My Journey Through Bolshevism
My Journey Through Bolshevism
My Normie Progressive Years
The September 11th terrorist attacks were what first got me interested in matters of public policy. Or more correctly, the way my country (the United States) chose to respond did. You know that one impractical person you knew back then who questioned whether the government should be allowed to keep track of what books you check out at the library (...well people still used those back then) and thought the Guantanamo Bay concentration camp was a bad idea from the outset? That was me. While even I wanted something done militarily about Al Qaeda after the attacks, I really, reeeeeaaaaally hated the suffocatingly jingoistic atmosphere that defined the media climate at that moment in time. For you Americans younger than me who think you've seen that before, no you haven't! You have seen nothing that way unless you lived through 2001-3 and were old enough at the time to know what was going on. Nothing like it has again happened since. Not here. To me, it was pretty fucking scary! I literally went to school on September 12th and there was a lengthy debate in our history class of whether we should abolish air travel. I am not shitting you! I overheard a couple guys at lunch the previous day suggesting we should nuke Afghanistan until the whole place is nothing but a giant crater. The media climate, which revolved around replaying the footage of the towers being struck from new angles over and over and over again and telling the stories of the deceased and their harrowing final moments seemingly one at a time for like six months straight, made it impossible to convince anyone that we were overreacting except for a fringe minority of hippie peacenik types who nobody took seriously (including me).
I was that one person who never bought the official narrative that Saddam Hussein and Al Qaeda were teaming up to nuke us or that we were on a mission from Isaiah and noticed that both the sitting president and VP had extensive experience in the oil business. By 2003, I wasn't quite alone anymore and the previous governor of my state (Howard Dean) jumped in the presidential race as an anti-Iraq-War candidate. I voted for him. He lost the nominating contest though, so I didn't vote in the 2004 general election, as there were no anti-war candidates who were relevant. I voted for Hillary Clinton in the Democratic Party's 2008 nominating contest mostly because the political establishment had abandoned her in favor of Obama, so her's just felt like the more outsider campaign atm. She lost. I still voted for Obama in the general election because...the Iraq War, the economy (the crash had just happened), the cost of health care, warrantless wiretapping, gay rights (I was starting to come out of my shell that way), you name it frankly, though I think it worth saying that that was also the beginning of the end of my mainstream progressive era. I say "progressive era" because I never really was much of a proper liberal. Anyway, by this time I had already read Pornography: Men Possessing Women and Female Chauvinist Pigs, so my journey toward radical feminism had begun. I'd also started dabbling in Marxist politics though and you might say that disappointment with the early Obama years took me further down that road.
Into Marxism: Orbiting the Revolutionary Communist Party
The first stop on my journey through Marxist fringe politics was a little group called the Revolutionary Communist Party USA, or RCP for short. I never did develop much interest in the Frankfurt School type stuff you got on college campuses, as it seemed to me that that stuff never made a difference in the real world. I looked for something that had before and the RCP at the time had a Maoist reputation. It was this position paper of theirs on women's emancipation that ultimately sold me on their specific brand. I was impressed specifically by their concurrent opposition to both American imperialism and Islamist politics (as not all Bolshevik parties were equally against both), by their audacity to be not only pro-choice, but specifically take the stance that justice for women means there should be, if anything, more, not fewer, abortions happening, and by their principled stand against the sex industry (which was matched by few other Bolshevik groups that I found in my online research; the bulk embracing a frustratingly tolerant attitude toward spaces like Craig's List) and sexual violence against women of both consensual and non-consenting varieties. It almost felt like a Catherine MacKinnon sort of way of thinking to me; like how MacKinnon attempts to fuse Marxism and radical feminism together into a singular persuasion.
The reason I took inspiration from Maoism specifically was because over in Nepal a party of Maoist fighters led a successful revolt against their country's monarchy that resulted in it becoming a republic and adopting a new constitution. The story of their revolutionary struggle was in the news on occasion in that general window of time (mainly the late 2000s) as it unfolded. I thought it was awesome and that convinced me to look into Maoist parties here in the U.S. There was more than one of those here in America, but I landed on the RCP for the aforementioned reasons. I never formally joined, but I did participate in their orbit of front groups and help distribute their newspaper, simply titled Revolution. In 2010, I learned from a departing member of the RCP that the party was actually undergoing a transition away from Maoism and into frankly being a personality cult geared around the ideas of the party chair, Bob Avakian. He pointed out to me that the primer on Marxism-Leninism-Maoism that used to appear on the site's left side had disappeared and explained to me that that was why, and also why all the new position papers had been coming out rapid-fire lately. BA considered his way of thinking to represent a new stage in the evolution of Marxist thought. (In fact, the RCP still believes this today.) ...Yeah. Suddenly the whole site dedicated just to Bob Avakian and his works and the constant references to BA across like every Revolution article made sense. That was the point where I knew their orientation was wrong and started looking for the next thing. This is when I discovered a fascinating Wordpress blog called Monkey Smashes Heaven.
Discovering the Leading Light Communist Organization
I was drawn to Monkey Smashes Heaven by its quirky title that was obviously intended to get attention. The title, I found, was a reference to a Red Guard pamphlet from the Chinese cultural revolution of the 1960s that read:
"Revolutionaries are Monkey Kings, their golden rods are powerful, their supernatural powers far-reaching and their magic omnipotent, for they possess Mao Tsetung’s great invincible thought. We wield our golden rods, display our supernatural powers and use our magic to turn the old world upside down, smash it to pieces, pulverize it, create chaos and make a tremendous mess, the bigger mess the better!"
And I was like...
I loved this geeky agent of chaos aura! 
To top it all off, the masthead was a super-cool masterpiece of socialist realism (so-called) depicting a dancing, female People's Liberation Army soldier in the style of cultural revolution-era big-character posters and clearly taking inspiration from Jiang Qing's (Mao's last wife's) ballets. But like these things should be, the silly clickbait title and unapologetically retro Maoist styling concealed serious and thought-provoking content. MSH turned out to be the official blog of a new group called the Leading Light Communist Organization that promoted an ideology they (at least at first) called Maoist Third Worldism. The essence of Third Worldism, as distinct from other branches or offshoots of Maoist thought, is the idea of global people's war being the path to a communist future for humanity. Summed up originally in a celebratory text written by Mao's top military commander, Lin Biao, in 1965 called Long Live the Victory of People's War!, it calls for the worldwide emulation of the particular kind of revolutionary war that Mao had led against first the Japanese enemy during the Second World War and then from there to what was considered the country's national independence in 1949. More specifically, it calls for this model of struggle, built around the idea of identifying a main social problem to focus on and galvanize the public around and then gradually organizing and mobilizing mainly the peasantry into armed forces and encircling the urban centers from there, to be replicated by all poor countries as part of a single, global struggle against imperialism; mainly American imperialism specifically. But where Lin Biao's piece comments little on why this approach is necessary, simply remarking that communist revolution has been "delayed" in the Western world "for various reasons", the MSH journal expanded on this premise greatly, seeking to fill in the gaps as to why global people's war is needed to achieve a communist future. This is where we get to the key: the concept of bourgeois nations and proletarian nations.MSH made a shockingly compelling case that the reason no communist revolution had ever taken hold in a First World country was because First World peoples had become bourgeoisified, which is to say bought off by plunder from abroad, and thus had no genuine working class anymore. The systematic theft of resources from Third World countries that were used to enrich First World populations as a whole in turn arrested the economic development of the former, making the overthrow of lackey regimes controlled by the imperial powers the primary task necessary to move humanity forward both in terms of economic and social development. Essentially they took the old labor aristocracy theory to its logical extreme, in other words, redefining the global proletariat more in terms of poverty than in terms of wage labor. What made this theory of the case so compelling to me were the statistics they brought to bare to substantiate it. The most powerful of all to me was their estimation of total global wealth and what it would look like for all of it that existed in the world to be redistributed equally. They took a generous estimation of the total global product and broke it up along equitable per capita lines and found that, as of 2010, an equal distribution of all the world's resources would allow each person the equivalent somewhere between $6,000 and $11,000 per year in contemporaneous American purchasing power, which they averaged out to realistically around $8,400 per person per year to be more precise. By contrast, the average person at the time was making roughly the American purchasing power equivalent of $1,000 to $2,000 a year, while the typical American was making more than $30,000 a year. Based on this breakdown of the global wealth distribution, the vast majority of the world's population stood to greatly benefit from a communist redistribution of the world's resources while, by contrast, nearly all residents of First World countries, certainly including practically all Americans, belonged to the richest 10% more specifically, including most of those classified as below the American poverty line. More detailed analysis from their various articles and commentaries revealed that the only reason the official poverty rate in America remained above 2% was because it had been generously redefined in the 1990s. Americans had trouble affording homes mostly because they kept buying bigger and bigger ones. More and more Americans gained access to a college education, bigger homes, more property in general. For perspective, at the time I myself was making around $16,000 a year, which meant that I was richer than at least 85% of the world's population, and yet I thought I was poor because the U.S. government defined me as poor! Then the difference in average hours worked per week by country put the whole matter into even sharper relief for me.
These revelations stunned me and turned my mental world -- my whole concept of what it meant to be exploited and poor -- upside-down. For the first time in my life, I felt shame in my country, not just for the actions of my government that I had no control over, but because I myself, so this data made me feel, was materially benefiting to a tremendous extent from the exploitation of others much worse off than myself all around the world. I felt ashamed not just of my government, but of being alive. I wanted to do something about it! I decided to join the Leading Light Communist Organization.
