It’s very funny how much of Lovecraft’s work can be seen as, effectively, an aristocrat’s existential horror at the idea that, as Rosa Luxemburg said, “Bourgeois society stands at the crossroads, either transition to Socialism or regression into Barbarism.”
In 1921, Lovecraft wrote ‘The Outsider’, one of the more clear expressions, in his works, of a fear of lacking a place in society. A man wakes up in a decaying, decrepit castle - once great, now in ruins - and descends, down to the townsfolk, who have renovated an old mansion, turning it into apartments. Upon seeing him, they panic, finding him terrifying and disgusting. Looking in the mirror, he sees that he is, in fact, a beast; even going so far to describe himself as “a stranger in this century.” In 1921, as the aristocracy gave its final breath, it’s not hard to see why.
However, ‘The Call of Cthulhu’ stands as the most direct example of the ‘existential horror’ of capitalism. Luxemburg’s quote, that bourgeois society - capitalism - stands at the transition to socialism was not just an expression of a specific historical period. Capitalism innately, inherently works towards its own destruction. Capitalism develops and expands the proletariat, the class that aspires to destroy it. As capitalism develops science and technology, as it develops the means of production, it makes itself obsolete. Capitalist relations of production become limiting factors for new forms of industry - just as a nation that remained feudalist would be left behind and destroyed in the age of steam and industry, a nation that remains capitalist is dooming itself to the march of history. It is precisely the development of capitalism that makes possible, if not historically inevitable, the building of socialism. Compare this with the passage from ‘The Call of Cthulhu’:
The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the deadly light into the peace and safety of a new dark age.
Of course, socialism would seem like madness, in the eyes of the aristocrat. Comprehending, but briefly, the idea of communism, of a society without class, without class conflict and class oppression, might drive one to conclude that “mankind would have become as the Great Old Ones; free and wild and beyond good and evil, with laws and morals thrown aside.“
Historical materialism, the scientific understanding of human society, cares very little for the ideas or desires of individuals, as far as shaping the course of society goes. It is quite resolute: the only options are class society, and the inevitable march towards communism, or no society. This would have been a very pressing fact in the 1920s, with the establishment of socialism in Russia, and socialist movements across the world spreading like prairie fire. ‘The Call of Cthulhu’ describes Cthulhu’s dream infecting the human psyche - “average people in society and business“ in the west are unaffected, though scientists and artists stir with it. Across the global south, however, there is great unrest, especially among indigenous peoples - even Ireland gets rowdy - and in South America, “a fanatic deduces a dire future from visions he has seen.“
The idea that class society is a specific historical phenomenon, one which is unerringly moving towards its own abolition, must be a frightening one for a member of the upper classes. I’ll leave it to Lovecraft to express this existential horror: “Old Castro remembered bits of hideous legend that paled the speculations of theosophists, and made man and the world seem recent and transient indeed.“
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