent forms of societal death experienced by humans; i.e., those ignominously chattelized by Enlightenment thought during the Cartesian Revolution and its technologies of conquest: the map making the world undead/demonic for routine state feeding on a national, ultimately global scale (re: me vis-à-vis Patel and Moore's "capital is when [and where] money moves through nature," mid-abjection); e.g., the Palestinians being a more recent example of older ethnocentric models of alive/dead moral geographies, thus following the same basic logic of conquest, control, feeding and rape: keeping one's prey alive but trapped in state/undeath to feed on them, caught between the usual friend/foe contradictions pimping nature (e.g., zombies, orcs, demons, etc), and which state feeding historically demands (source: Akshra and Lakshay Mehla's "The Palestinian Homo sacer: examining the disparity towards casualties of Israel/Palestine and Russia/Ukraine wars," 2025).

"The spice must flow," and generally does DARVO-and-obscurantism. There must always be a whore to pimp/criminal to puritanically punish/trash to take out, thus deviant nightly homewrecker "of nature" to scapegoat as pirate, then behead/strip nakedly of its essence ("sanguine") by state actors for state absorption—to keep the status quo flush with stolen life, per Promethean Quest as "heroic"; e.g., the Skeksis, from Jim Henson's Dark Crystal (1982, above), depicting state vampirism "in a nutshell": "heroically" sacrificing as much nature as required "to cheat death," mid-abjection, the entire planet nowhere near enough "to defeat Medusa." Like all gods, the Archaic Mother personifies an idea, a "terrorist" goddess over life and death. Symbolizing abjection as a natural process of transference, her entropic, anisotropic and apotropaic memento mori smashes state monopolies of terror/counterterror arguments, thus precedes and ultimately survives state bodies (and vampirism) "on the Aegis"; i.e., by weaponizing violence, terror and monsters against her foes pimping nature: a witchy nerd/violently fuckable, clownish "hag whore" from outer space—a Numinously fearsome iconoclast that, when viewed, turns hunted into hunter (and vice versa) by reminding state actors how their food is dead/unappetizing in its "disobedient failure" to nourish and sustain them. She cannot die—is a true immortal they can never defeat, "shitting them" belly-of-the-beast out no matter how much blood they binge and purge, greedily sucked from glass-jar babies "kettled" en masse. Despite how common Capitalist Realism is, capital cannot virgin/whore scapegoat the source of its own decay—itself and its factories self-defeating and, more to the point, suspiciously mortal. All roads lead to Rome, and Rome was, is, and shall always be "dead on arrival." All they can do is eat and surveille, watching themselves wither away while structures of invasion lead cynically to extinction (therefore madness, senility and Goya-style cannibalism).

So yes, the system succeeds, through "all our yesterdays," in cheapening life to exploit it; it fails every time to keep the bourgeoisie alive—a historical-material embarrassment/reminder the Gorgon (and her servants) shine in pimp faces to humble, frustrate and level them; re: having the whore's revenge by reversing the abjection process, during ludo-Gothic BDSM. The Gorgon is a dark oracle, then—one "fucking back" as hard as she needs (using anything of the land, labor and worker bodies) to hammer her point home, and in Gothically "mature" forms of trash predicting state death through radical change (which death is): "When Perseus slew the Medusa he did not – as commonly thought – put an end to her reign or destroy her terrifying powers" (source: Barbara Creed's The Monstrous-Feminine, 1993). Quite the opposite, she lives on after death; i.e., in little-and-Big varieties attached mythically to women's work/unpaid labor as a whole (the orgasm/Numinous tied to rapturous cycles of death and rebirth, whereupon the usual Neo-Gothic revivals—paradoxical "oubliettes," employing "darkness visible" through campy castle-in-the-flesh hyphenations, mise-en-abyme and mid-Amazonomachia-as-kayfabe—critique capital-as-stillborn). To it, whores are classically "homewreckers" relaid in highly romantic code, their "ancient imaginary" veneer dissecting state illusions hiding harmful material conditions—pirates and destroyers, yes, but also teachers, activists and rebels linked inextricably to home-as-haunted by state vampirism; i.e., the alien, monstrous-feminine stuff of Gothic legend and play that, when consciously engaged with, achieve partial concealment: hiding in plain sight and speaking truth to power through paradoxical exposure/the dark passage of Charon's canoe smuggling this or that (often information), "when in Rome."

(artist: Ryder K)

Whores work in shadows but also embody them/darkness visible, the Satanic cargo-in-question ferried mid-abjection while hugging the alien/the Gorgon during ludo-Gothic BDSM; re: rape play dressed cryptonymically up—both in the morphological, performative language of war and buildings vampirically hyphenized, mid-Gothic, but also food, sickness, destitution, and death, etc, as suitably uncanny/vaso vagal harbingers thereof (the friction of shortage, amid a growing appetite for healthy things to eat, or "forbidden fruit" that—by tasting good and/or through acquired taste—leads towards health in "unhealthy" language abjuring the Protestant ethic and damage it causes: the lusty hyphenation of mouths and teeth, but also live burial/graveyard sex "girding one's loins" and shielding one's mind from state influence (re: "Holistic Instruction; or, a Cruel Angel's Thesis," 2024). In short, people learn through play and play with things that suitably address the problem by "letting off steam" under surveillance; i.e., Gothic trash a double, subversive means of camouflage "for the guerilla," the terrorist, the iconoclast whore stirring the pot to upend/undermine state chastity arguments (the "maiden" side of the virgin/whore argument haunted by her "evil" double, sentenced previously to death by state pimps).

(source: Hans Staats' "Mastering Nature: War Gothic and the Monstrous Anthropocene," 2016; cited: "Men of Reason Suck," 2024)

Here, the language of war stays rooted in rape fantasies/giant destroyers since Walpole wrote Otranto (1764, above): a castle of rape that interrogates past forms of unequal power arrangement come home. In turn, "storm my castle" = the whore's refrain played endlessly out, under capital. For workers freed from state illusions, though (namely the monomyth and violence it incurs), Gothic poetics engender and supply open acts of defiance/neo-medieval forms of calculated risk, thus control as something to seek (re: the palliative Numinous; see: "Prey as Liberators," 2024); i.e., through "death" as something to enact in comical, sexy-silly ways, but also as Satanic, oxymoronic emblems of invasion/confusion that cryptonymically promise and promote such games. They consequently generate hidden lessons flirting with taboos/stigmas/phobias/scapegoats, rape or otherwise dressed up as "mere play"; re: me vis-à-vis Gloggins dating back to Plato, whose entire lineage of play and disguise inform ludo-Gothic BDSM that my friends and I conceptualize: through brothel espionage, the whore-in-question a "lady of the night" evoking decapitation, crucifixion-style impalement, and other forms of capital punishment linked paradoxically to rapture, to orgasm playing "rape" out in quotes in ways known to whores out of Antiquity into the medieval and neo-medieval worlds (re: "Psychosexual Martyrdom," further down).