This was a fundamental turning point in my relationship to all political dogmas. Where I had initially dismissed Third Worldism as a crackpot, racist fringe theory of the case, by the time I'd read a handful of MSH articles, I came to feel like "Oh my god, the fringe weirdos are right and everyone else is wrong!!" Never again would I dismiss an idea just because of it's seeming oddity, offensiveness, or lack of popularity. This experience, frankly, taught to me truly to think for myself. Where during my time orbiting the RCP I had really just trusted in the wisdom of their leaders and experienced activists, assuming they knew better than me and really just wanting to believe what they said was true emotionally, now I had found something deeper through my own exploration and morbid curiosity. ...Well anyway, philosophizing aside, on to what my brief experience was like in the LLCO because that was pretty damn clarifying of a lot of things to me in its own way.
The Reality of the LLCO: I Was Cult-Hopping
I was with the LLCO for a period of some six months across the first half of 2011. Joining the organization was as easy as having a web chat with the party's two top leaders. Since it was a new institution, there was no formal process beyond that. From there, I was mailed a small number of copies of the zine version of Monkey Smashes Heaven (the first issue, which was the only one that existed at the time) to try and distribute around my area. It was a very small group at the time composed of about 25 people at any given point, roughly 20 of whom were male and nearly all of whom were white, with nearly all living specifically in Denver, Colorado. Like other Bolshevik groups though, they also operated fronts with larger membership and participation. One of these was the Revolutionary Anti-Imperialist Movement, which was an issue-driven organization focused on organizing protests against American militarism, which in this window of time mainly meant protests against the bombing of Libya, whose dictator was facing a pro-democracy revolt that most all of the world's governments were supporting (even Russia and China), led by ours. The other front, which was being developed during the time I was with the LLCO, was to be essentially a hippie one where we appealed to like rave-goers and ecology students' willingness to make sacrifices for the betterment of the planet to get them into simple living for the sake of the Third World; minimizing people's participation on the system of imperialism, as far as we were concerned. Where RAIM could mobilize around 50 people sometimes, playing propaganda videos at Denver raves seemed to be more effective at generating interest, so that was to be the main promo work in the short run.
The truth is that the LLCO was another personality cult organized around a guy who went by the screen name Prairie Fire. Officially there was a democratic process by which decisions were made, but in reality he personally ran everything and made all kinds of decisions for the group unilaterally. He also, frankly, wrote about 80% of its articles on Monkey Smashes Heaven, was invariably the star of all our propaganda videos, etc. It all revolved around him. For the most part, he was the LLCO. The name and organization themselves were his ideas. He also wanted to change the name of the theory it was built on to "leading light communism". If that sounds like a fruity, vaguely religious title then you're getting the idea. He often wrote of forces of "light" and "darkness" and other quasi-religious terms. I learned in the course of my stay (because he told me in our occasional check-in group chats) that he, along with another top leader who went by the screen name Jacob Brown (obviously a fake name), was a former drug dealer who made the mistake in the past of becoming addicted to what he was selling and had been sentenced to seven years in prison for it, but was now on probation. His real plan for the organization, he disclosed, was to return to drug dealing, this time with us in tow helping him out. It would work out differently this time, he explained to me. He reasoned that this was the best means by which to fund a party that was hostile to the American public since voluntary donations and dues-paying memberships for such a cause as ours with be hard to accrue organically, and that it served our purposes of weakening the nation's population as well. We might also, he suggested, adopt a bunch of kids and raise them to be "leading light communists" in some remote area together closer to where I lived.
Speaking of all this, there was a method by which Prairie Fire was able to get the LLCO's propaganda videos shown at local raves. Namely, he was involved with an erotic dancer there, whom he spoke of eventually making the public face of the organization. I always felt like something was wrong with this, but was new and didn't want to start out by complaining, but focus on learning the line better. There were so few women involved in or orbiting the group though that it ultimately got to me and I came to feel like the only way for me to be noticed by the leadership was to try and compete for Prairie Fire's affections myself. And I wasn't good at it, lol.
I'll spare you the finer details of the very lame intrigue, but shit like this was a reality of the misogynistic culture the group had. Ideologically, our line on feminism centered on the idea that there was no universal sisterhood and that First World women were privileged enemies of Third World women who should be opposed. It made sense within the framework of our proletarian nations vs. bourgeois nations conception of the world, so I accepted it, but in practice this thinking was used to excuse shit like our men going around proclaiming "FW" women sluts, bimbos, and whores and whatnot. It felt like a hostile atmosphere. I rebelled against this climate in my own little way by quietly creating a cheesy Third Worldist blog of my own called "I.O.U." under the screen name Monkey Queen, which was also my code name with the LLCO. (Yes, I apologize for the incredibly lame blog title. I just couldn't think of a better one, what can I say?
) There I could do what I really wanted to, which was mainly theory work and education. It still exists (though I haven't updated it since before leaving the LLCO for obvious reasons), so, to provide you with a few examples of what I mean, here was my intro to classical Marxism, for example, my later breakdown of what Maoism entails, and a commentary on the relationship between Libyan dictator Muamar Qaddafi, the U.S.-led bombing compaign, and Al Qaeda, which was also involved in the conflict. I also sometimes re-posted MSH/LLCO theory articles that I found especially helpful. Here was one of my favorites on the relationship between emergent global slums and imperial mall economies, among other things. The blog was eventually discovered by our leadership. Fortunately, they liked it and even briefly endorsed it, including a link on the LLCO main page.It wasn't long though before this chapter came to a close. In June, Prairie Fire created a new official blog to replace Monkey Smashes Heaven and I was to run it together with him and another of our members. I was to cease posting on my I.O.U. blog and post only to the new one as part of this, and would be permitted to write only "newsy" articles, like articles denouncing the latest American village bombing in Afghanistan and hyping the resistance of the Taliban, stuff like that. No more theory work. I was to become a mindless cog churning out low-effort, generic propo material. ...I hated this. It was kind of the final straw really on top of my increasingly long list of grievances. Another issue was that I'd come to increasingly disagree with Third Worldism / "leading light communism" at a baseline theory-of-the-case level over time, thanks in part to an inadvertent revelation written by Prairie Fire himself about the nature of global value accumulation since World War 2.
Leaving the LLCO
My differences with the LLCO's theory of the case began with our line on women's emancipation. We weren't actually the only organization holding a Third Worldist political line that championed global people's war. A number of our members were defectors from an older such group called the Maoist Internationalist Movement that held more or less the same opinion on the nature of the world's class composition and distribution. This group of ex-MIM people were, I found, the ones most insistent on 1) maintaining the Maoist-Third Worldist theory title instead of branding ourselves "leading light communists" and 2) respecting the democratic process of the new party rather than just going along with Prairie Fire's whims. I soon wound up looking into what was left of MIM because, like I said above, I just didn't like our climate very much. I liked MIM's line on feminism much better. They actually had a fleshed out theory of the case on gender politics. Much of their theory work on this still exists, so I can still link you to a lot of it. Much of it seemed to be built on a more Maoist-specific variation on the thinking of the Marxist radfem lawyer and personal friend of Andrea Dworkin's, Catherine MacKinnon, who I briefly mentioned earlier in this thread. (Here's their original summary/review of her work.) I was quickly drawn to their stark slogans like "all sex is rape" and "Sterilize All Men!". As I read, I found some pretty damn interesting ideas that continue to influence my thinking about women's oppression today. In particular, I found their point that the concept of consent is meaningless in a context of unequal socio-economic relations powerfully compelling. Someone is always richer than the other. Someone is usually taller and stronger than the other. Differences of wealth, differences in physical ability, differences in mental acuity (someone being sober or more mentally competent, another not or less), game-playing (lying to acquire sex you wouldn't receive otherwise)...all of these circumstances influence our choices. Choice exists in degrees, in other words, not just in absolute terms like the liberals insist, and therefore so too does coercion, including sexual coercion, exist in degrees. Truly free choices under unequal conditions are a myth. Thus, to MIM's way of thinking, mutual inclination toward sex while class distinctions and money exist is nonsense. That made sense to me! It still makes sense to me. What we formally call rape right now and what we currently call regular sex is really just a difference of degrees, to which end society's accepted definition of rape keeps changing, expanding when women become more powerful and contracting when patriarchal social relations are more fully cemented.
Another thing I liked was their propensity to use terms like "womyn" for 'woman', "wimmin" for 'women', and "persyn" for 'person'. I thought it silly and childish at first, but by the time I got done reading a few paragraphs that read like that, I noticed that I had actually begun to feel qualitatively better about myself, like I was genuinely respected. I hadn't realized the extent to which I'd internalized the idea that I'm just an extension of men! I kind of wish these words were always written like that.
But alas, nothing is perfect and MIM's line on women also gets very bizarre in other areas. For example, they also embrace non-biological definitions of "men" and "women", going as far with their theory of imperialism as to define First World countries as male nations and Third World countries as female nations. Thus their call to "sterilize all men" in reality is actually a call to sterilize First World populations in general, including the women, and not to sterilize Third World populations. And that is the kind of crackpot metaphysics that kept me away from their organization in the end. Still, I admired their principled commitment to the eradication of women's oppression, which was well-illustrated in the above-linked article on their formulation that all sex is rape: "If money and property are gone and we still have physically strong people sexually exploiting weaker people, then communists will be the ones looking for a solution to that, whether it takes bio-engineering, control of gender ratios, organizing the weak into collectives suitable for self-defense or anything else." In my present worldview, I basically just skip ahead right to these questions because it's obvious that abundance doesn't end male violence and exploitation. How many ultra-rich women of Hollywood and the music industry have to share with us their stories of rape and battery and manipulation before we get this point? Men don't need money to abuse women, they do so because they can! They do so because they are, on average at least, taller, stronger, and faster than we are, and because they have more testosterone than we do. They can, so they do. Marxists believe that more or less everything boils down to socialization, not biology, but sorry, biological differences are the underpinning of women's oppression by men!
