Comradely salutations, everyone! It has been a while since my latest blog post, which received quite the positive traction on Twitter. Regarding the Sison article, I am still planning to write a follow-up article but my external hard drive that contains the unedited 3 to 4 hour footage of my interview with Comrade Joma remains lost. It should be lying around somewhere, but alas, I have not found it thus far. In this status update post, I would like to address a couple things regarding the overall developments surrounding this blog Red Spectre Writings.

The Missing Sison Remark

Unfortunately, roughly a month ago, I realised that I completely forgot to recall one insightful remark Joma made during my interview with him back in January 2020. That remark should have been part of the article, but I am not sure to what extent it is considered appropriate to re-edit an already published article, especially one that is several weeks old by now.

However, it is for that reason that I have decided to either produce a small article in which I give the missing Sison remark its appropriate spotlight or to simply save that remark for the follow-up article though it might take quite a while before I finally rediscover my lost external hard drive. It would just not feel right to simply elaborate on something I forgot mentioning regarding an old conversation between Sison and I in a status update post. That being said, I can already mention that it was one of his concluding remarks he made as we were bringing the interview to a close. It is a remark that, while obvious, says something about how one should look at their dedication to the communist cause. Again, this topic deserves an article separate from the status update, so I will not elaborate any further.

What happened to the website?

In case you have visited Red Spectre Writings before March 2023, you will notice that the layout of the website has significantly changed. You will also notice that the blog’s URL is now ‘redspectrewritings.wordpress.com’ instead of ‘redspectrewritings.com’. Both of these changes are the result of financial difficulties, which leave the blog in a somewhat precarious predicament. Hopefully, the site will return to its previous appearance once I can afford paying the required subscription, though I did manage to safely secure and extend the domain name for another year. Is it not strange that you can only extend the duration of a domain name up to a year? I was hoping to find an option to secure the domain for the next couple years, but I digress.

What have you been up to?

Honestly, I have just been preoccupied with all sorts of matters outside of Red Spectre Writings. I will occasionally reach out to comrades and like-minded people through social media—mainly on my Twitter account @red_writings—but even then I try not to go overboard with my online activities. It is obviously easier for me to engage with other people in a series of tweets as opposed to writing lengthy articles on Red Spectre Writings, but Twitter is not the best place for nuanced discourse and elaborate analyses and critiques. Facebook and Reddit are not ideal places for discussions either, of course, but political exchanges via Twitter can get easily lost in the nigh-endless stream of content. There is still a great deal of merit of having a blog such as Red Spectre Writings which provides a proper place for lengthy articles and potential discussions associated with those very articles.

Unfortunately, all sorts of real life issues kept me from giving adequate attention and energy into this blog, but I still intend to revitalise Red Spectre Writings. Despite not working on the website for over a year, there have been numerous attempts of me writing articles and essays, but even at times when real life itself did not pose the primary obstacle it would just be perfectionism or other insecurities keeping me from finishing and publishing something. For instance, I have yet to publish my political review of the video game Tonight We Riot. Will it eventually be published? That is the intention, of course, but real life matters such as political activities and making sure I keep a roof over my head take priority over updating the blog on a consistent basis. Nevertheless, I realise I need to strike a balance between my real life activities and my aspirations for Red Spectre Writings.

Once again, what are your aspirations?

Initially, Red Spectre Writings was intended to be a political blog focused on Marxism-Leninism-Maoism. Fundamentally speaking, that has not changed but I must admit that I want to use the blog as a platform for articles, essays but also stories that are not directly concerned with revolutionary Marxist theory or the history of Marxism. If I do become more proactive when it comes to maintaining and updating this blog, you can expect the occasional reviews of popular works and ramblings on a wide array of topics that go beyond Marxism itself. One of the reasons I want to expand the type of content permissible on Red Spectre Writings is because I have occasionally found myself fretting over whether a certain article or short story ‘was Marxist enough’, whether it ‘sufficiently applied dialectical materialism’, or whether it was ‘politically relevant enough’—and these hesitations only exacerbated my perfectionism and bouts of procrastination.

Ultimately, Red Spectre Writings is a blog about exploration and investigation with a self-admitted bias towards Marxism-Leninism-Maoism—whether that takes the form of elaborate essays, personal commentaries, literature reviews, or short stories. To me, the blog is a tool to improve my skills as a writer, but I also firmly believe it can be a platform that not only advocates for revolutionary Marxism but that also elaborates on or addresses various matters that deserve their fair share of nuance and critique. Of course, I am still open towards using the blog as a platform to co-operate with fellow Marxist-Leninist-Maoists. Perhaps we can all share insights with one another and in turn generate articles that address important concerns of the International Communist Movement. If you are interested, feel free to reach out to me.

What is in the works?

Besides the political review of Tonight We Riot and the follow-up article to my interview with Comrade Joma, there are quite a bunch of articles I have in store for the blog. Some articles are almost 50% done, and others remain in the conceptual phase. For those who are interested, here is a brief overview of the articles I have tried to publish over the last two years:

• Small biographies on British Marxists, mainly Christopher Caudwell, George Derwent Thomson, and William “Bill” Ash;
• Reader’s Notes on Georges Politzer’s Elementary Principles of Philosophy;
• Reader’s Notes on George Thomson’s From Marx to Mao Tse-tung: A study in revolutionary dialectics;
• Analysis and Critique of Struggle Sessions’ Theory and History of the US Maoist Movement;
• Historical Overview of the Maoist Movement in the Netherlands;
• An Historical and Epistemological Comparison between the Marxist Women’s Movement and Feminism;
• On Capitalist Mythology;
• On Voting, Electoralism, and Reformism;
• Preliminary Meditations on the Bystander Effect;
• Critique on the Redistribution of Wealth as the main objective of Marxism;
• Critique on the Perverted Understanding of Power Dynamics;
• The Problem of Moralising Practices Under Capitalism.

Admittedly, I was playing around with more topics and ideas in my head than that I could adequately write about in my spare time, but feel free to tell me if any of these topics sound interesting—or for that matter, if there are other topics you would like me to write an article about. While I am unable to provide any concrete estimates as to when I will publish the next article, I hope that this status update post reaffirms my intention to use Red Spectre Writings as a mainly Marxist-Leninist-Maoist platform for investigation, analysis, critique, and expression.

Until victory, always!