On Nia Frome

Nia Frome

Buncha her tweets. I'll probably make a separate page, or maybe tack it onto the RedSails one.

Marketing Socialism - Jan 31, 2019 (src)

This eventually became an article on RedSails, Marketing Socialism, but I saw it on twitter first.

when i was a kid i also believed 'communists should ditch that label, for PR reasons'. now i think you make more headway owning it than dishonestly disavowing it. not least because someone will almost always bring up stalin no matter what you call yourself

stalin is a powerful trope for normies. his name stands for the perverse emergence of injustice from the overzealous pursuit of justice. it's dramatic irony. it's a morality tale about how power corrupts.

that mythic trope stands as a barricade between normies and socialism no matter what kind of spin you put on socialism

what are the crimes normally attributed to stalin? the show trials, the purges, the gulag, forced collectivization... in other words state violence. the socialisms that define themselves in opposition to stalin therefore downplay state violence as much as they can.

but statehood IS (a monopoly on legitimate) violence. the question of who's doing violence to whom, and to what end, is the fundamental problem of politics. it's capitalism's answer to this question that makes us hate it so much.

"nobody does violence to anybody" sounds good, but it's not actually a political position. political positions require charting out a plausible path from where we are now into the glorious future ahead, and that path goes through socialist states.

the demonization of stalin is the demonization of socialist statehood itself. you will not convince a normie that the latter is false as long as they remain convinced that the former is true.

the ritual denunciation of stalin on "the left" 1) presents a utopia of socialism without antagonism 2) flatters first-worlders and academics 3) spares people the unpleasantness of interrogating how their ideas about the past were formed 4) makes a virtue of losing and waiting

if we decline to draw from the entire history of socialism-in-power in favor of utopian socialism or pragmatic liberalism, the range of results we can obtain will be limited to those achieved by utopian socialism (evanescent communes) and pragmatic liberalism (hellworld)

pretending our new thing is sui generis and doesn't have anything to do with bad stalinism doesn't actually mean we'll face different problems or have better solutions. stalin faced problems that were generic to socialism. socialism isn't just a label, it's a class project.

you don't actually transcend that project just by calling yourself something else, just like you don't transcend capitalism by calling yourself a post-capitalist.

Why is Materialism Proletarian? - Jul 15, 2021 (src)

why is materialism proletarian? because the objective world exerts a greater unifying force on the thinking of the proletariat than it does on the thinking of any other class. the bourgeoisie, a minority, can more easily wrap itself in myths and delusions of grandeur

i think that, in an important sense, proletarian standpoint epistemology = materialism

so wherever marxism becomes massive it becomes more materialist, more marxist

the material world is what we share, ineluctably. the urgency with which it presses itself upon our thoughts is inversely proportional to our insulation against it, insulation in the form of money/power/privilege

liberalism is a marvelous technology for sparing the bourgeoisie the unpleasantness of having to synthesize or hash out their various conflicting worldviews, it's a license for boundless subjectivism

because each bourgeois can be counted on to step forward when it counts, that is, to defend their class interest in maintaining exploitation, keeping their insulation nice and thick, there is no need to reach any higher agreement on an objective basis

the proletariat, which needs cooperation to survive, which is brutally exposed to the exigencies of life on this planet, can't afford to leave conflicts unresolved, it needs objectivity

the proletariat as a class has more sense organs and greater sensitivity to the material world than any other class in history

Problems - Aug 2, 2021 (src)

capitalism creates problems that only socialism can solve. socialism is inevitable only in the sense that a logical conclusion is inescapable, not in the historic sense—it is of course possible that humans won't solve their problems

Pessimism and Nostalgia - Oct 23, 2021

it's bizarre to see tankies accused of both pessimism and nostalgia when like... we're the ones who think socialism is winning

eschatological optimism is no optimism at all

and if you've had the misfortune of speaking to an anti-stalinist leftist for more than two seconds you know they're giant fucking nerds about what could have been, that's their bread and butter

similarly w/r/t the idea that we're only in it for the affective payoff of taboo-breaking, as if there were no affects associated with the anti-stalinist left (getting off at being smarter and more decent than everyone in history, potentially leading the "true" revolution, etc.)

evidently some important taboos need breaking, also

in general the psychologizing argument that paints your enemy as unwell, moved by pathological motives, can basically be turned against anyone, and is therefore abstract, empty. what matters is the content of the hope, the content of the nostalgia, which taboos get broken

iPhones - Nov 8, 2021 (src)

re: the "you're a communist with an iphone" thing

communists are the ones who believe that the incredible wealth of our society, though the product of heinous exploitation, should be made to serve the great masses, that capitalism has made unprecedented things possible

the WHOLE POINT is to detourn, hijack, repurpose, salvage, adapt these things that are the product of class society in order to bring about a classless one. you don't DO that by keeping your hands off all the dirty products of class society (i.e. basically everything)

furthermore:

the most ethical consumption would be to buy clothes handmade by versace himself

the contradiction between being a communist and having an iphone is the contradiction between use-value and value at the heart of the commodity itself

the law of value or abstract labor is a kind of monstrous drive to accumulate coupled with a monstrous indifference to concrete particulars. use-value, by contrast, is all about concrete particulars - if you want people to flourish, you want them to enjoy use-values.

the underlying problem is that we produce stuff in this anarchic, clumsy, uncoordinated way, that our labor is socialized only after the fact, and so the law of value runs roughshod over everybody's flourishing

making a socialist society means reasserting the sovereignty of conscious deliberation (the kind of thing iphones are very good at enabling btw) over and against the unconscious rule of blind economic forces