But there was something else. In Prairie Fire's article The Slum Within the Global Countryside (it's linkable because it was re-posted to their new site in 2016; it was originally written and published to their old site in 2011 during the time when I was a member), he briefly mentions that since the end of the Second World War, America and other imperialist countries have shifted their approach toward the poor nations of the world toward economic development -- however warped. Hence why most of the world's population today lives in urban areas, not the countryside. He means this to highlight the existence of a new form of economic underdevelopment, but I found that it had a way of invalidating some of the central premises of Third Worldism. The Third Worldist theory is an expansion on the labor aristocracy theory, which is a Marxist POV meant to explain how feudal countries can essentially bypass a capitalist stage of development and leap directly to socialism: because the imperialist stage of capitalism makes it necessary for the economic development of the world to continue. Foreign empires prop up kings and feudal lords and extract natural resources for themselves, stunting both the economic and political development of the victim countries, thus preventing them from developing the industrial working class that Marx saw as the engine of communism. Thus you must throw off the yoke of these empires in order to resume the natural development process. And yet since World War 2, that has proven unnecessary. Instead, empires themselves have worked to accelerate the economic development of poorer countries, if only to win them over as well and have them replace us as the manufacturing sector of the world so we can just focus on consuming. And yet one thinks about how far in debt we are right now and to whom we owe that money. The end of our particular empire is in sight. Sooner or later, China and our other creditors are going to insist on collecting and at that point we become the next Greece. Put all these things together and you get a picture of the world's human population itself slowly becoming more bourgeoisified and its working classes edging ever more toward an equal station with each other at least, with the working classes of the First and Third World ultimately destined to meet each other somewhere in the middle of their current wealth gap. And what's more, how does a global people's war work without much of a global countryside left to serve as its base of operations anyway? That much the LLCO has never been able to make very clear.
But if people in general are trending richer and richer, is it just because or does that value still come from somewhere? It still comes from somewhere. The world's wildlife population, for example, declined 73% in the half-century between 1970 and 2020! In this and a thousand other ways, it seemed clear to me after a time that the real main contradiction in the world wasn't in fact between rich and poor nations, but between human beings and the natural world. This, of course, raises a fundamental dilemma: animals and plants cannot develop a shared consciousness of their shared interests and overthrow human beings, so, outside of the Hoppers hypothesis, how do we establish harmony with nature? We have to get the oppressing class to care enough to make serious sacrifices. This led me out of the LLCO and toward participation in PETA (People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals) campaigns.
Becoming Female-Centered
Well...my PETA phase didn't last long. Even shorter than my LLCO adventure. It took only a few months for me to become fed up with with their frequent recourse to using female nudity to get the public's attention. Tbh, it just made me stop caring about this whole concept of like "main problems" with the world. Frankly, I just stopped caring about saving the world because I found that I just couldn't get past the extent of the world's hatred for me, specifically because of my sex. There was a SlutWalk I attended in New York that October (of 2011). In many ways, it felt more like an exercise in self-objectification than a march against rape. The Occupy Wall Street movement happened in that same time window. Soon there emerged a raft of rape accusations at encampments and they quickly developed a reputation for pressuring the victims not to report these incidents to the police for fear that they'd become a pretext to tear down the encampments and undermine the movement. And of course the following year became the year that Republicans were accused of waging a "war on women" for a thousand reasons ranging from increasingly opposing birth control to voting against renewing the Violence Against Women Act and much more. It just seemed like everywhere I turned, whether it was to the Marxists, the animal liberation crowd, the anarchists, the conservatives, or even the feminists, there was the same issue -- the issue of male power and privilege over women -- getting in the way of my sympathy. They all had the same problem, just in slightly different expressions, and I increasingly found that I couldn't dwell on anything else.
The world of online radical feminism unfortunately had been pretty invisible to me up to that point, so I'd been reliant on a handful of women's liberationist books and whatever overlap with radical feminist politics I could find in existence on the Revolutionary Left message board, which was very minimal. That's when I discovered, oddly through a gaming site that I frequented, a woman named Anita Sarkeesian.
For those who don't know, Anita Sarkeesian was the creator of Feminist Frequency, which was a small group that did feminist critiques of pop culture, like movies and TV shows, Lego sets and marketing campaigns, this sort of thing. Her most famous work by far though was five-year project called Tropes vs. Women in Video Games: an extensive web video series analyzing in-depth and critiquing the representation of women in video games throughout the history of the medium. I discovered it through coverage of the consequent MRA harassment campaign in gaming media, which began the second the project was announced in 2012, a year before even a single installment had been published, and donated toward its creation in response. You can still find the entire series here. It was pretty good! Early installments like the Damsel in Distress trilogy and The Ms. Male Character proved award-winning material.
The next several videos in the series though centered on the sexual objectification of women in the medium in ways that included critiques of "mainstream" pornography and the prostitution of women, thus drawing the ire of liberals and praise from radical feminists over on the Feminist Current blog. (No more awards for you!
![[Image: laugh.gif]](https://thepoliticalforums.com/images/smilies/newsmilies/laugh.gif)
) In fact, the linked article by site owner Meghan Murphy was how I originally discovered the blog, which in turn became my first real window into the radfem internet! The infamous 2014 Gamergate misogynist harassment campaign against female and "pro-feminist" video game developers and critics (a handy, comprehensive and well-sourced timeline of which can be found here for the edification of anyone wishing to dispute that characterization) was in part a direct response to the first batch of these videos, called Women As Background Decoration. Anita was forced to flee her home more than once during this window of time. To me, the ferocity of this reaction, if anything, proved the importance of those sorts of critiques. Over-sexualization of women in the gaming landscape was, and to a much more limited extent remains, a problem that most women ourselves I think find more demeaning and alienating than patriarchal chivalry and such, and also clarifying of the cultural battle lines; clarifying of who is really on your side and who is not. (It was very clarifying, for example, that the sex industry directly participated in Gamergate. Example) It may be worth noting that, in larger feminist politics, Anita had notably been an early critic of the SlutWalk movement and of liberal "choice feminism" and, to some extent, hook-up culture itself (to which I reference her positive takes on the 2016 indie game One Night Stand). Indeed, as you can see at the first link in this paragraph, Anita back then described radical feminism in positive terms and would cite areas of agreement with thinkers like Gail Dines and the aforementioned Meghan Murphy, in addition to more conventional theorists; stuff she certainly wouldn't do today. On the flip side though, Anita's work was also always heavily infected with intersectionality nonsense, e.g. trans-inclusive, very concerned with race in ways that were by no means always women-focused, etc., though mercifully during the time of the Tropes vs. Women series that stuff was hardly the focus of her work. My point here being that, if some of her critiques -- particularly the stuff from 2014-15 (Women As Background Decoration part 1 and part 2; Women As Reward main video and follow-up) -- feel different from / less sexually liberal than what other feminist commentators of the time were offering, that's because they were indeed coming from an unorthodox place that was not strictly liberal-minded or strictly woke, though definitely not conservative either, and one that I connected to a lot. The reason I'm spending so much time on this somewhat frivolous subject is because Anita was the first vaguely radfem-adjacent "celebrity" figure I learned of who wasn't dead and gaming was, and is, an important part of my life/coping. I had strong feelings.
All that said, this is a bit of a frivolous subject because ultimately both Sarkeesian and Murphy abandoned anything resembling radical feminist politics they might have once embraced. After the Trump election in 2016 (which occurred near the end of the Tropes vs. Women series), Anita much more fully indulged the woke side of her philosophy, became "sex-positive", and directed Feminist Frequency toward an educational focus on such important topics as "Islamophobia" and "transphobia" and explaining how "sex work is work" and how terribly homofobo and wrong it is to portray Trump and Putin kissing on your protest placards (which I'm linking because it's my favorite example of the kind of cartoonish, virtue signalling political correctness the site came to exemplify after Trump's election), called for the abolition of police, and the rest of the rather familiar package. Meghan, meanwhile, basically lost her entire fucking mind after she got banned from Twitter for cruelly "misgendering" a male rapist in late 2018 after the site changed their policy to require denial of biology, established frequent (and just as frequently flirtatious) contact with the full breadth of the bro podcast network, and before long went MAGA (you become like the company you keep) and denounced radical feminists (especially the lesbians and female separatists) for being inhuman, apparently in contrast to her new friend network of nice guys. Heterosexuality compromises women no matter their politics. Consequently, most of her site's followers, who were mainly radfems, left and stopped donating, causing the site to become the mere shell of its former self that it is today. But neither of them (Anita or Meghan), it's worth pointing out, ever proclaimed themselves radfems. These were simply women who were willing to associate with them and absorbed some of their ideas in the process, it would seem. In spite of these eventual destinies though, Feminist Current became my first real connection to radfem culture and their articles and near-daily news round-up links were how I first discovered places like r/GenderCritical and Magdalen Berns' YouTube channel, which in turn led me to the discovery of places like r/TruFemcels, r/FemaleDatingStrategy, r/BlackPillFeminism, and more over the course of 2018-20, so it was a useful and important politically formative experience for me. The Gender Critical sub wasn't my first experience on Reddit. That honor belongs to r/GirlGamers, which I learned about through gaming sites during the initial men's rights activist meltdown over Anita Sarkeesian in 2012. I wasn't a frequenter of Reddit more broadly though until 2018.
