Traverse Fantasy

Digital version of my pamphlet on Itch ! Investigating the historical context and legacy of Thomas Paine's  Common Sense , written to proselytize radical liberalism right before the American Revolution. 1. The Colonies In 1764, the English Parliament began imposing taxes on American colonies to recuperate the costs of the French-Indian War. Although the constitution of England gave all citizens the right to representation, the colonists did not have a voice in Parliament. “No taxation without representation!” American colonists started boycotting English goods and protesting against the rule of Parliament. The more they voiced their opposition, the more Parliament punished them, causing protests to escalate into riots. In 1774, Parliament began to violently repress the colonists: restricting trade, housing soldiers in private homes, and imprisoning people without trial. 2. Common Sense Thomas Paine wrote Common Sense in 1775 at the cusp of revolution, when the original ...

I’ve gotten comments from people asking questions that I thought would be nicer to answer in longer form! Thank y’all so much for your interest and responses :) Question 1: Commodity Fetishism From “ Marx’s Capital Vol. 1 For Dummies ”: I would like to add a thought/question that came to my mind a bit after commenting. You do use the term ‘social ilusion’ describing commodity fetishism and this may just be language issue but i have always had a bit of an issue with the translation of the german ‘Schein’ as ‘illusion’. In some other cases (Kant or Hegel) it gets translated as ‘semblance’. For me, neither seems coneptually accurate. Especially ‘illusion’ might lead people to think that acknowledging it would dispell it. But the fetish of the commodity seems a lot stickier. It is an illusion that only fades when the material modes of social (re)production have changed. Thanks, warenunförmig ! For context, throughout my pamphlet, I describe value (we need not qualify here—read Marx o...

I wanted to keep making mini versions of  Capital  volumes because it'd be fun, besides hopefully being useful for others to get a conversational grasp on Marx's critique. Like, "Yeah, I've read  Capital , in the form of these stupid little things." But while working on this and revisiting the second volume, now published on Itch , a thought struck me which I've included as a postface. Let's start with the content of the zine, and then I'll get into that. 1. Capital as Circuit Capital as a process can be perceived from many perspectives, representing the forms into which value transforms: from money, to active production, and finally to commodities which are then sold for more money. Although that sequence is “accurate”, when starting from capital as money, it’s also misleading because it appears like capital is a one-and-done process.   But it doesn’t stop there. The money doesn’t just recuperate the costs of one production, but is thrown back...

HTML version of my eight-fold zine outlining a more cohesive feminist politics. This one is actually very new; I wrote it both to synthesize what I had been reading and thinking about lately, and to get back into practice working with this relatively short form. Maybe I need a separate 'feminism' tag, but I see feminism as something that pierces and interconnects everything else—yet isn't that true of everything? 1. Our Crisis The US is in a crisis of sexual politics: abortion access is no longer protected on the federal level, allowing states to criminalize it again and surveil women across state lines if suspected; federal courts are ruling against trans people, facilitating the loss of their healthcare, legal recognition, and participation in everyday life; gay and even interracial marriage are next on the table. Republicans may wield the stick, but Democrats wield the carrot: their lack of urgency over the last few decades, and their ‘response’ to our lost rights...

HTML version of my eight-fold zine summarizing Lenin's Imperialism , which I also just put on Itch ! 1. Monopolization A capital is an investment of money in the production of some commodities. As such it is not merely money, but the social process of industrial production. There can be many capitals (or firms) in one industry, competing with each other to generate greater profits. As Marx analyzed in Capital: Volume I , free competition among capitals does not last, but eventually results in their concentration and centralization into one massive capital. This capital poses a monopoly, controlling all production within its particular industry. The centralization of production within a single industry results in production becoming highly socialized, while the fruits of industry remain privatized. 2. Banks & Finance Monopolization occurs not only in the context of industry but also of finance. Banks loan money to industrial firms to provide them with financial capit...

An HTML version of the eight-fold zine I just put on Itch , summarizing Volume I of Marx's Capital for our generation's brainrotted minds. I also previously posted a longer summary (lol). 1. Commodities Capitalism is understood as a society where commodities are produced and exchanged on a vast scale to support that society. A commodity could be a physical good, or it could be a service performed for money. We typically view each commodity in terms of how it is used and how much one is generally worth. A commodity’s usage, however, does not tell us about how much that commodity is worth. Since a commodity’s ‘exchange-value’ is measured using money, and money helps us compare exchange-values of different commodities, we can surmise that money measures a quantity of an essence that commodities apparently share in various amounts. 2. Value & Labor There is obviously no physical essence that all commodities have in common. You cannot view a commodity’s value underneath ...

There's a cliché quote often falsely attributed to Oscar Wilde: "Everything is about sex, except sex, which is about power." Thankfully, this isn't a boomer's Facebook page, so we can have the same point restated by Deleuze and Guattari and seem all the more intellectual for it: "The truth is that sexuality is everywhere: the way a bureaucrat fondles his records, a judge administers justice, a businessman causes money to circulate; the way the bourgeoisie fucks the proletariat; and so on. And there is no need to resort to metaphors, any more than for the libido to go by way of metamorphoses. Hitler got the fascists sexually aroused. Flags, nations, armies, banks get a lot of people aroused. A revolutionary machine is nothing if it does not acquire at least as much force as these coercive machines have for producing breaks and mobilizing flows." I've been ruminating on a handful of things lately, which I realize are interconnected. The angels ...

Talia Bhatt wrote a really good essay called “ The Third Sex ”, about how the third-sexing of individuals who display male-to-female cross-sex behavior/characteristics marks them for ostracization and violence in their particular societies. In other words, taking traditionalist Hindi society as an example, the classification of MTF individuals as hijira is not motivated by an enlightened sense of gender diversity (especially as opposed to ‘modern’ notions of transness), but rather by a patriarchal imperative to punish those who dare to forsake the male pedestal and instead associate with the female sex, since doing so problematizes the base assumptions of patriarchy that sex is immutable and that the male sex in particular is superior to the female sex. “The ‘gender binary’ is a misnomer,” Bhatt argues; “gender has always been a hierarchy.” It’s a really good essay, one that speaks to how ‘pre-modern’ patriarchies rationalize the existence of trans people as well as contextualizes ho...