Replacements - Nov 27, 2021 (src)

whatever replaces capitalism has to be better than capitalism at doing stuff, not just better in an abstract/moral sense

protracted economic war

Race - Dec 30, 2021 (src)

it's a race between socialism and human extinction

Anarchism or Socialism? - Jan 24, 2022 (src)

there's definitely an asymmetry between MLs and anticommunist leftists: MLs can explain anticommunism as stemming from propaganda, ignorance, and social pressures, whereas anticommunists can only explain marxism-leninism by saying that a lot of people just choose evil

this has to do with the fact that we have more experience being them than they do being us

Moving to the left - Feb 9, 2022 (src)

you move to the left as you gain an awareness of crimes that are much worse than theft and murder: big, abstract crimes of using many people wrongly, squeezing them dry, denying them access to the means by which they might flourish, frittering away their lives on stupid nonsense

all the baby-brained rightists can do is dial up the made up death toll of communism because they haven't progressed beyond like stage 4 of moral development

i wasn't sure about this tweet because like, if you think about it, both the preconventional stages 1-2 and the conventional stages 3-4 are really just punishment avoidance, minor variations on what is essentially stage 1 thinking

Markets - Apr 13, 2022 (src)

the claim "markets are incompatible with socialism/communism" conflates two questions:

1. are markets a feature of communism? (no)

2. must markets disappear immediately in order for something to be recognizable as socialism? (no)

once again, by erasing any distinction between lower and higher, socialism and communism, ultras can revoke the socialism card of any society that has ever existed and render the term completely speculative, imaginary, philosophical, ideal

eschatological

Consistency vs Completeness - Oct 22, 2022 (src)

locality/consistency/non-contradiction

realism/completeness/holism

you gain the latter only by sacrificing the former, with which it's mutually exclusive

realism ≈ holism because realism says there's only one objective world (that's what objectivity means, the oneness of it, there not being as many worlds as there are perspectives) and that means realism hinges on counting the whole world as one, i.e. holism

locality ≈ non-contradiction because it has to do with a subjective narrowing of one's focus (only in the sense x, only meaning y) with the goal of attaining consistency, self-identity, for one's objects. the worst slur a dialectician knows is "partial, one-sided"

sorry to break it to you but the interdependence of all things got in there before your little controlled experimental setup and it ALWAYS WILL

Imagining - Oct 31, 2022 (src)

the correct form is the imperative: stop imagining the end of the world, start imagining the end of capitalism

Understanding - Nov 1, 2022 (src)

understanding stuff in a more proletarian way = understanding it better

this is because our existing understanding is so deeply biased by accumulated historical privileging of aristocratic and bourgeois perspectives

Nov 3, 2022 (src)

re: idealism vs. materialism, philosophy, the ivory tower, anti-intellectualism, kant vs. dogmatism, credentialism, communization of the epistemic, etc.

the basic question: "who has the right to truth?"

one answer with obvious appeal: "everyone!" but that can't be right, because people disagree. unless somehow our notion of truth could encompass those disagreements? but then it would no longer point in any particular direction, it wouldn't resemble objective truth at all.

there's going to have to be some kind of hierarchy, some axis by which we measure who's closer and who's farther away from the truth. perhaps multiple axes? that sounds nicely pluralist, but again it waters down our conception of truth to the point where it can't do what we want.

so you're gonna have to bite the bullet and admit that truth is unevenly distributed. the obvious next question is: who's got it?

oops, there's been some drift from the first tweet. "who has the right to [declare or discover] truth" has turned into "who's got truth?" before i was talking about inequalities in its production (permits), now i'm talking about inequalities in its possession (poverty/wealth)

so we could side with those who aren't allowed to declare or discover truth, or we could side with those who are richer in truth

the obvious dialectical temptation is to come up with some sort of reasoning to show that these are in fact the same people

oh wait i've already done that:

understanding stuff in a more proletarian way = understanding it better

this is because our existing understanding is so deeply biased by accumulated historical privileging of aristocratic and bourgeois perspectives

Nov 7, 2022 (src)

the tactic of pointing out inconsistencies in other people's politics jumped the shark like six seasons ago. it's time to start earnestly seeking/furthering the good, folks

stop hiding behind hypocrisy gotchas and just tell us what you think ought to be done

"but nia," you might say, "where does that leave immanent critique, the almighty dialectic, the universal irony of the world, all that jazz?"

i think calling out hypocrisy is justifiable iff you're able to identify the consistency (unity) underlying the inconsistency (contradiction), because that usually makes your own position w/r/t the unity in question clear and unequivocal

Nov 16, 2022 (src)

imagine what is

imagine you show up and there's a war going on. you're not sure which side to join or whether you can just stay out of it altogether (you can't)

there are no uniforms and with just a few exceptions it's hard to tell which side anyone is on

you have to fight for something, but which somethings are genuinely on offer isn't clear

you cannot not be moved some way or another

from what will you take orders?

who or what will you defend?

Nov 17, 2022 (src)

so to recap:

• stalin good
• china good
• idpol good
• irony bad
• grimdark bad
• media matters
• hegel good
• nonviolence bad
• anti-americanism good
• real rational
• authority good
• "left unity" bad
• marxism science
• reality marxist
• socialism winning
• mediation key
• transition messy

computer, play vitamin C's "graduation"

index tags: Twitter, Backup

category tags: Modern Communists, Media Lists, Tweets