The final major transformation of my worldview occurred after I read this 2018 Feminist Current article on an emerging wave of radical feminism in South Korea that had young women proudly destroying their beauty products. The article, authored by Hyejung Park, Jihye Kuk, and Caroline Norma, passingly introduced me to a female supremacist site called Womad, which was an abbreviation of "woman" and "nomad" meant to articulate their separation from a previous radfem site called Megalia and their independence in general. The site was at its peak of popularity at the time. The key thing about it for me was the discovery of mirroring as a way of combating cultural misogyny. Mirroring is the defining trait of South Korean feminism and the feature that separates it from the Western varieties. South Korean feminists are often alternatively just called "Megalians", such was the influence of the Megalia site specifically during its brief period of existence, and the name "Megalia" is a combination of the term "Mers Gallery" (a reference to a site they defected from) and "Egalia", which is a reference to Gerd Brantenberg's classic 1977 novel Egalia's Daughters, which satirizes gender roles by reversing the traditional, patriarchal ones in every way possible. That is the essence of what the South Korean feminist tend to do: they satirize misogyny by flipping the script and deploying misandry in response, often to comical and highly satisfying effect.
... 
This dedication to proportional responses is what gives it its distinctive lack of political correctness; it's about vice signaling rather than virtue signaling. Especially in the case of Womad. I was both like 
and immediately drawn to this concept when I discovered it through Womad! In fact, I'd like to discuss the concept of mirroring in a separate thread sometime.Anyway, I could currently be best described as a pessimistic proponent of matriarchy. I champion this concept, but believe the complete opposite is humanity's more plausible future.
What I've Retained From My Marxist Days
1. Materialism. I continue to find historical materialism a valuable tool for understanding events. In other words, I see social change in human history as driven by technological advancements. For example, women's modern freedom is in essence a byproduct of women gaining leisure time, which is in turn substantially a byproduct of having fewer children, which is in turn a byproduct of families requiring fewer children to achieve population replacement, which in turn is a byproduct of the advent first of heavy industry, with opportunity maximized by the advent of semi-reliable birth control. Modern improvements in communication also play a major, defining role in the advancement of women's class consciousness. There are material reasons why these advancements for women have happened at the particular times in history that they have, and that will go on being the case for future developments. It's not just a matter of willpower. History works in a more deterministic way than that.
2. Socialism. I just find that women tend to place more of a premium on equitable social relations in general than men do. I can't help doing so myself. But I think the way men tend to approach "socialism" reflects their own nature. It becomes very rigid, inflexible, authoritarian when they are the ones to organize it. I favor a kind of market socialism wherein the government owns businesses and provides them with startup capital, but wherein those businesses are managed by their workers collectively. I feel like this would balance out the human need for a motivation to invent and produce and distribute and just generally do work in a dynamic way that responds to what people want and need while minimizing opportunities for exploitation.
3. Concept of Bourgeoisification. I definitely think the fact that First World women have won many legal victories and generally gotten a good amount of access to a college education and the professions and whatnot and tend to have a fairly high level of income, globally speaking -- a lot to lose -- plays a role in their audacity, or more correctly their lack thereof. Comparatively favorable conditions tame revolutionary zeal. Radicalization is a byproduct of opportunity and motive and I find that those are maximized for women generally under what we might call Second World conditions, and South Korea is a good example. So has been Argentina, South Africa, Brazil, Mexico, and more over the last decade or so. There are many forms women's radicalization can take. In South Korea, it's mainly been the advent of a female separatist culture. In Mexico, it has involved women's strikes in protest of femicide. In 1960s-80s Japan, it meant the formation of all-female gangs. One just doesn't see comparable audacity either in heavily rural nations or here in what's considered the West today. It's just an observation.
4. The Vanguard and the Mass Line. Marxists have a valid point about the working class tending to lack a reasonable amount of leisure time, and leftover energy to exercise in that leisure time, with which to seriously invest themselves in theory work and political strategizing and thus benefit from the leadership of professional revolutionaries who do. This is easy to see in the women's movement, which itself is dominated by professionals, white collar workers, and small business owners, not so much your menial or manual laborers (like yours truly), yet it's ideas tend to work their way down to the grocery store floor. Elitism, you say? I call it realism. In Maoist theory and practice, though, this is balanced out by establishing connections to the general population through peripheral fronts dedicated to specific causes orbiting the revolutionary vanguard. You both influence these fronts and also learn from them in a back-and-forth way while recognizing your role of radicalizing them. This concept of populism with radicalizing leadership is known as the mass line. I believe these principles can be useful for grasping what the proper relationship between women's liberationists and phenomena like the Female Dating Strategy or Vexxed or what have you should be when they arise. We shouldn't view these groups as enemies or competitors, but as groups that help us reach, and radicalize, the larger public and which also may have valid lessons to offer us in the process that we should be open to. We shouldn't be open to becoming reformists or mere lifestylists, but other lessons, I mean.
What I've Ditched
1. Male-centered thinking. For example, I believe in socialism. For women. In our own societies with no men. The subjugation of women caused private property, not the other way around. It's more basic. The Marxists think the sex-based oppression of women -- if they can even recognize it as sex-based anymore -- is all about economics and not physical power and thus if we do away with class distinctions and establish a world composed entirely of shared property, male violence against and control of women will just sort of metaphysically disappear. They don't recognize the obvious primacy of our different biology as a causative agent. They're fucking delusional that way. Only women can truly understand our own oppression. I am also done trying to save the world. Those who claim we have to save the world to end our own class oppression as women can only reach this conclusion by conflating our interests with those of our oppressors: men.
2. Blank slate theory. Like most leftists, Marxists tend to believe that human nature is infinitely malleable. They often use this belief to justify extensive social engineering and slave labor, only to have the impact thereof overwhelmed by the realities of human nature, like people generally requiring motivation to work, to invent, etc. etc.
3. Communism. Modern Marxists are just utopians, frankly. Marx himself defined utopian socialism as the notion that communism is achieved through simple willpower rather than a product of human necessity. (He, incidentally, used the term "communism" and "socialism" interchangeably, as was common back in the 19th century.) If communism isn't historically necessary, it won't come about. Marxism, properly understood, is the theory that communism is the inevitable future of humanity because capitalism abolishes scarcity yet concentrates both wealth and workers together. Events have proven though that capitalism doesn't abolish material scarcity, and for that matter that workers are no longer being concentrated together in increasing volumes anymore. Communism is therefore not historically inevitable and therefore will not happen. Even compromised versions of it have proven less than especially productive and in fact better suited to agrarian settings where the means of production don't change as much than to the types of places people are being increasingly concentrated in. As a matter of fact, as experiments like the Great Leap Forward in China and the Super Great Leap Forward in Kampuchea/Cambodia show, the more purified a socialist system is, the lower the rate of material output in general. It's a testament to inefficacy of planned economies that proponents thereof today often hang their case on the idea that we should aim for zero economic growth for ecological reasons.
4. Optimism. Unfortunately, matriarchy, or even just the continuation of the status quo in gender relations, is likely itself a utopian pipe dream. Our gains can be easily reversed by changes in human necessity. If women's liberation from male oppression means imposing extinction on our species, for example, human survival instinct can kick in and impose the full force of patriarchal social conditions upon us anew. And I believe that is our most likely future. Ways out like the advent of artificial wombs and sex-selective birthing can and most likely will be utilized to drive women extinct before we will have sufficient access to drive men extinct with these technologies instead. We are, on average, weaker, shorter, and slower, so fighting our way out is something that can only be done with the great equalizers: firearms. Unfortunately, most owners of firearms are also men, to which end women tend to see gun control as an equalizer instead and demand that. The only firearms that should actually be controlled are those sought by men. Statistically speaking, they're the ones who use them for murder, not us. We need them for self-defense (against men) and our right to self-defense should not be impeded by men's choices. I don't see a plausible way out of our dilemma. In fact, I see few feasible ways of even mitigating the return of patriarchy in earnest. The national liberation cause, for example, has also taken a turn for the worse in the last half-century, in my observation, with its general ideological leadership shifting from Marxists, who tended to be more accommodating to women, to Islamists instead. In a way the simple fact that such a shift has been possible captures the religiosity of Marxism itself; that it's functional role in the world could be so easily subsumed by an actual religion. My understanding of imperialism itself has also evolved over the years to a recognition that imperialism is itself a social system that functions like capitalism. Just as their may be large and small businesses, winners and losers, in capitalism, so too are there powerful and weaker nations, winners and losers in the imperialist system, but no nation that doesn't aspire to imperial status of its own. Like how capitalism can only function on a pro-growth, for-profit basis, nations likewise can only function by continuous expansion, be it financial or territorial. There are no heroes to root for. I fight for the cause of women in my own way, but recognize the ultimate vanity of it. It's just like an uncontrollable impulse that I have. I feel like my whole life has been defined by misogyny that I've become too aware of not to care about. But pessimism is actually kind of healthy, IMO. It brings ones expectations closer to reality. It helps me keep developments in perspective and avoid over-investing myself emotionally in losing causes.