(artist: Scyllacibi)

Gothic is trashy insofar as porn is viewed as/treated like trash/a haunted house promoting rape, barbarism, sudden death, and public humiliation postmortem. For the Gorgon and her ilk, however, such language (and games) remain undeniably useful: "playing dead" under surveillance akin to "swimming in Styx," in trash, in the murky grey area/cultural "nadir" of mainstream society that previous rabble rousers delighted in, mid-scandal; e.g., Matthew Lewis writing Matilda—the riotous, Satanic hero-in-disguise/crossdressing whore/devil worshipper exposing the incestuous rapey and cloistered monk, Ambrosio—being made, like all golems are, from inanimate garbage to eventually return to (and whose reputation when writing The Monk [1794] led it to becoming his namesake);

Assuming now a conjuror's office, I
Thus on your future Fortune prophesy:—
Soon as your novelty is o'er,
And you are young and new no more,
In some dark dirty corner thrown,
Mouldy with damps, with cobwebs strown,
Your leaves shall be the Book-worm’s prey;
Or sent to Chandler-Shop away,
And doomed to suffer public scandal,
Shall line the trunk, or wrap the candle! (source: "Preface").

i.e., in ways whores, queer folk and unpaid labor recognize and imitate through exposure: by playing with the forbidden as conspicuous garbage—a garbled mess of mixed emblems, confused binaries and dead metaphors, cryptonymically reversing abjection mid-upheaval (as Lewis very much did, wearing his novel on his sleeve during the French Revolution).

Again, trash is camouflage for the guerrilla, in Gothic. Deceiving deceivers, so does the whore and her endless, ontological states of undress/wardrobe of personas, alter-egos and aliases tie to generational dialogs of survival as happening everywhere—and do so all at once, under the oldest labor struggle there is: the whore, "skewered" in various performative ways that pass useful data-as-code along under questionable states of grace (re: homo sacer). All in good fun/while having fun, of course—workers of any gender channeling "Gorgon vibes"  to complete the disguise, memento mori (classically the monstrous-feminine evolving into the vengeful femme forte, fatale] to enjoy Numinous power Medusa categorically wields, the "castle" a space of concealment and war play different games useful to worker survival and liberation): "'Tis but a scratch!" Code is code, deciphered through play to mean whatever workers need it to among themselves, not the state dubiously watching them. "Slay, queen!" becomes a signal to build trust or sow discontent ("Cry 'havoc!' and let loose the dogs of war!"). It all depends on what the language (and its dialectical-material context) are hiding upon themselves/doubling whatever they need to satirize whoever they like (monks or otherwise). The most productive dialogs are the ones that lead to future revivals of fearsome things; i.e., that the state fears, namely the Gorgon/Communist Numinous embodied in our own lives and media we produce while alive (and leave behind, after we die).

(artist: Guido Reni; cited: "Psychosexual Martyrdom")

And so Medusa—refusing to be victim by surviving inside state/nuclear models of abjection (re: me vis-à-vis Elizabeth Hadley's "More than a Monster: Medusa Misunderstood," 2024; see: "Always a Victim," 2025)—evokes Numinously her prey to strike them stone dead when found again. (re: like Matilda, aping the Madonna to seduce the false preacher). She achieves this aim through her de facto "children," radicalizing future generations by leading them hypnotically towards a partially imaginary past-future: one whose routine exploration yields up dynamic and radial material changes, whereupon potential soldiers backslide into chaos under state lies by waking and rising up from dormant phases of rebellion. And so, in capital's dying moments, the Gorgon offers up courage through fear—as something to face and overcome, yes, but also embody in whore-like ways of cryptonymic pushback: "eat, worship, hug or fuck me (the alien) and learn the truth, toppling state power through the beauty of disorder come home (wherein 'anarchy' or decentralized power = 'chaos,' in state eyes, thus destruction of 'home' as a false space of deadly feeding on those inside). Level the state, crucifying Roman fools on Roman swords; then make a better world to lift yourselves up towards, one whose post-scarcity—built cycle-to-cycle on the bones of the old, the Wisdom of the Ancients something to rediscover—the living of today lay graciously (and ungraciously) to rest." Rebellion never ends, but goes round and round from cradle to grave: smothering future empire "in the crib" (often through gallows humor and trashy Neo-Gothic theatre, the cuckoo act anisotropic in a non-zero-sum game). Choke on it, you little fuck.

(artist: Zdzisław Beksiński; cited: "I, Satanist; Atheist: A Gothicist's Thoughts on Atheism, Religion, and Sex," 2021)

Gothic maturity

A new term I coined, specifically the ability to say healthy things through taboo language during ludo-Gothic BDSM; i.e., while pushing for intersectional solidarity and consciousness, developing Gothic Communism (thus universal liberation) through various creative successes that collectively overcome praxial inertia, division, dormancy and betrayal [often trapped between different feelings to act out, in Numinously Promethean ways; e.g., goblins and puppetry (above) being classic (neo-)medieval devices; i.e., of the antisemitic sort, notably concerned with blood libel, sodomy and witchcraft as "imbricating persecution language" (re: "Idle Hands," 2024): as tied older ancient varieties, all of which capital/the state revive to abuse, feeding on/punching down at workers, mid-abjection, and where workers—within a shared Gothic mode—passionately reclaim and reverse such matters in highly operative, campy and kayfabe-style eyes].

Further Unpacking State Vampirism, Rape, and Camping It

Note: Again as I conceive it, state vampirism = feeding through the state mid-abjection*, be it openly capitalist or Marxist-Leninist. These are largely questions of aesthetic, whose Promethean (self-destructive) function extends to other configurations "of Omelas"; e.g., Zionism. Zionism is a settler-colonial device whose ethnocentric, divide-and-conquer models overlap with racism, Orientalism, and other modular tools of division and persecution; i.e., canonically arbitrating war-as-business for productivity and profit, all by utilizing Cartesian thought, heteronormativity and settler colonialism tied to state monopolies of violence, terror and monsters/sex (re: Weber, Asprey and me; see: "The State: Its Key Tools" from "Paratextual Documents"). To be effectively anti-Zionist—meaning in ways that actually challenge capital/the state's vampiric feeding mechanism and poetics (unlike fascism)—is to be anti-racist/anti-white-supremacist, anti-war(-for-business), etc, as intersecting modules: in a larger intersectional, dualistic solution to an intersectional problem that, likewise, critiques Marxist-Leninism sharing the same basic language and spaces of play. So does Gothic (gay-anarcho) Communism and ludo-Gothic BDSM (rape play) dialectically-materially reclaim "imbricating persecution language" (e.g., blood libel, sodomy and witchcraft; re: "Idle Hands," 2024)—doing so holistically and dualistically to reverse abjection ergo state predation/vampirism, which historically-materially prey through said territories to further abjection, onstage and off: the state hates sex but needs it to survive, policing it through various rapacious paradoxes borrowed from city-state slavery and ancient-world Imperialism (re: "Rape Reprise," 2024). Furthermore, there's overlap between my anti-Zionist work and my work critiquing Marxist-Leninism alongside capital, so consider reading both. —Perse

(artist: Karen B.; cited: "The World Is a Vampire," 2024)

*Re: Which state predation and revolutionary action both rely upon to function; i.e., "on the Aegis" as something to further or reverse, mid-vampirism. In essence, capital/the state rape by design, which unpaid labor prevents by breaking Capitalist Realism mid-abjection; i.e., during ludo-Gothic BDSM having the whore's revenge (outlined below, but which "State Vampirism" explores at length):

Per Marx and myself, Capitalism alienates and sexualizes everything. Nature is monstrous-feminine as such, "empowerment" applying to any aspect of our life, bodies, violence and terror the state wishes to monopolize/control, and any trope, convention, cliché or fetish that might be used to degrade, humiliate, rape or otherwise demonize/dominate beings "of nature" per capital's qualities (re: settler-colonial, heteronormative and Cartesian); i.e., that we can reclaim during ludo-Gothic BDSM [...]

