Welcome, O life! I go to encounter for the millionth time the reality of experience and to forge in the smithy of my soul the uncreated conscience of my race.
-Stephen Dedalus in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by James Joyce
I recently opened a new YouTube channel where I will post videos about my literary journey. It will make a nice change from writing about the misdeeds of Trotskyist cults. My first video is a recitation of one of my favourite poems, ‘No Coward Soul Is Mine’, by Emily Bronte.
In other news, I have just finished reading Ulysses by James Joyce for the first time. What an adventure. It is now one of my favourite novels of all time. I noticed that the IMT has included an article about the 100th anniversary of the novel in their latest magazine. In that article they attempt to claim Joyce for Trotskyism, which is hilarious when you consider the fact that Joyce hated Irish nationalism (which the IMT now gives ‘critical support’ to), was opposed to any kind of violence or totalitarianism (unlike Trots) and would in all likelihood have been kicked out of any far-left party if he had joined one for being too much of a petty-bourgeois intellectual. A good thing that instead of wasting his time on politics, he spent his time on art and literature and gave us Ulysses instead. Leopold Bloom in Ulysses has harsh things to say about revolution and violence – his conception of socialism is, like Joyce’s own, a distinctly pacifistic and libertarian one, and at odds with nationalism or ‘vanguardism’ of any kind. Needless to say, most members of the organisation will not bother to read Ulysses – they are kept busy reading nonsense from Ted Grant and Alan Woods, and they are happy to leave the business of offering up a ‘correct interpretation’ (i.e. misinterpretation) of the novel up to their leaders.
Like Stephen Dedalus, who disentangled himself from the constraints of religion, revolutionary nationalism and peer pressure to fall in on one ‘side’ or another, I have freed myself from the claims of church, nationalism, far-left cults, wokeness and all other ridiculous creeds that prevent the individual from being able to attain his true destiny. Like Dedalus, like Joyce, I will emancipate myself through art and literature.
You should write on bob avakian’s leftcom’s. Probably the most transparent and vulgar of the left cults operating today.