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Thought I'd go for something a bit different tonight and take you through some of my mental journey to the particular type of feminist thinking (part of the journey anyway) that I possess today. So much of what's proven fashionable this year has fallen into the category of socialist feminism that I thought it worth taking you through the Bolshevik chapter of my life.
My Normie Progressive Years
The September 11th terrorist attacks were what first got me interested in matters of public policy. Or more correctly, the way my country (the United States) chose to respond did. You know that one impractical person you knew back then who questioned whether the government should be allowed to keep track of what books you check out at the library (...well people still used those back then) and thought the Guantanamo Bay concentration camp was a bad idea from the outset? That was me. While even I wanted something done militarily about Al Qaeda after the attacks, I really, reeeeeaaaaally hated the suffocatingly jingoistic atmosphere that defined the media climate at that moment in time. For you Americans younger than me who think you've seen that before, no you haven't! You have seen nothing that way unless you lived through 2001-3 and were old enough at the time to know what was going on. Nothing like it has again happened since. Not here. To me, it was pretty fucking scary! I literally went to school on September 12th and there was a lengthy debate in our history class of whether we should abolish air travel. I am not shitting you! I overheard a couple guys at lunch the previous day suggesting we should nuke Afghanistan until the whole place is nothing but a giant crater. The media climate, which revolved around replaying the footage of the towers being struck from new angles over and over and over again and telling the stories of the deceased and their harrowing final moments seemingly one at a time for like six months straight, made it impossible to convince anyone that we were overreacting except for a fringe minority of hippie peacenik types who nobody took seriously (including me).
I was that one person who never bought the official narrative that Saddam Hussein and Al Qaeda were teaming up to nuke us or that we were on a mission from Isaiah and noticed that both the sitting president and VP had extensive experience in the oil business. By 2003, I wasn't quite alone anymore and the previous governor of my state (Howard Dean) jumped in the presidential race as an anti-Iraq-War candidate. I voted for him. He lost the nominating contest though, so I didn't vote in the 2004 general election, as there were no anti-war candidates who were relevant. I voted for Hillary Clinton in the Democratic Party's 2008 nominating contest mostly because the political establishment had abandoned her in favor of Obama, so her's just felt like the more outsider campaign atm. She lost. I still voted for Obama in the general election because...the Iraq War, the economy (the crash had just happened), the cost of health care, warrantless wiretapping, gay rights (I was starting to come out of my shell that way), you name it frankly, though I think it worth saying that that was also the beginning of the end of my mainstream progressive era. I say "progressive era" because I never really was much of a proper liberal. Anyway, by this time I had already read Pornography: Men Possessing Women and Female Chauvinist Pigs, so my journey toward radical feminism had begun. I'd also started dabbling in Marxist politics though and you might say that disappointment with the early Obama years took me further down that road.
Into Marxism: Orbiting the Revolutionary Communist Party
The first stop on my journey through Marxist fringe politics was a little group called the Revolutionary Communist Party USA, or RCP for short. I never did develop much interest in the Frankfurt School type stuff you got on college campuses, as it seemed to me that that stuff never made a difference in the real world. I looked for something that had before and the RCP at the time had a Maoist reputation. It was this position paper of theirs on women's emancipation that ultimately sold me on their specific brand. I was impressed specifically by their concurrent opposition to both American imperialism and Islamist politics (as not all Bolshevik parties were equally against both), by their audacity to be not only pro-choice, but specifically take the stance that justice for women means there should be, if anything, more, not fewer, abortions happening, and by their principled stand against the sex industry (which was matched by few other Bolshevik groups that I found in my online research; the bulk embracing a frustratingly tolerant attitude toward spaces like Craig's List) and sexual violence against women of both consensual and non-consenting varieties. It almost felt like a Catherine MacKinnon sort of way of thinking to me; like how MacKinnon attempts to fuse Marxism and radical feminism together into a singular persuasion.
The reason I took inspiration from Maoism specifically was because over in Nepal a party of Maoist fighters led a successful revolt against their country's monarchy that resulted in it becoming a republic and adopting a new constitution. The story of their revolutionary struggle was in the news on occasion in that general window of time (mainly the late 2000s) as it unfolded. I thought it was awesome and that convinced me to look into Maoist parties here in the U.S. There was more than one of those here in America, but I landed on the RCP for the aforementioned reasons. I never formally joined, but I did participate in their orbit of front groups and help distribute their newspaper, simply titled Revolution. In 2010, I learned from a departing member of the RCP that the party was actually undergoing a transition away from Maoism and into frankly being a personality cult geared around the ideas of the party chair, Bob Avakian. He pointed out to me that the primer on Marxism-Leninism-Maoism that used to appear on the site's left side had disappeared and explained to me that that was why, and also why all the new position papers had been coming out rapid-fire lately. BA considered his way of thinking to represent a new stage in the evolution of Marxist thought. (In fact, the RCP still believes this today.) ...Yeah. Suddenly the whole site dedicated just to Bob Avakian and his works and the constant references to BA across like every Revolution article made sense. That was the point where I knew their orientation was wrong and started looking for the next thing. This is when I discovered a fascinating Wordpress blog called Monkey Smashes Heaven.
Discovering the Leading Light Communist Organization
I was drawn to Monkey Smashes Heaven by its quirky title that was obviously intended to get attention. The title, I found, was a reference to a Red Guard pamphlet from the Chinese cultural revolution of the 1960s that read:
"Revolutionaries are Monkey Kings, their golden rods are powerful, their supernatural powers far-reaching and their magic omnipotent, for they possess Mao Tsetung’s great invincible thought. We wield our golden rods, display our supernatural powers and use our magic to turn the old world upside down, smash it to pieces, pulverize it, create chaos and make a tremendous mess, the bigger mess the better!"
And I was like... I loved this geeky agent of chaos aura! To top it all off, the masthead was a super-cool masterpiece of socialist realism (so-called) depicting a dancing, female People's Liberation Army soldier in the style of cultural revolution-era big-character posters and clearly taking inspiration from Jiang Qing's (Mao's last wife's) ballets. But like these things should be, the silly clickbait title and unapologetically retro Maoist styling concealed serious and thought-provoking content. MSH turned out to be the official blog of a new group called the Leading Light Communist Organization that promoted an ideology they (at least at first) called Maoist Third Worldism. The essence of Third Worldism, as distinct from other branches or offshoots of Maoist thought, is the idea of global people's war being the path to a communist future for humanity. Summed up originally in a celebratory text written by Mao's top military commander, Lin Biao, in 1965 called Long Live the Victory of People's War!, it calls for the worldwide emulation of the particular kind of revolutionary war that Mao had led against first the Japanese enemy during the Second World War and then from there to what was considered the country's national independence in 1949. More specifically, it calls for this model of struggle, built around the idea of identifying a main social problem to focus on and galvanize the public around and then gradually organizing and mobilizing mainly the peasantry into armed forces and encircling the urban centers from there, to be replicated by all poor countries as part of a single, global struggle against imperialism; mainly American imperialism specifically. But where Lin Biao's piece comments little on why this approach is necessary, simply remarking that communist revolution has been "delayed" in the Western world "for various reasons", the MSH journal expanded on this premise greatly, seeking to fill in the gaps as to why global people's war is needed to achieve a communist future. This is where we get to the key: the concept of bourgeois nations and proletarian nations.
MSH made a shockingly compelling case that the reason no communist revolution had ever taken hold in a First World country was because First World peoples had become bourgeoisified, which is to say bought off by plunder from abroad, and thus had no genuine working class anymore. The systematic theft of resources from Third World countries that were used to enrich First World populations as a whole in turn arrested the economic development of the former, making the overthrow of lackey regimes controlled by the imperial powers the primary task necessary to move humanity forward both in terms of economic and social development. Essentially they took the old labor aristocracy theory to its logical extreme, in other words, redefining the global proletariat more in terms of poverty than in terms of wage labor. What made this theory of the case so compelling to me were the statistics they brought to bare to substantiate it. The most powerful of all to me was their estimation of total global wealth and what it would look like for all of it that existed in the world to be redistributed equally. They took a generous estimation of the total global product and broke it up along equitable per capita lines and found that, as of 2010, an equal distribution of all the world's resources would allow each person the equivalent somewhere between $6,000 and $11,000 per year in contemporaneous American purchasing power, which they averaged out to realistically around $8,400 per person per year to be more precise. By contrast, the average person at the time was making roughly the American purchasing power equivalent of $1,000 to $2,000 a year, while the typical American was making more than $30,000 a year. Based on this breakdown of the global wealth distribution, the vast majority of the world's population stood to greatly benefit from a communist redistribution of the world's resources while, by contrast, nearly all residents of First World countries, certainly including practically all Americans, belonged to the richest 10% more specifically, including most of those classified as below the American poverty line. More detailed analysis from their various articles and commentaries revealed that the only reason the official poverty rate in America remained above 2% was because it had been generously redefined in the 1990s. Americans had trouble affording homes mostly because they kept buying bigger and bigger ones. More and more Americans gained access to a college education, bigger homes, more property in general. For perspective, at the time I myself was making around $16,000 a year, which meant that I was richer than at least 85% of the world's population, and yet I thought I was poor because the U.S. government defined me as poor! Then the difference in average hours worked per week by country put the whole matter into even sharper relief for me.
These revelations stunned me and turned my mental world -- my whole concept of what it meant to be exploited and poor -- upside-down. For the first time in my life, I felt shame in my country, not just for the actions of my government that I had no control over, but because I myself, so this data made me feel, was materially benefiting to a tremendous extent from the exploitation of others much worse off than myself all around the world. I felt ashamed not just of my government, but of being alive. I wanted to do something about it! I decided to join the Leading Light Communist Organization.
