Happy International Workers’ Day, everyone! I hope everyone had a splendid and invigorating day filled with revolutionary fervour and internationalist zeal. Unfortunately, I was unable to enjoy the most of May Day due to fatigue-induced procrastination. That also seems to be a recurring trend with regards to my blogging activity, or lack thereof. While the oppressive presence of lethargy and procrastination were key factors as to why I could not write and publish the various works I aspired to do, there were also other factors such as managing various aspects of my personal and on-ground political life. Looking back on it, it also did not help that my personal circumstances were rather precarious and that my political self-education lacked a much needed degree of diligence and consistency.
However, I can only hope that this will change in the near future. Last month, I published a short story titled The Next Justice, which arguably deviated from the type of work I was initially set out to write. While the Red Spectre Writings as a blog was always going to have a place for media and culture, I was not sure to what extent said media and culture should have fidelity to communist ideology or meet the requirements of ‘serious communist cultural analysis and production’. At this point, after much contemplation and soul-searching, I have come to the conclusion that I do not wish to restrict Red Spectre Writings to any given idea or format. While neither my deep interest in the International Communist Movement, in its numerous years of both theory and practice, nor my personal creativity and curiosities can be fully separated from one another, I felt that I was pressuring myself in creating a prim and proper communist blog at the detriment of not allowing my writing to bring me where I would feel at my most passionate, at my most driven. Especially given certain political and personal developments I underwent the past few years, I have become convinced that I am not cut out to be a proper, orthodox Marxist-Leninist—or Maoist for that matter. While this does not mean I have resigned myself to willful ecclecticism, I do believe I straight-jacketed myself into this mindset of appealing to a certain audience that does not resonate with my own sensibilities, my own thoughts and feelings.
Even so, Red Spectre Writings will not lose its character as communist blog. It will, however, make room for topics and types of writings that cannot be necessarily contained or reduced to one specific category. This blog will be a representation of my own, for lack of better words, ‘internal multiplicity’ that can neither be reduced as a reductive one-ness or single identity nor as a dualism of multiple, separate identities. My aims with this blog go beyond simply elucidating and contemplating Marxism and, likewise, my aims with this blog go beyond writing short stories of a magical communist exploring the macrocosm. It is in this void of freedom that I push for my own voice in the hope that I start ‘doing’ things as opposed to worrying about whether I am doing the ‘doing’ correctly or incorrectly.
Unfortunately, I cannot provide a timeline for when my next work or essay gets published, but I can only hope that recent personal developments, along with me writing and publishing the debut of Crimson Justice as a literary character, are pushing me into writing both fictional and non-fictional works on a consistent basis. At the very least, I can say that I hope to give this website a proper theme as soon as possible. It just look very unappealing to me, but due to neglecting this blog for a long time I lost access to my original website layout. Besides making the website visually appealing, I also hope to rewrite the “Welcome to Red Spectre Writings” post because neither does it fully reflect the overall aspirations of the blog nor does it reflect my current politico-ideological perspective. While I have not renounced the revolutionary contributions of the Chinese Communist movement, I do no longer subscribe to Maoism or Marxism-Leninism-Maoism. At this time of writing, I would more or less consider myself a Marxist-Leninist that is sympathetic to the ideological critique and discourse generated by the Movement for Reconstitution (MxR). I hope to elaborate on their positions and works in the near future, but for now I will simply share with you a link to the Committee for Reconstitution’s (CxR) most recent statement, which was published on this very same day, 1 May, 2025.
Long live proletarian internationalism, everyone!
Red Spectre Writings 