(artist: ALT3R4TI0N)

To do so is to break capital's hold on all things demons, darkness and nature they stole and monopolized, in turn smashing their own abjection against them and breaking Capitalist Realism with our Aegis—to deny capital's dead labor and language feeding on living labor and language according to what power and knowledge we exchange to and fro. The whore's revenge is to break the profit [and productivity] motive by making a world for which it (and rape) are no longer possible using these methods; i.e., by using the same demonic and slutty language capital does, but at cross purposes: to hug the alien—not demonize it to receive state violence—thereby (ex)changing how the world is seen to begin with (source: "Rape Reprise").

To it, I was raped—a topic I've written about on more than one occasion, given cause in light of the Epstein files' release to talk about it once more:

I was raped (re: "I'm a Rape Survivor" from "Raising Awareness"). One thing I learned is the abuse extends to not being believed. It's not just the event, but everything that follows in its wake. This includes the rapist, themselves, but also everything that emboldened them to start with: a system upon which rape isn't just expected, but demanded to maintain the status quo under capital, the state/nuclear model.

Edit: Being a trans, white Gothicist, I can safely say that (cis) white women already sit in a liminal position. Trans women, however, sit in a space of the monstrous-feminine wherein we can be both rapist and raped—admittedly one that cis women also experience to some degree (the Gorgon, Amazon and similar avengers of a forte or fatale character out of Antiquity into present times), but for which the feminist pecking order classically tokenizes (through TERFs); i.e., to punch down at/fetishize trans women as vampires and trans men as confused slaves/damsels-in-distress "under Dracula's spell." The whole thing is deeply rooted in patriarchy, misogyny and antisemitism, but also capital gentrifying feminism to tokenize and decay in defense of the nuclear model. All the same, the paradox of safety isn't in segregation and assimilation, but exposing the very things that put us at risk from the get-go: in ways that are both risky and empowering. To that, liberation and exploitation share the same stages, bodies and language—meaning among good actors and bad, wherein capital/the state rape by design (and often by targeting the mind: gaslight, gatekeep, girlboss). In turn, rape isn't just of sexual violence and penetration—though TERFs monopolize it as such, "ranking rape" (re: "Regarding Tokenism and Fighting It")—but various forms of in-group/out-group power abuse that workers must subvert, "on the Aegis" (ourselves). "There's no reversing a curse," the burden rape presents something to transform through generational trauma gradually reclaimed on all registers: a source of shame, blaming the whore as something for cop-like entities to sniff out—a witch hunt, one commonly waged by women against other women (cis or not) (source YouTube community post, Persephone van der Waard: 2/3/2026, in response to Lady Izdihar's "On the Files...").

So often, women are bullied into silence, until they bully others into silence/prey on various marginalities; but they can also conspire amongst each other to speak out, passing down stories of abuse that help the next generation "break the cycle." To that, my mother is a rape victim (above), as are many of the people I work with (of whom the state and its defenders chattelize like women, meaning "lesser" than white straight men to modular degrees). In Gothic, this often happens through stories, and by finding common ground through intersectional consciousness and solidarity (awareness and teamwork); i.e., to dialectically-materially heal from rape as a systemic "curse" of sorts; re (from "Raising Awareness"):

We're effectively "Making Marx Gay" (2024) by employing the same Gothic devices he did, but further than he (and his followers) actually tried; i.e., to heal from state abuse, while disguising ourselves as "mere play" through cryptonymy reversing abjection:

The Western world is generally a place that testifies to its own traumas by fabricating them; i.e., as markers of sovereignty that remain historically unkind to specific groups that nevertheless survive within them as ghosts of unspeakable events linked to systemic abuse. Trauma, in turn, survives through stories corrupted by the presence of said abuse. There is a home resembling a castle, where a ghost—often of a woman—lurks inside having been met with a sorry fate. But undeath is something that can be felt through echoes of ourselves that aren't diegetically spectral; they feel spectral through an uncanny resemblance, like standing over our own graves. This becomes something to play with during ludo-Gothic BDSM (source: "Healing from Rape," 2024).

To be clear about "rape" as something to play with, it's still a weapon, but not one the state can exclusively monopolize; re: the Gorgon as a Numinous being of rape/terror weapon that, in functionally rebellious hands, can turn state atrocities backwards; i.e., by employing the Promethean Quest to reverse abjection "on the Aegis," such cryptonymy a concealed weapon of "mere play" that nonetheless paralyzes state capacities to cause harm: through nakedly calculated risk/a palliative Numinous playing god/with gods—specifically "homewrecker" sorts that camp the canon to such an earthshattering degree as to threaten the nuclear order (therefore Capitalist Realism). It's [to be blunt] what the Gothic does [...]

(artist: Nya Blu; cited: "Preface Conclusion; or, Caught the Middle: A Cryptonymy Reprise and Witchcraft Refrain" from "The Wolf Is Loose," 2026)

Commonly this occurs through fear of theft come home, itself fetishized as "bandit," "pirate" or "bastard" in ways the state romances to serve profit. But the same terror weapons classically belong to the whore as punching up, mid-abjection; i.e., while "backing it up," invoking "badass" through weapons-grade puns—of the "medieval" sort, essentially bouncing this-or-that off their weaponized, fortress-like bodies: as Numinous, fearful/fascinating sources of terror-like sex, the whore a classic "homewrecker" demonized through the criminalization of sex work by state powers since Medusa into an ongoing Neo-Gothic period (e.g., Nya Blu [above] covered in symbols of fear that speak to her as fearsome to behold by Puritanical agents dreading her release). "Not only can terror be employed as a weapon, but any weapon can become a weapon of terror: terror is a weapon, a weapon is terror, and no one agency monopolizes it [...] Terror is the kissing cousin of force and, real or implied, is never far removed from the pages of history. To define (and condemn) terror from a peculiar social, economic, political, and emotional plane is to display a self-righteous attitude that, totally unrealistic, is doomed to be disappointed by harsh facts" (source: Robert Asprey's War in the Shadows, 1975). In turn, abjection goes both ways, theft a prandial but also surveilling device, mid-imprisonment:

(artist: Francisco Goya)

To it, the state loves whores or those treated like whores by state vampirism, which is to say the state loves and fears what their contradictory models demand: to fetishize someone for rulers to lay "on top of," giving the iconoclast an edge/room to work when push comes to shove (and the fight takes to the gutter). Whores are essentially guerillas (and vampires gay ninjas) waging war cryptonymically from spaces and bodies of concealment—with many of the people I work with operating behind multiple masks, aliases and buffers, "stealing" their labor back through the shadowy veneer of rumored seduction, fatal attraction and all-around sin. "Eat the fucking apple," as Maegen McAuliffe O'Leary would put it; re: liberation and exploitation share the same place, and there's no escape to be had from hiding in the long run. Be the apple as something to eat, stealing your power back in the bargain! Play becomes a creative, clever means of disguise and subversion, all-at-once, the witch a kind of whore that puritanical men (and witch hunters at large) commonly fear retribution of (re: the whore's revenge): eating us won't help you cheat death. So the Gorgon is a goddess of life and death—one who patiently reminds patriarchs how "a king has his reign and then he dies"; i.e., Trump growing old and mad to devour his sons, Goya-style (above), but also become an object of Ozymandian/Quixotic pity by ordinary care workers during revolutionary optimism (Heather Delany Reese's "Trump's Vacant Stare is Sending Shockwaves Around the World" and Silent Middle Child's "Are things getting better or worse?"). Rape goes both ways, empowering the usual victims of state theft to castrate the origins of a dying curse: its rotten core to consume and fertilize with fresh change by those unsung mothers of a better world. Whores keep secrets they pass along through code, itself laced with dark fantasies of radical change (the apple "poisoned" with useful data).