This was a fundamental turning point in my relationship to all political dogmas. Where I had initially dismissed Third Worldism as a crackpot, racist fringe theory of the case, by the time I'd read a handful of MSH articles, I came to feel like "Oh my god, the fringe weirdos are right and everyone else is wrong!!" Never again would I dismiss an idea just because of it's seeming oddity, offensiveness, or lack of popularity. This experience, frankly, taught to me truly to think for myself. Where during my time orbiting the RCP I had really just trusted in the wisdom of their leaders and experienced activists, assuming they knew better than me and really just wanting to believe what they said was true emotionally, now I had found something deeper through my own exploration and morbid curiosity. ...Well anyway, philosophizing aside, on to what my brief experience was like in the LLCO because that was pretty damn clarifying of a lot of things to me in its own way.
The Reality of the LLCO: I Was Cult-Hopping
I was with the LLCO for a period of some six months across the first half of 2011. Joining the organization was as easy as having a web chat with the party's two top leaders. Since it was a new institution, there was no formal process beyond that. From there, I was mailed a small number of copies of the zine version of Monkey Smashes Heaven (the first issue, which was the only one that existed at the time) to try and distribute around my area. It was a very small group at the time composed of about 25 people at any given point, roughly 20 of whom were male and nearly all of whom were white, with nearly all living specifically in Denver, Colorado. Like other Bolshevik groups though, they also operated fronts with larger membership and participation. One of these was the Revolutionary Anti-Imperialist Movement, which was an issue-driven organization focused on organizing protests against American militarism, which in this window of time mainly meant protests against the bombing of Libya, whose dictator was facing a pro-democracy revolt that most all of the world's governments were supporting (even Russia and China), led by ours. The other front, which was being developed during the time I was with the LLCO, was to be essentially a hippie one where we appealed to like rave-goers and ecology students' willingness to make sacrifices for the betterment of the planet to get them into simple living for the sake of the Third World; minimizing people's participation on the system of imperialism, as far as we were concerned. Where RAIM could mobilize around 50 people sometimes, playing propaganda videos at Denver raves seemed to be more effective at generating interest, so that was to be the main promo work in the short run.
The truth is that the LLCO was another personality cult organized around a guy who went by the screen name Prairie Fire. Officially there was a democratic process by which decisions were made, but in reality he personally ran everything and made all kinds of decisions for the group unilaterally. He also, frankly, wrote about 80% of its articles on Monkey Smashes Heaven, was invariably the star of all our propaganda videos, etc. It all revolved around him. For the most part, he was the LLCO. The name and organization themselves were his ideas. He also wanted to change the name of the theory it was built on to "leading light communism". If that sounds like a fruity, vaguely religious title then you're getting the idea. He often wrote of forces of "light" and "darkness" and other quasi-religious terms. I learned in the course of my stay (because he told me in our occasional check-in group chats) that he, along with another top leader who went by the screen name Jacob Brown (obviously a fake name), was a former drug dealer who made the mistake in the past of becoming addicted to what he was selling and had been sentenced to seven years in prison for it, but was now on probation. His real plan for the organization, he disclosed, was to return to drug dealing, this time with us in tow helping him out. It would work out differently this time, he explained to me. He reasoned that this was the best means by which to fund a party that was hostile to the American public since voluntary donations and dues-paying memberships for such a cause as ours with be hard to accrue organically, and that it served our purposes of weakening the nation's population as well. We might also, he suggested, adopt a bunch of kids and raise them to be "leading light communists" in some remote area together closer to where I lived.
Speaking of all this, there was a method by which Prairie Fire was able to get the LLCO's propaganda videos shown at local raves. Namely, he was involved with an erotic dancer there, whom he spoke of eventually making the public face of the organization. I always felt like something was wrong with this, but was new and didn't want to start out by complaining, but focus on learning the line better. There were so few women involved in or orbiting the group though that it ultimately got to me and I came to feel like the only way for me to be noticed by the leadership was to try and compete for Prairie Fire's affections myself. And I wasn't good at it, lol. I'll spare you the finer details of the very lame intrigue, but shit like this was a reality of the misogynistic culture the group had. Ideologically, our line on feminism centered on the idea that there was no universal sisterhood and that First World women were privileged enemies of Third World women who should be opposed. It made sense within the framework of our proletarian nations vs. bourgeois nations conception of the world, so I accepted it, but in practice this thinking was used to excuse shit like our men going around proclaiming "FW" women sluts, bimbos, and whores and whatnot. It felt like a hostile atmosphere.
I rebelled against this climate in my own little way by quietly creating a cheesy Third Worldist blog of my own called "I.O.U." under the screen name Monkey Queen, which was also my code name with the LLCO. (Yes, I apologize for the incredibly lame blog title. I just couldn't think of a better one, what can I say? ) There I could do what I really wanted to, which was mainly theory work and education. It still exists (though I haven't updated it since before leaving the LLCO for obvious reasons), so, to provide you with a few examples of what I mean, here was my intro to classical Marxism, for example, my later breakdown of what Maoism entails, and a commentary on the relationship between Libyan dictator Muamar Qaddafi, the U.S.-led bombing compaign, and Al Qaeda, which was also involved in the conflict. I also sometimes re-posted MSH/LLCO theory articles that I found especially helpful. Here was one of my favorites on the relationship between emergent global slums and imperial mall economies, among other things. The blog was eventually discovered by our leadership. Fortunately, they liked it and even briefly endorsed it, including a link on the LLCO main page.
It wasn't long though before this chapter came to a close. In June, Prairie Fire created a new official blog to replace Monkey Smashes Heaven and I was to run it together with him and another of our members. I was to cease posting on my I.O.U. blog and post only to the new one as part of this, and would be permitted to write only "newsy" articles, like articles denouncing the latest American village bombing in Afghanistan and hyping the resistance of the Taliban, stuff like that. No more theory work. I was to become a mindless cog churning out low-effort, generic propo material. ...I hated this. It was kind of the final straw really on top of my increasingly long list of grievances. Another issue was that I'd come to increasingly disagree with Third Worldism / "leading light communism" at a baseline theory-of-the-case level over time, thanks in part to an inadvertent revelation written by Prairie Fire himself about the nature of global value accumulation since World War 2.
Leaving the LLCO
My differences with the LLCO's theory of the case began with our line on women's emancipation. We weren't actually the only organization holding a Third Worldist political line that championed global people's war. A number of our members were defectors from an older such group called the Maoist Internationalist Movement that held more or less the same opinion on the nature of the world's class composition and distribution. This group of ex-MIM people were, I found, the ones most insistent on 1) maintaining the Maoist-Third Worldist theory title instead of branding ourselves "leading light communists" and 2) respecting the democratic process of the new party rather than just going along with Prairie Fire's whims. I soon wound up looking into what was left of MIM because, like I said above, I just didn't like our climate very much. I liked MIM's line on feminism much better. They actually had a fleshed out theory of the case on gender politics. Much of their theory work on this still exists, so I can still link you to a lot of it. Much of it seemed to be built on a more Maoist-specific variation on the thinking of the Marxist radfem lawyer and personal friend of Andrea Dworkin's, Catherine MacKinnon, who I briefly mentioned earlier in this thread. (Here's their original summary/review of her work.) I was quickly drawn to their stark slogans like "all sex is rape" and "Sterilize All Men!". As I read, I found some pretty damn interesting ideas that continue to influence my thinking about women's oppression today. In particular, I found their point that the concept of consent is meaningless in a context of unequal socio-economic relations powerfully compelling. Someone is always richer than the other. Someone is usually taller and stronger than the other. Differences of wealth, differences in physical ability, differences in mental acuity (someone being sober or more mentally competent, another not or less), game-playing (lying to acquire sex you wouldn't receive otherwise)...all of these circumstances influence our choices. Choice exists in degrees, in other words, not just in absolute terms like the liberals insist, and therefore so too does coercion, including sexual coercion, exist in degrees. Truly free choices under unequal conditions are a myth. Thus, to MIM's way of thinking, mutual inclination toward sex while class distinctions and money exist is nonsense. That made sense to me! It still makes sense to me. What we formally call rape right now and what we currently call regular sex is really just a difference of degrees, to which end society's accepted definition of rape keeps changing, expanding when women become more powerful and contracting when patriarchal social relations are more fully cemented.
Another thing I liked was their propensity to use terms like "womyn" for 'woman', "wimmin" for 'women', and "persyn" for 'person'. I thought it silly and childish at first, but by the time I got done reading a few paragraphs that read like that, I noticed that I had actually begun to feel qualitatively better about myself, like I was genuinely respected. I hadn't realized the extent to which I'd internalized the idea that I'm just an extension of men! I kind of wish these words were always written like that.
