i was once an avowed communist revolutionary

4 Further, socialism-also in its actually-existing state form-had an enormous impact on the hegemonic West. These countries were globally connected during the time of state socialism’s heyday and-as numerous recent studies have shown-they cross- and counter-exported socialist material culture and political aesthetics back and forth between continents, in a way which was economically and politically distinct to the manner in which the West interacted with the world. State socialism always actually existed globally. The second point of departure is that the socialist world is not seen as being confined to the actually-existing countries of the Soviet Union and other parts of the Eastern Bloc. There is a lot in the world, in other words, which is not post-socialist but still-socialist. There are a lot of socialist remainders (or still-socialists, 2 or socialist zombies 3) alive-after-death in the so-called post-socialist world, whether in the form of buildings, infrastructure, institutional formations, everyday aesthetics, or forms of speech. 1 The first is that it does not see the socialist project as something which is obsolete, failed, or finished. There are three main points of departure for the concept of trans-socialism. Under the conditions of Russia’s brutal war against Ukraine-which is waged in part under the banner of transphobic sexual counterrevolution-it becomes clear that a crucial trait distinguishing a (trans-)socialist anthropology from a Putinist-fascist as well as a liberal-capitalist one is its commitment to the plasticity of so-called “human nature.” Trans-socialism is rooted in the historical experience of state socialism, as well as in the long process of state socialism’s unravelling-but also in the multiple ways in which the reality produced by socialism continues to haunt the wild capitalist present.Īt the same time, trans-socialism remains vigilant, aware of the extent to which the actually-existing reality of state socialism was (and is still) tied in with coloniality, racism, coercive heteronormativity, misogyny, labor exploitation, ethnic chauvinism (specifically, but not exclusively, Russian ethnic chauvinism), resource extractivism, and nature-hatred. This short text proposes the idea of “trans-socialism” as an intersectional form of leftist political and aesthetic practice. Zofia Kulik, All Things Converge in Time and Space To Disperse, To Converge, To Disperse, and So On, 1992.

I was once an avowed communist revolutionary