(artist: Judith Meets Salome; cited: "Further Food for Thought" from "Of Darkness and the Forbidden," 2024)

Footnotes

[1] A footnote from "Raising Awareness," lifting from Patel and Moore's seminal book; re: regarding reproductive labor (sex work or otherwise; i.e., "women's work"):

*A book, I might add, that was given to me by Cuwu [a practicing Marxist-Leninist]; re (from the Poetry Module):

[censored for this version]

(exhibit 34a1b2b [from "Modularity and Class," 2024]: Left: Cuwu reading my copy of Mike Dixon-Kennedy's Celtic Myth & Legend [1998], their pussy fucked for hours until it became too sore and we had to try anal [note: Before going home, I swapped Celtic Myth for Cuwu's copy of A History of the World in Seven Cheap Things. Said swap was instrumental in writing Sex Positivity as it currently exists; i.e., Moore and Patel's arguments were utterly vital in how I think of Cartesian thought relative to the monstrous-feminine as harvested by capitalistic forces]. Right: Cuwu inspecting my copy of Robert Ingpen and Michael Page's Encyclopedia of Things That Never Were—one of my favorite books—along with old vintage porno mags Jadis' father inherited from a friend as a joke, and which Jadis wanted nothing to do with after he died. So I gave them to Cuwu.)

The exploitation of such labor (theft is theft, rape is rape) was not restricted to the United States, but also occurred in the USSR

The technologies of employer power in the workplace are so pervasive that they even made an appearance in a place we might least expect: the Soviet Union, where workers themselves—at least on paper—controlled the conditions of their labor. Although much is still made of how distinct the Soviets were from the capitalist West, the continuities outweigh the contrasts. The Soviet model was trapped by the same relations of work and nature. The logic of twentieth-century state communism was stuck in a sixteenth-century ecology. In fact, the Soviets were rather keen on taking all manner of ideas from their capitalist foes, including those of the American time-and-motion expert Frederick Winslow Taylor, which were embraced—and contested—in Soviet industry. Lenin, who had earlier denounced "man's enslavement by the machine" under Taylorism, insisted in April 1918 that "we must definitely speak of the introduction of the Taylor System… Without this, it will be impossible to raise productivity, and without that we will not usher in socialism." […]

and China

Chinese communism went further in transforming relations of work through collectivism, but it was still infused with a strong Promethean streak. As part of his efforts to free China from famine, Mao declared war on the animals that ate Chinese grain in 1958. A two-day slaughter would, he thought, ensure the perpetual flourishing of China's population. Humans were to kill on sight the four major scourges of fleas, flies, rats, and sparrows. Although the f leas were uncounted, the government catalogued "48,695.49 kilos of flies, 930,486 rats and 1,367,440 individual sparrows." Without sparrows to feed on it, the invertebrate population grew rapidly. Insects ate grain unchecked, contributing to the 1959–61 Great Chinese Famine.

leading to various changes in strategy

For anxious capitalists, massive Chinese mortality was less of a concern than the threat that peasants might seize title to the land. In general, the threat of workers' power— under various radical banners—caused capitalists to change their strategies. […] Capitalism, however, could not survive a day without a third moment of work: the appropriation of human reproductive labor, conducted largely outside the cash nexus [emphasis, me]. The global factory and the global farm each relies on a family, on a community of care. Thus a revolutionary politics of sustainability must recognize—and mobilize through the contradictions of—a tripartite division of work under capitalism: labor power, unpaid care work, and the work of nature as a whole. Worker exploitation is bound together with the appropriation of extrahuman nature and the unpaid work of care [emphasis, me].

that ultimately faced hard realities regarding nature as something to exploit by all parties involved (much how states [city- or nation-] have since Antiquity into the present, below):

[…] reproductive labor [is] the work of caring for, nurturing, and raising human communities. Such work is overwhelmingly unpaid because it makes the whole system of wage work possible. Without unpaid work, especially care work*, wage work would simply be too expensive [emphasis, me …] But when we talk of reproductive labor under capitalism, we're referring to a very specific set of arrangements, ones that were rearranged through world ecology and persist today. Under these arrangements, some humans were confined to new political, social, and ecological units—households—the better to engage in care work in capitalism's ecology. Call this the Great Domestication. […] Just as Spanish colonists had bridled at Mayan sexual adventures, so the British demanded allegiance to their own version of sexual order and power, one that created the legal category of woman and set her in the household, the workshop of reproductive labor. But, of course, to use the term workshop is to mischaracterize how housework was viewed. It was considered precisely beyond the domain of wage work, a favor that women did for men, akin to the free gifts that nature offered enterprise. […]

*Ergo sex work, I argue; i.e., the whore and her exploitation (during the pimp's revenge) that requires said workers to rebel; re: in ways that reverse abjection, ergo profit and labor exploitation of nature as monstrous-feminine more broadly (the whore's revenge): the home vs the homewrecker upon which said home (ergo the state) is built.

Any movement—be it openly capitalist or "socialist/Communist" in name (and arguably capitalist in function, to whatever degree that is)—historically exploits "women's work" (re: me vis-à-vis John Duncan; timestamp: 1:39:55); i.e., by taking women's work for granted, therefore advantage of all over the place:

In the discussion of cheap work in the previous chapter, we connected rural and urban economics in the link between global farms and global factories. The availability of proletarian labor was possible only because of the transformation of care work into unpaid work, available as one of Nature's "free gifts"—which, as we have seen, are neither free nor gifted. […]

One radical response to the fundamental devaluation of care work involves a jujitsu pricing move and the demand that housework be paid. As the 1970s Wages for Housework campaign argued, "Slavery to an assembly line is not a liberation from slavery to a kitchen sink. To deny this is also to deny the slavery of the assembly line itself, proving again that if you don’t know how women are exploited, you can never really know how men are." The irony here, of course, is that there's a long history of women who were paid little if at all for their domestic labor: those working under slavery. The United States is not alone in this pattern, with carers from different classes, castes, and indeed nations suffering widespread exploitation in other countries too. And even if payment were a route to recognition, there's much further to go to reach dignity. As Angela Davis put it, "Psychological liberation can hardly be achieved simply by paying the housewife a wage." Yet the insight of Wages for Housework shouldn't be forgotten. To ask for capitalism to pay for care is to call for an end to capitalism [emphasis, me].