But alas, nothing is perfect and MIM's line on women also gets very bizarre in other areas. For example, they also embrace non-biological definitions of "men" and "women", going as far with their theory of imperialism as to define First World countries as male nations and Third World countries as female nations. Thus their call to "sterilize all men" in reality is actually a call to sterilize First World populations in general, including the women, and not to sterilize Third World populations. And that is the kind of crackpot metaphysics that kept me away from their organization in the end. Still, I admired their principled commitment to the eradication of women's oppression, which was well-illustrated in the above-linked article on their formulation that all sex is rape: "If money and property are gone and we still have physically strong people sexually exploiting weaker people, then communists will be the ones looking for a solution to that, whether it takes bio-engineering, control of gender ratios, organizing the weak into collectives suitable for self-defense or anything else." In my present worldview, I basically just skip ahead right to these questions because it's obvious that abundance doesn't end male violence and exploitation. How many ultra-rich women of Hollywood and the music industry have to share with us their stories of rape and battery and manipulation before we get this point? Men don't need money to abuse women, they do so because they can! They do so because they are, on average at least, taller, stronger, and faster than we are, and because they have more testosterone than we do. They can, so they do. Marxists believe that more or less everything boils down to socialization, not biology, but sorry, biological differences are the underpinning of women's oppression by men!
But there was something else. In Prairie Fire's article The Slum Within the Global Countryside (it's linkable because it was re-posted to their new site in 2016; it was originally written and published to their old site in 2011 during the time when I was a member), he briefly mentions that since the end of the Second World War, America and other imperialist countries have shifted their approach toward the poor nations of the world toward economic development -- however warped. Hence why most of the world's population today lives in urban areas, not the countryside. He means this to highlight the existence of a new form of economic underdevelopment, but I found that it had a way of invalidating some of the central premises of Third Worldism. The Third Worldist theory is an expansion on the labor aristocracy theory, which is a Marxist POV meant to explain how feudal countries can essentially bypass a capitalist stage of development and leap directly to socialism: because the imperialist stage of capitalism makes it necessary for the economic development of the world to continue. Foreign empires prop up kings and feudal lords and extract natural resources for themselves, stunting both the economic and political development of the victim countries, thus preventing them from developing the industrial working class that Marx saw as the engine of communism. Thus you must throw off the yoke of these empires in order to resume the natural development process. And yet since World War 2, that has proven unnecessary. Instead, empires themselves have worked to accelerate the economic development of poorer countries, if only to win them over as well and have them replace us as the manufacturing sector of the world so we can just focus on consuming. And yet one thinks about how far in debt we are right now and to whom we owe that money. The end of our particular empire is in sight. Sooner or later, China and our other creditors are going to insist on collecting and at that point we become the next Greece. Put all these things together and you get a picture of the world's human population itself slowly becoming more bourgeoisified and its working classes edging ever more toward an equal station with each other at least, with the working classes of the First and Third World ultimately destined to meet each other somewhere in the middle of their current wealth gap. And what's more, how does a global people's war work without much of a global countryside left to serve as its base of operations anyway? That much the LLCO has never been able to make very clear.
But if people in general are trending richer and richer, is it just because or does that value still come from somewhere? It still comes from somewhere. The world's wildlife population, for example, declined 73% in the half-century between 1970 and 2020! In this and a thousand other ways, it seemed clear to me after a time that the real main contradiction in the world wasn't in fact between rich and poor nations, but between human beings and the natural world. This, of course, raises a fundamental dilemma: animals and plants cannot develop a shared consciousness of their shared interests and overthrow human beings, so, outside of the Hoppers hypothesis, how do we establish harmony with nature? We have to get the oppressing class to care enough to make serious sacrifices. This led me out of the LLCO and toward participation in PETA (People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals) campaigns.
Becoming Female-Centered
Well...my PETA phase didn't last long. Even shorter than my LLCO adventure. It took only a few months for me to become fed up with with their frequent recourse to using female nudity to get the public's attention. Tbh, it just made me stop caring about this whole concept of like "main problems" with the world. Frankly, I just stopped caring about saving the world because I found that I just couldn't get past the extent of the world's hatred for me, specifically because of my sex. There was a SlutWalk I attended in New York that October (of 2011). In many ways, it felt more like an exercise in self-objectification than a march against rape. The Occupy Wall Street movement happened in that same time window. Soon there emerged a raft of rape accusations at encampments and they quickly developed a reputation for pressuring the victims not to report these incidents to the police for fear that they'd become a pretext to tear down the encampments and undermine the movement. And of course the following year became the year that Republicans were accused of waging a "war on women" for a thousand reasons ranging from increasingly opposing birth control to voting against renewing the Violence Against Women Act and much more. It just seemed like everywhere I turned, whether it was to the Marxists, the animal liberation crowd, the anarchists, the conservatives, or even the feminists, there was the same issue -- the issue of male power and privilege over women -- getting in the way of my sympathy. They all had the same problem, just in slightly different expressions, and I increasingly found that I couldn't dwell on anything else.
The world of online radical feminism unfortunately had been pretty invisible to me up to that point, so I'd been reliant on a handful of women's liberationist books and whatever overlap with radical feminist politics I could find in existence on the Revolutionary Left message board, which was very minimal. That's when I discovered, oddly through a gaming site that I frequented, a woman named Anita Sarkeesian.
For those who don't know, Anita Sarkeesian was the creator of Feminist Frequency, which was a small group that did feminist critiques of pop culture, like movies and TV shows, Lego sets and marketing campaigns, this sort of thing. Her most famous work by far though was five-year project called Tropes vs. Women in Video Games: an extensive web video series analyzing in-depth and critiquing the representation of women in video games throughout the history of the medium. I discovered it through coverage of the consequent MRA harassment campaign in gaming media, which began the second the project was announced in 2012, a year before even a single installment had been published, and donated toward its creation in response. You can still find the entire series here. It was pretty good! Early installments like the Damsel in Distress trilogy and The Ms. Male Character proved award-winning material.
The next several videos in the series though centered on the sexual objectification of women in the medium in ways that included critiques of "mainstream" pornography and the prostitution of women, thus drawing the ire of liberals and praise from radical feminists over on the Feminist Current blog. (No more awards for you! ) In fact, the linked article by site owner Meghan Murphy was how I originally discovered the blog, which in turn became my first real window into the radfem internet! The infamous 2014 Gamergate misogynist harassment campaign against female and "pro-feminist" video game developers and critics (a handy, comprehensive and well-sourced timeline of which can be found here for the edification of anyone wishing to dispute that characterization) was in part a direct response to the first batch of these videos, called Women As Background Decoration. Anita was forced to flee her home more than once during this window of time. To me, the ferocity of this reaction, if anything, proved the importance of those sorts of critiques. Over-sexualization of women in the gaming landscape was, and to a much more limited extent remains, a problem that most women ourselves I think find more demeaning and alienating than patriarchal chivalry and such, and also clarifying of the cultural battle lines; clarifying of who is really on your side and who is not. (It was very clarifying, for example, that the sex industry directly participated in Gamergate. Example)
It may be worth noting that, in larger feminist politics, Anita had notably been an early critic of the SlutWalk movement and of liberal "choice feminism" and, to some extent, hook-up culture itself (to which I reference her positive takes on the 2016 indie game One Night Stand). Indeed, as you can see at the first link in this paragraph, Anita back then described radical feminism in positive terms and would cite areas of agreement with thinkers like Gail Dines and the aforementioned Meghan Murphy, in addition to more conventional theorists; stuff she certainly wouldn't do today. On the flip side though, Anita's work was also always heavily infected with intersectionality nonsense, e.g. trans-inclusive, very concerned with race in ways that were by no means always women-focused, etc., though mercifully during the time of the Tropes vs. Women series that stuff was hardly the focus of her work. My point here being that, if some of her critiques -- particularly the stuff from 2014-15 (Women As Background Decoration part 1 and part 2; Women As Reward main video and follow-up) -- feel different from / less sexually liberal than what other feminist commentators of the time were offering, that's because they were indeed coming from an unorthodox place that was not strictly liberal-minded or strictly woke, though definitely not conservative either, and one that I connected to a lot. The reason I'm spending so much time on this somewhat frivolous subject is because Anita was the first vaguely radfem-adjacent "celebrity" figure I learned of who wasn't dead and gaming was, and is, an important part of my life/coping. I had strong feelings.
All that said, this is a bit of a frivolous subject because ultimately both Sarkeesian and Murphy abandoned anything resembling radical feminist politics they might have once embraced. After the Trump election in 2016 (which occurred near the end of the Tropes vs. Women series), Anita much more fully indulged the woke side of her philosophy, became "sex-positive", and directed Feminist Frequency toward an educational focus on such important topics as "Islamophobia" and "transphobia" and explaining how "sex work is work" and how terribly homofobo and wrong it is to portray Trump and Putin kissing on your protest placards (which I'm linking because it's my favorite example of the kind of cartoonish, virtue signalling political correctness the site came to exemplify after Trump's election), called for the abolition of police, and the rest of the rather familiar package. Meghan, meanwhile, basically lost her entire fucking mind after she got banned from Twitter for cruelly "misgendering" a male rapist in late 2018 after the site changed their policy to require denial of biology, established frequent (and just as frequently flirtatious) contact with the full breadth of the bro podcast network, and before long went MAGA (you become like the company you keep) and denounced radical feminists (especially the lesbians and female separatists) for being inhuman, apparently in contrast to her new friend network of nice guys. Heterosexuality compromises women no matter their politics. Consequently, most of her site's followers, who were mainly radfems, left and stopped donating, causing the site to become the mere shell of its former self that it is today. But neither of them (Anita or Meghan), it's worth pointing out, ever proclaimed themselves radfems. These were simply women who were willing to associate with them and absorbed some of their ideas in the process, it would seem. In spite of these eventual destinies though, Feminist Current became my first real connection to radfem culture and their articles and near-daily news round-up links were how I first discovered places like r/GenderCritical and Magdalen Berns' YouTube channel, which in turn led me to the discovery of places like r/TruFemcels, r/FemaleDatingStrategy, r/BlackPillFeminism, and more over the course of 2018-20, so it was a useful and important politically formative experience for me. The Gender Critical sub wasn't my first experience on Reddit. That honor belongs to r/GirlGamers, which I learned about through gaming sites during the initial men's rights activist meltdown over Anita Sarkeesian in 2012. I wasn't a frequenter of Reddit more broadly though until 2018.