This tendency is so pervasive that John Duncan, in his own video, doesn't even mention sex workers at all—leading me to have to call him out for it (re: timestamp: 2:18:02); re: "When the Man comes around, show him your Aegis!" To free the land is to also free labor and sex, therefore all of nature as monstrous-feminine (female or not, white or not)—a breaking of all the monopolies used to pimp nature-as-usual; e.g., of violence, terror and monsters rooted in the ancient cradle of abuse showing capital where it eventually will die during the whore's revenge (re: "Our Sweet Revenge").

(model and photographer: Cuwu and Persephone van der Waard; cited: "Meeting Rebels," 2024)

Or as Carl Sagan put it, "To make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe." To that, the "inventors" of Society and Nature are in for a rude awakening (re: Descartes, Bacon and others—see Patel and Moore's section on the Cartesian Revolution, but also state shift; i.e., when Mother Nature [climate change] takes the planet back for good, the Capitalocene laid ungraciously to rest: when Medusa sits on it). To prevent that, we must learn to see women (or those treated like women) as capable not just of intelligence, but of revolutionary action; i.e., building a better world through Gothic Communism (the domain of Amazons and Gorgons); re: through a holistic and shared, intersectional consciousness (of class, culture and race); re: Cuwu (above) was a revolutionary actor (a trans man, to be specific) who thought and read, but also used their sexual labor to further radicalize me. Development is a lifelong battle, continuing long after the present generation has kicked the bucket.

To quote Sagan in the same breath as Patel and More, I write:

I wasn't familiar with Sagan's "extinction is the rule, survival is the exception" quote, but that sounds like him. Hearing the reaction of planetary crisis unfold, the elite are holding the world ransom under Capital Realism. It can be easy, then, to fall into despair—especially with the owner class destroying the world to hold onto power as empire dies/capital decays. But there remains tremendous power among workers to band together, pool our knowledge and resources, and ultimately enact great change (before the planet does, that is). To it, I strongly recommend people read Patel and Moore's A History of the World in Seven Cheap Things (2017), as it discusses these very issues; i.e., within capital as something to challenging to an eco-centric degree: we are a part of nature, not the other way around! (source YouTube community post, Persephone van der Waard: February 18th, 2026, in response to Astrum Earth's "I Didn't Want to Make This Video" (2026).

Nature is monstrous-feminine, then, but it needn't be policed by workers to serve capital. Indeed—and if we are to survive capital/the state spiraling towards ecocide, under neoliberal/fascist orders—we must embrace its abject status for ourselves: as better stewards of nature than capital/the state historically have ever been.

[2] Concerning a recent example of an Amazon being policed, refer to Essence of Thought's "Female Model Kicked Out of Bathroom For 'Looking Trans'" (2026).

Persecution of such beings isn't strictly "new" but does take on modernized forms of state predation through retro-future police violence. As I respond to Ethel's video:

Speaking as a Gothicist, TERF antics (and retrograde) fall in line with witch hunts and zombie narratives; i.e., the persecutory and cannibalistic outcomes of worker betrayal occur under neoliberal hegemony and austerity measures - specifically revolutionary countermeasures that historically spiral towards fascism (ergo zombies and witch hunts).

"Austerity is the trademark feature of fascism," one for which scapegoats and persecution (mania) aren't just endemic but central. To that, scapegoats once historically applied through some degree of natural scarcity. Capital, by comparison, preys on workers through manufactured scarcity furthering abjection: "there's not enough and it's [that alien's] fault." As capital decays, it tells workers who betray their own (women or otherwise) to find the scapegoat; e.g., the witch, the vampire, the alien, to expose and exterminate. It's essentially a perverse kind of game, specifically a witch hunt but also death lottery handing out tickets: someone has to die, seemingly at random but in reality for the elite (much how starving sailors draw straws while stuck in the doldrums).

First, they're merely blamed for state crimes (and daily operations); when that fails to rectify the shortage, though, traitors (cops) separate the targets from the others, their victims chosen seemingly from the margins and far away from the in-group. The more decay sets in, however, the more desperate workers become to find "the enemy" responsible. Unable to, they start to panic; and guided by prescribed mortal certainties, their actions grow increasingly conducive to superiority and judgement over others (often through the language of sin, crime and punishment).

To it, someone must always fail by design. It's a death cult, a cruel game where those "saved for last" eventually eat others "like them" alive. And it generally doesn't wait until some logical end point; perceived shortages and paranoia cause witch hunts to increase, tout-le-monde, seeing barbarians at the gate while "cleaning house" (seeking the enemy within - the foreign plot, the backstabber to avenge). All to blame anyone but those rigging the game, those quick to betray begin to blame themselves (or those they treat AS themselves). Decay sets in; they become alien, both givers and receivers of state force ergo death warrants. Guided by dogma and moral panic - and kettled by the walls slowly closing in, promising expulsion - they turn blindly inwards: towards the core, when outsiders and war abroad are exhausted. They start to eat themselves.

At first they nibble, striving for clemency (so-called "hesitation wounds," during the hunger games). It's not long before they start to take larger and larger bites, becoming the proverbial "next in line" (the fatal [and false] bloodline of the Gothic yarn - one routinely promised by perfidious con men, promoting peace and plenty forever stalled by "bumps in the road") (source YouTube community post, Persephone van der Waard: February 4th, 2026).

This same issue extends to any workers conscripted under duress, which capital essentially is—not just versus Amazons, but "vampire" and "conqueror" as something projected retro-future often onto whomever the state needs labor to betray through routine police action under Cartesian dualism, the Protestant ethic and Capitalist Realism; e.g., the Belmonts from Castlevania effectively being cops disguised as "holy men," the arm of the state-in-crisis exorcizing evil (and its liminal hauntology of war aka traveling black castle) as simply a matter of routine; i.e., the boom-or-bust arrival per centennial grim harvest: "When such a castle appears, it is time to be afraid; the colonial harvest is at hand. Yet, precisely because the state does not hold a monopoly over violence, terror and morphological expression, a demon or castle needn't spell our end; it can represent our sole means of attack, reclaiming said poetics' endless inventiveness to turn colonizer fears back into their hopelessly scared brains" (source: "Prey as Liberators"). Fascists and Communists share the same kayfabe, but centrism always ratchets a drive to the right by treating Communism, not fascism, as the ultimate "end of the world." DARVO is DARVO.

(source: Matt Whittaker's "What Was the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact?" 2023)

[3] Speaking of DARVO (from the previous footnote) and dictators as darlings to kill regarding their ghosts to camp, it's not just my voice alone but others before/as/after I wrote my book series, too; re: Stalin as someone critiqued by other academics; i.e., concerning not only fascist overlap between the National Socialists under Hitler and Bolsheviks under Stalin (rival dictators both concerned with total control* over their societies), but also the DARVO label of "counterrevolutionary" normally applied by state actors (namely token ML reactionaries) to an-Coms—meaning alongside Socialist obscurantism, historically had by Soviet opportunists: reactionaries in red paint, conducting Imperialism against neighboring enemies like Poland† but their also own populations (see: "On Sex Work versus Marxist-Leninism" from "Raising Awareness" for further examples of dictatorial critique beyond Stalin, including Mao). Critics of the Soviets, then, also include Chemical Mind, whose own work on Soviet queerphobia I've cited before in "Raising Awareness"

*So-called "totalitarianism," as my book series glossary describes it, being

a state condition towards the total consolidation of power at one point. For example, in respect to Hitler's Germany or Stalin's Russia, Richard Overy writes in The Dictators (2004), "'Totalitarian' does not mean that they were 'total' parties, either all-inclusive or wielding complete power; it means they were concerned with the 'totality' of the societies in which they worked" (source).

The same could be said of Trump's America, or anywhere dictators/the bourgeoisie call home (with the Founding Fathers only signing the Bill of Rights into law after workers forced them to, and the state/corporate oligarchs who survived them trying to undermine said rights [and those of every successful labor action thereafter] into the present space and time; e.g., the "tech bro" billionaires of the Bill Gates variety, aka the Pirates of Silicon Valley under American neoliberalism). All billionaires are bad, as are dictators employing similar degrees of vertically-arranged power under capital/state models. They abject, thus rape and feed the same basic way versus workers/nature: through mass exploitation at the bottom to maintain power at the top.

†Who Stalin and Hitler both invaded and slaughtered; e.g., the Soviet massacre of Polish officers at Katyn (Mark Felton Productions, 2021). It bears repeating that Stalin wasn't just a strongman of the fascist variety (a conservative-minded man who hated "degenerates," and whose name literally means "Man of Steel") but a cunning and shrewd bureaucrat-turned-dictator—one who organized state power around himself to conduct Imperialism alongside the Nazis. He was an ally to the United States, as well, the Soviets anticipating Nazi and American betrayal but not before bloodying their own hands: when putting rival nations to the sword, force-relocating and subsequently starving millions of workers to death, jailing millions more, and engaging in pointless propaganda battles, etc, as hallmarks of Imperialism (with Stalingrad, the bloodiest battle in human history/modern war, being fought over because it had Stalin's name in it, not any strategic value on the Eastern Front).

but also Fred Weston, who writes on the same betrayal of queerness Stalin and company enacted:

In the 1930s, after the criminalisation of homosexuality in the Soviet Union, the Stalinist Communist International became permeated with homophobia and in almost all those countries where Stalinist regimes came to power, homosexuality was criminalised, from Eastern Europe, to China, to Cuba. This only began to change under the pressure of the growing gay rights movement, especially on the back of the 1968 movement. / This had not always been the case, however. The German Communist Party prior to the rise of Hitler in 1933 was in favour of homosexual emancipation, and it would have been unimaginable to members of that party that, in the mid-1930s, the very same anti-gay laws introduced by Hitler would also be adopted by Stalin.

Stalin adopted the same anti-gay laws as Hitler in the mid-30s / Image: public domain

It is also true to say that there were two trends present in Soviet society in the early days. There was a revolutionary trend that aimed to radically change the structure of society, but there was also an underlying conservative trend, an expression of the remnants of the old society and also the petit-bourgeois nature of the caste of bureaucrats that was beginning to emerge. / There were the attempts to build communal kitchens, communal housing, communal laundries, to provide free generalised childcare and many other changes to facilitate the life of women in particular. At the same time, however, the limited development of the economy meant that the resources for all this to become a long-lasting reality did not exist.

The isolation of the revolution to one country, and a backward one at that, meant that the leap towards a genuine communist society was not possible, and the other, more conservative trend eventually predominated. The traditional values began to creep back into society. Let us not forget that, especially within the state officialdom, it was the same old conservative petit-bourgeois layer in control. Once the complete isolation of the revolution had become evident, the hope of an international revolution saving the Soviet workers dissipated and was eventually lost in the consciousness of millions of people in the Soviet Union.

In these conditions, one observes a change even in the ability to debate different opinions. In the early years there was genuine debate within the press, with sometimes very contrasting opinions being expressed. This was also seen in art and literature. But already from the early years there was another layer, that of the mediocre non-entities, those incapable of independent thought, the sycophants and yes-men and women. This layer was only interested in being seen as the perfect party activist, always carrying out the "correct line." This line, however, was no longer to be achieved through genuine open debate, as had been the case when Lenin and Trotsky led the Bolshevik Party. Now the line was to be learnt by rote and passed down from above.

In this atmosphere, the conservative views that permeated the bureaucracy slowly started emerging as the only accepted views. This did not take place overnight, but was a process drawn out over several years. More and more conservative views were expressed as the years went by. / This was to have a tremendous impact on the treatment of homosexuals. Already, before the actual criminalisation of homosexuality in 1934, the regime under Stalin had been making life more difficult for homosexuals (source: "From Emancipation to Criminalisation: Stalinist Persecution of Homosexuals from 1934," 2018).

Keeping that in mind (and applied to my work), dictators thrive on austerity as an inherently fascist concept, ergo ADAB. To that, the state's targeting of cis gay men also affected straight/queer women, trans people, sex workers and religious people under Soviet Russia. These not only merit critique; they require it to move past Socialist Realism as a facet of Capitalist Realism:

Figure 1. William Blake, Europe, Supported by Africa and America, 1796. Source: Stedman 1796, 394. [...]

Under capital and state models (which the Soviets borrowed from the West to a Cartesian degree, above), nature is monstrous-feminine/a vengeful whore to police out from an ethnocentric past (re: "Nature Is Food"); i.e., into Socialist Realism as much as Capitalist Realism (for more, see: Patel and Moore, footnotes—specifically on Cartesian thought and a 16th century ecology tied to America, Communist China and the USSR). The state cannot allow such things. Ergo, anyone who suggests a freeing of the Gorgon—to pay those "of nature"/see them as human despite their present monstrous-feminine status as worthy of capital punishment—is an unironic "terrorist" who must be, in Bad Empanada's own words, "made taboo again" (source YouTube Community post, Bad Empanada: 2024): he's dancing to Stalin's tune (see: "On Lenin, Stalin...")!

The same goes for anything criminalized by the state, the Soviets being the ones prostituting those they treated as whores; e.g., Alexandra Kollontai:

Sex work is work. Calling it "prostitution" demonizes it under a criminal lens, monopolizing care and sex work for the state. Also Kollontai lived in exile under Stalin after he and company killed her compatriots:

With the defeat of the Workers' Opposition Kollontai appeared to give up her fight for reform and for women, retreating into relative obscurity. With the rise of Stalin her life became one of de facto exile, although formally she was USSR diplomat for Mexico and Norway before settling in Sweden. She was thus the first female diplomat in western history. Dying of natural causes in 1952, *Kollontai was the only member of the Workers' Opposition to survive the purges* [emphasis, me]. She lived the last 20 years of her life in constant fear of assassination or imprisonment (source: Jenny Morrison's "Women on the left: Alexandra Kollontai," 2012).

A pimp's a pimp. SWERFs are pimps or victims to pimps (source YouTube community post, Persephone van der Waard: January 30th, 2025).