The final major transformation of my worldview occurred after I read this 2018 Feminist Current article on an emerging wave of radical feminism in South Korea that had young women proudly destroying their beauty products. The article, authored by Hyejung Park, Jihye Kuk, and Caroline Norma, passingly introduced me to a female supremacist site called Womad, which was an abbreviation of "woman" and "nomad" meant to articulate their separation from a previous radfem site called Megalia and their independence in general. The site was at its peak of popularity at the time. The key thing about it for me was the discovery of mirroring as a way of combating cultural misogyny. Mirroring is the defining trait of South Korean feminism and the feature that separates it from the Western varieties. South Korean feminists are often alternatively just called "Megalians", such was the influence of the Megalia site specifically during its brief period of existence, and the name "Megalia" is a combination of the term "Mers Gallery" (a reference to a site they defected from) and "Egalia", which is a reference to Gerd Brantenberg's classic 1977 novel Egalia's Daughters, which satirizes gender roles by reversing the traditional, patriarchal ones in every way possible. That is the essence of what the South Korean feminist tend to do: they satirize misogyny by flipping the script and deploying misandry in response, often to comical and highly satisfying effect. ... This dedication to proportional responses is what gives it its distinctive lack of political correctness; it's about vice signaling rather than virtue signaling. Especially in the case of Womad. I was both like and immediately drawn to this concept when I discovered it through Womad! In fact, I'd like to discuss the concept of mirroring in a separate thread sometime.
Anyway, I could currently be best described as a pessimistic proponent of matriarchy. I champion this concept, but believe the complete opposite is humanity's more plausible future.
What I've Retained From My Marxist Days
1. Materialism. I continue to find historical materialism a valuable tool for understanding events. In other words, I see social change in human history as driven by technological advancements. For example, women's modern freedom is in essence a byproduct of women gaining leisure time, which is in turn substantially a byproduct of having fewer children, which is in turn a byproduct of families requiring fewer children to achieve population replacement, which in turn is a byproduct of the advent first of heavy industry, with opportunity maximized by the advent of semi-reliable birth control. Modern improvements in communication also play a major, defining role in the advancement of women's class consciousness. There are material reasons why these advancements for women have happened at the particular times in history that they have, and that will go on being the case for future developments. It's not just a matter of willpower. History works in a more deterministic way than that.
2. Socialism. I just find that women tend to place more of a premium on equitable social relations in general than men do. I can't help doing so myself. But I think the way men tend to approach "socialism" reflects their own nature. It becomes very rigid, inflexible, authoritarian when they are the ones to organize it. I favor a kind of market socialism wherein the government owns businesses and provides them with startup capital, but wherein those businesses are managed by their workers collectively. I feel like this would balance out the human need for a motivation to invent and produce and distribute and just generally do work in a dynamic way that responds to what people want and need while minimizing opportunities for exploitation.
3. Concept of Bourgeoisification. I definitely think the fact that First World women have won many legal victories and generally gotten a good amount of access to a college education and the professions and whatnot and tend to have a fairly high level of income, globally speaking -- a lot to lose -- plays a role in their audacity, or more correctly their lack thereof. Comparatively favorable conditions tame revolutionary zeal. Radicalization is a byproduct of opportunity and motive and I find that those are maximized for women generally under what we might call Second World conditions, and South Korea is a good example. So has been Argentina, South Africa, Brazil, Mexico, and more over the last decade or so. There are many forms women's radicalization can take. In South Korea, it's mainly been the advent of a female separatist culture. In Mexico, it has involved women's strikes in protest of femicide. In 1960s-80s Japan, it meant the formation of all-female gangs. One just doesn't see comparable audacity either in heavily rural nations or here in what's considered the West today. It's just an observation.
4. The Vanguard and the Mass Line. Marxists have a valid point about the working class tending to lack a reasonable amount of leisure time, and leftover energy to exercise in that leisure time, with which to seriously invest themselves in theory work and political strategizing and thus benefit from the leadership of professional revolutionaries who do. This is easy to see in the women's movement, which itself is dominated by professionals, white collar workers, and small business owners, not so much your menial or manual laborers (like yours truly), yet it's ideas tend to work their way down to the grocery store floor. Elitism, you say? I call it realism. In Maoist theory and practice, though, this is balanced out by establishing connections to the general population through peripheral fronts dedicated to specific causes orbiting the revolutionary vanguard. You both influence these fronts and also learn from them in a back-and-forth way while recognizing your role of radicalizing them. This concept of populism with radicalizing leadership is known as the mass line. I believe these principles can be useful for grasping what the proper relationship between women's liberationists and phenomena like the Female Dating Strategy or Vexxed or what have you should be when they arise. We shouldn't view these groups as enemies or competitors, but as groups that help us reach, and radicalize, the larger public and which also may have valid lessons to offer us in the process that we should be open to. We shouldn't be open to becoming reformists or mere lifestylists, but other lessons, I mean.
What I've Ditched
1. Male-centered thinking. For example, I believe in socialism. For women. In our own societies with no men. The subjugation of women caused private property, not the other way around. It's more basic. The Marxists think the sex-based oppression of women -- if they can even recognize it as sex-based anymore -- is all about economics and not physical power and thus if we do away with class distinctions and establish a world composed entirely of shared property, male violence against and control of women will just sort of metaphysically disappear. They don't recognize the obvious primacy of our different biology as a causative agent. They're fucking delusional that way. Only women can truly understand our own oppression. I am also done trying to save the world. Those who claim we have to save the world to end our own class oppression as women can only reach this conclusion by conflating our interests with those of our oppressors: men.
2. Blank slate theory. Like most leftists, Marxists tend to believe that human nature is infinitely malleable. They often use this belief to justify extensive social engineering and slave labor, only to have the impact thereof overwhelmed by the realities of human nature, like people generally requiring motivation to work, to invent, etc. etc.
3. Communism. Modern Marxists are just utopians, frankly. Marx himself defined utopian socialism as the notion that communism is achieved through simple willpower rather than a product of human necessity. (He, incidentally, used the term "communism" and "socialism" interchangeably, as was common back in the 19th century.) If communism isn't historically necessary, it won't come about. Marxism, properly understood, is the theory that communism is the inevitable future of humanity because capitalism abolishes scarcity yet concentrates both wealth and workers together. Events have proven though that capitalism doesn't abolish material scarcity, and for that matter that workers are no longer being concentrated together in increasing volumes anymore. Communism is therefore not historically inevitable and therefore will not happen. Even compromised versions of it have proven less than especially productive and in fact better suited to agrarian settings where the means of production don't change as much than to the types of places people are being increasingly concentrated in. As a matter of fact, as experiments like the Great Leap Forward in China and the Super Great Leap Forward in Kampuchea/Cambodia show, the more purified a socialist system is, the lower the rate of material output in general. It's a testament to inefficacy of planned economies that proponents thereof today often hang their case on the idea that we should aim for zero economic growth for ecological reasons.
4. Optimism. Unfortunately, matriarchy, or even just the continuation of the status quo in gender relations, is likely itself a utopian pipe dream. Our gains can be easily reversed by changes in human necessity. If women's liberation from male oppression means imposing extinction on our species, for example, human survival instinct can kick in and impose the full force of patriarchal social conditions upon us anew. And I believe that is our most likely future. Ways out like the advent of artificial wombs and sex-selective birthing can and most likely will be utilized to drive women extinct before we will have sufficient access to drive men extinct with these technologies instead. We are, on average, weaker, shorter, and slower, so fighting our way out is something that can only be done with the great equalizers: firearms. Unfortunately, most owners of firearms are also men, to which end women tend to see gun control as an equalizer instead and demand that. The only firearms that should actually be controlled are those sought by men. Statistically speaking, they're the ones who use them for murder, not us. We need them for self-defense (against men) and our right to self-defense should not be impeded by men's choices. I don't see a plausible way out of our dilemma. In fact, I see few feasible ways of even mitigating the return of patriarchy in earnest. The national liberation cause, for example, has also taken a turn for the worse in the last half-century, in my observation, with its general ideological leadership shifting from Marxists, who tended to be more accommodating to women, to Islamists instead. In a way the simple fact that such a shift has been possible captures the religiosity of Marxism itself; that it's functional role in the world could be so easily subsumed by an actual religion. My understanding of imperialism itself has also evolved over the years to a recognition that imperialism is itself a social system that functions like capitalism. Just as their may be large and small businesses, winners and losers, in capitalism, so too are there powerful and weaker nations, winners and losers in the imperialist system, but no nation that doesn't aspire to imperial status of its own. Like how capitalism can only function on a pro-growth, for-profit basis, nations likewise can only function by continuous expansion, be it financial or territorial. There are no heroes to root for. I fight for the cause of women in my own way, but recognize the ultimate vanity of it. It's just like an uncontrollable impulse that I have. I feel like my whole life has been defined by misogyny that I've become too aware of not to care about. But pessimism is actually kind of healthy, IMO. It brings ones expectations closer to reality. It helps me keep developments in perspective and avoid over-investing myself emotionally in losing causes.