The same goes for aesthetics tied to said Realism; e.g., me critiquing Lady Izdihar tied to sex work commonly omitted from said Realism (excuse the long quote, below):

"Under Capitalist Realism, Hell is a place that always appears on Earth," I also write (source: "Scouting the Field," 2023); the same goes for any aforementioned Socialist Realism—with "Socialism" of the Marxist-Leninist sort never meant to be the final staging point, but one that through its own historical failures remains frozen in time. So while modesty is fine as an option, I would not recommend dressing like a nun exclusively to challenge nuclear models (including red nuns; e.g., Lady Izdihar still fetishizing power much like nuns frankly do, below):

(source Instagram post, ladyizdihar: August 27th, 2023)

On Nudity, Cocottes and Red Scare (and Critiquing Soviet Aesthetics during Socialist Realism, feat. Lady Izdihar)

I believe Izdihar is a bisexual Muslim, but my point still stands. Modesty unto itself is not a virtue—at least not one that serves workers universally, insofar as those treated as "vice" personified are historically demonized by the "more modest" among labor as a whole (not that Izdihar is doing that, mind you). Furthermore, sex-as-fetish can be a weapon and armor (or Gorgon/Amazon as I research them); and while it can communicate upon veils (e.g., Segewick's "Imagery of the Surface," 1981)—it can also communicate in the buff (so to speak). Such nudity shouldn't be discounted as a holistic form of rebellion alongside more modest varieties. Gothic (gay-anarcho) Communism is holistic, and fights for universal liberation, nude or not; "universal" means freeing whores (scarlet but also green women, further down), letting them speak for themselves in all forms of policed speech. This includes nudity and prostitution, but also modesty arguments ("cocottes") and Red Scare/Socialist Realism more broadly.

First, "Socialist Realism" as I describe it isn't strictly the artistic movement upholding Socialist values and aesthetics (e.g., Shawn Grenier's "An Introduction," above; timestamp: 0:26); it's a Gothic refrain tied to the hauntology (re: canceled future) of state decay per socialist models. Said decay leads historically to myopic results comparable to Mark Fisher's aforementioned Capitalist Realism: an end of the world imagined when faced with the death of Socialism, one with—in the Soviet's case before, during and after the Fall—a suitably radioactive flavor (e.g., Roadside Picnic, Stalker [exhibit 4, below] and the Metro series—1972, 1979 and 2002; see: "All that We're Told" [2018] and "Red Scare: Out in the World"  for further studies from me, combining Gothic and post-Soviet critique). Or, as I define "hypernormality" in my series glossary:

hypernormal/-ity

A term that, according to Adam Curtis' HyperNormalization (2016), was originally used to describe the "whiplash" feelings of Soviet citizens during the 1980s—faced with the terrifying onset of societal collapse despite Soviet national propaganda having adopted neoliberal shock therapy while insisting that things were fine. The same idea can be applied to the uncanny sensation that things are not fine or even real despite how normal, foundational and concrete they seem; i.e., how they "pass" as normal despite a disquieting sense of decay (worker exploitation, for our purposes).

(artist, left: Jill Suzanne Smith; right: Persephone van der Waard)

Furthermore, to be holistic and avoid Red Scare, I levy my critique not only at ML "cocottes" pining for the USSR during Socialist Realism (if the shoe fits, Izdihar), but also Berliners nostalgic for Weimar's doomed interwar period; e.g., Jill Suzanne Smith (above), who I critique for her own myopic (and exclusionary) Berlin Coquette (2013)—specifically for her "bourgeois cocottes" and for valuing "whores that don't look like whores" over visibly monstrous (whore-like) ones; re (from "Joy Under Fascism"):

(exhibit 1: Two different used bookstores, two different partners who bought me books after grad school—with various adventures tied to each; e.g., the Styrofoam containers in the take-out bag [from the second book store, bottom-right] accidentally overturned, spilling their contents into the bag and causing it to leak [and forcing me to throw out the food, much to my chagrin]. Deprived of prandial food thanks to my own absent-mindedness, I fed my mind on the usual "foodstuffs" academics often resort to—a house of leaves! Furthermore, when writing this section, I took my copy of George Mosse's Nationalism and Sexuality [1985] that Jadis bought me, in 2022 [the rightmost book, bottom-left], and combined it alongside my examining of a different book; re: Jill Smith's Berlin Coquette that a newer partner purchased for me, in a completely different city and state, three years later.)

The exact books (and their respective acquisitions) led me to reading a bit while at the hospital, and gave me food for thought about my own work in relation to other workers; e.g., Smith's Berlin Coquette as something to synthesize; i.e., in the aforementioned old-fashioned way of looking at something and going from there; re: from grad school onwards, leasing the approach from my pre-Internet past: as a little girl reading books from the local library in my spare time. Books are brainfood; I see food, I eat it—with people being "food" as much as books (as are all the assorted neo-medieval hyphenations "Gothic" typically affords).

This time, I read Smith's concept of a "whore's ball"; i.e., as advertised by West Berlin media, in 1988, but also her academic desire to view whores in ways that defy common expectations about whores:

"What will the world come to, if we can no longer tell who's a whore and who isn't?' [re: the abjection process]. This book is much like the whore's ball, for it provides its readers with images of prostitutes in Berlin that defy common stereotypes about deviance and destitution. It does so, however, by examining debates on prostitution that took place up to a century before the women of Hydra organized their first ball. […] Some artists and writers who lived and worked in the German capital at the time were able to see beyond dichotomized images of prostitutes and envision them as something other than victims or villains [emphasis, me]. Granted, some of Berlin's most iconic cultural texts serve up visions of female monstrosity and victimization that are impossible to erase from our index […] Without ignoring those images [of Berlin's metropolitan decadence and sexual murder], this book shows that the idea of prostitutes as rational workers and as elegant bourgeois "cocottes" (Kokotten) also surfaced and took hold during this period and give us a far more complex, differentiated picture of gender and sexuality in modern Berlin [emphasis, me]. My work disrupts the dichotomized reading of prostitutes as either victims or agents of destruction reproduced in existing scholarship [re: Creed's The Monstrous-Feminine, 1993], which, much like the taz's article about the Whore's Ball, perpetuates stereotypes of prostitutes and produces narratives laden with judgement that do an injustice to the very context they are describing. Analyses that view prostitution only through the restrictive dual lens of destitution and sexual deviance lead to less nuanced readings of primary sources [emphasis, me] (source: "Introduction" to Berlin Coquette).

And yet in reading it, I suddenly felt personally attacked; i.e., by a fellow academic woman discounting my profession and research areas; re: not just Metroidvania, but the Gothic, monstrous-feminine, ludo-Gothic BDSM and public nudism (exhibiting sex and force)! An explanation eluded me, save that I wanted to lash out at this stuffy German prude: "Bitch, please."

(artist: Caravaggio)

Keeping the above quotes in mind, criminality and aesthetics merit criticism like anything else; i.e., insofar as capital and nation-states criminalize queerness, women and sex work, doing so in ways that workers reclaim, mid-abjection: from a system of exploitation, its subsequent vampirism (and scapegoats) mired in state apologia as deeply nostalgic, rigidly dogmatic and institutionally sacred. From Athens to America to the Soviet Union, such nostalgia becomes rape apologia; i.e., whenever and wherever people start venerating dictators and the worlds and (sex) workers they ruled over (and conservative worldviews that survive them, concerning such matters). This operates to a matter of degree, of course; e.g., Lady Izdihar, saying in "The Rights the U.S. Still Won't Guarantee" (2026): "What if I told you that in 1936, the Soviet Union legally guaranteed gender equality, racial equality, work, rest, and education?"

Similar to racism in the United States, though, legal guarantees by a given state don't preclude mistreatment of marginalities by the guarantor (who can either lie, renege on a promise, or refuse to give it outright); e.g., queer people were abused and censored by Soviet power before it recriminalized homosexuality. As such, rule of law is just a promise by the state not to harm workers—a promise it happily breaks, all the time, to bolster its own position within capital, the nuclear model, and some-such Realism. As I respond to Izdihar's video:

In 1936, the Soviet Union also made abortion illegal and made it harder to divorce one's husband. Two years prior, they also had made homosexuality illegal under Stalin and company. Queer women were often institutionalized. While the exact treatment of queer people (cis or otherwise) varied throughout the Union, homosexuality was illegal until after the Fall, in the early '90s. Abortions were re-legalized in 1955. Guarantees don't preclude abuse, especially from bad actors tied to various motives (e.g., profit and productivity). / The US sucks in this respect, obviously. But the Soviets' treatment of women and queer people has been pretty uneven over time, and generally [remains] concerned with the state apparatus and household (source YouTube community post, Persephone van der Waard: 2/12/2026).

There's also bias; e.g., it also bears repeating that Izdihar's revolutionary chart left out academics, care/sex workers, and starving artists (though she did invite others to expand on her chart, below):

(source YouTube community post, Persephone van der Waard: January 2026; artist: Lady Izdihar)

To that, critique dictators and their various dogmas like you would anyone, including those defending them to prevent—on purpose or by accident, to any degree of faith in state power—liberation for all (above). Rape is rape, and if someone responds conservatively to a critique of their favorite dictator by you—including by punching down at queer people, women and sex workers by gaslighting them—they're embodying the very people they tell you their heroes aren't: dictators, cops, pimps, tyrants. If anyone should be critiqued, its people like them; i.e., those who treat Imperialism as "revolution" while defaming sex work and queerness as "inherently bourgeois," and making open fascism their strange bedfellows. A pimp's a pimp and pimps are cops conducting state vampirism; dictators are cops, abjecting and raping by design whoever they need to help the state feed, generally through Imperialism at home or abroad in some shape or form. The state is straight, white and male; Stalin sucked, like Mao did, and so many others following this model. Recognize the larger dialectical-material effects, all the while, but don't ignore that he was a rapist and so were his friends (e.g., Beria, a pedophile cop; see: Behind the Bastard's "Part One: Beria: Stalin's Pedophile Cop," 2024). The state rapes by design; rape apologia, for dictators, aides in a rape mentality the state constantly relies on while resurrecting itself.

Gulags and concentration camps, the German Nazis and Stalinist Soviets used the same methods and language, calling queerness both "degenerate" and "counterrevolutionary" in ways that continue into the present; i.e., that defend the household as tied to the state: criminalization of this or that and calling it "bourgeois." DARVO is DARVO, code is code—which the Soviets and their planned economy employed alongside the Nazis:

Thus, everything shifted towards promoting the bourgeois family as the basis for the production and reproduction of labour. With this came the idealization of motherhood, up to the point where mothers with more than seven children received incentives, very much like what Mussolini and Hitler were doing in the same period. Thus abortion was banned and divorce made less accessible. As we can see, this is the final triumph of the backward traditions of old Russia embodied in the prejudices of the bureaucracy. And these prejudices reached right to the top in the person of Stalin himself (source: "From Emancipation to Criminalisation").

To this, queerness was treated as criminal alongside prostitution for its threatening of the household; re: as "homewreckers," much like whores and queer folk have been for millennia. The state hates sex, but needs to promise "good, orderly" forms of it provided "bad, disorderly" forms are policed to guarantee a continued hold on state power by those in charge. Function, then, is one of flow, not aesthetic; e.g., "It is an irony of history that the Stalinist regime denounced homosexuality as a bourgeois depravity, quoting Germany and the Nazis as examples, precisely when Hitler was moving in exactly the same direction as Stalin on this question!" (ibid.). This hypocrisy continues into the present—with reactionary Marxist-Leninists accusing me of counterrevolutionary behavior and degeneracy (re: Bad Empanada and Charlitics) but also a wider move among other seemingly temped MLs giving me (and my gay friends) a wide berth.

(artist: Puppy Tyko and Juicy Bunny)

Sadly such "hedging of one's bets" is a common survival tactic; i.e., one enacted by those less likely to be immediately targeted by state forces—though not always, of course; re: Charlitics is queer and reactionary towards an-Coms, for example. MLK's "silence of our friends" holds true concerning such traitors to varying degrees—turning a blind eye, however aggressively or slight, towards the sex worker and the marginalized queer as easier to demonize and/or ignore (e.g., Tyko and Bunny, above). For a time, to be sure, but eventually the chickens come home to roost: gay Communism isn't a paradox but gay fascism is, the price of your betrayal a heavy toll we extract in light of your continued failure to exterminate us. Eventually we'll tire you out, exposing your "protection" for what it is: cheap perfidy. Assimilation is poor stewardship, silence is death; the state and its terrible vampirism eventually come for us all.

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My name's Persephone van der Waard; I have my MA in Gothic English literature and independent PhD in Gothic poetics and ludo-Gothic BDSM (focusing partially on Metroidvania), and I am the author of the multi-volume, non-profit book series, Sex Positivity vs Sex Coercion, or Gothic Communism—its art director, sole invigilator, illustrator and primary editor (the other co-writer/co-editor being Bay Ryan). A rape survivor/granddaughter of a Holocaust survivor and Dutch Resistance member—and someone anti-war (as a business), anti-Zionist and anti-racist/anti-white-supremacist who specializes in tokenism (e.g., TERFs, SWERFs, and fascist feminism)—I'm a MtF trans woman, Tolkien and Amazon enthusiast, former YouTuber, anti-fascist, loud critic of Marxist-Leninism/state vampirism, atheist and Satanist, poly/pan kinkster with multiple partners, erotic artist/pornographer and anarcho-Communist; i.e., under my brand of Gothic (gay-anarcho) Communism as a holistic, intersectional discipline: one devised in 2022-2023, and which my friends and I currently achieve together. / Originally this blog explored my love of movies when I was cis-het; now I use it to write about the Gothic—horror, but also sex, heavy metal, and videogames in a queer way (especially Metroidvania).

I take donations for my work (which goes towards helping sex workers, trans people and other minorities). I currently take payment on PayPal, Patreon, and CashApp, etc; all links are available on my Linktr.ee. Every bit helps!

Regarding Formatting Issues for Blogposts (Older than October 2025): Recently Josey Howarth helped transfer my old blog from Blogger to WordPress, which—while vital for security reasons—altered their formatting. On a phone screen, the posts are mostly readable, but look slightly "jank" on computer screens. Many also contain outdated "About the Author" sections—meaning inside the posts-in-question, alongside the blog website "footer" (as added by Josey after the transfer). Such things are temporary. Eventually we plan to overhaul their visual design, remodeling my blog and website (thus fixing the issues in the question)!

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