AubsTalk

JFC, It's November

tags: personal

Holy hell, it's already November 2026.

I'm giving Eleventy a try. It was simple enough to transition my former Jekyll blog over to Eleventy, even though I did have to write the theme from scratch and implement the templating. I am hoping to eventually shift Left Is Best over to this sort of system, so that I can more easily statically generate a large number of pages without having to manually futz with every single little detail of the HTML every time. It's already enough of a pain as it is.

Concerning Left Is Best, I've put up a couple more texts, and I'm currently working on formatting the entirety of Luna Oi's translation of the first installment of the Vietnamese textbook on Marxism-Leninism. It is tedious but I enjoy document formatting.

I've been spending a lot more time doing theory reading, especially with the new friends I've developed over in the October Institute community. I've come to the conclusion that I have to leave the DSA, and I have to leave my party. I've really got to join a party where I can actually devote my time and effort toward something productive, rather than the opportunist nothingness I'm currently in.

I did make a new friend at work who is also a union steward and is properly organized, and I'm hoping to make some connections there.

A shift in the tide

My thoughts on the revolutionary potential of the US has shifted greatly over the past year. Of all the motions toward consciousness have become clear, so has the reactionary impulse implicit to the system of settler-colonial white supremacy and all of its tentacles of hegemonic psychological domination. Human consciousness is not determined primarily by ideas, as those ideas do not arrive uninfluenced; the material structures that influence consciousness also reify and empower those ideas.

I need to connect with my neighbors. I need to improve my ability to communicate, on a human level. Despite my deliberate strides, I am still very limited in my ability to make these connections. Part of that is my own shortcomings, and part of it is the seemingly impervious scope of the problem. I need to get organized, and I need to grapple with people who similarly understand the nature of the beast, and want to effect a better world without compromising to the brutality of imperialism.

How to do this, in practice, in day-to-day life, still eludes me. It cannot be done alone, of that I am certain. I will keep striving. I will keep fighting. I will keep learning. Hopefully I'll keep posting too... I have a lot of thoughts I'd quite like to get down in writing, and have simply kept to myself in the bits and bytes of excerpts and forgotten diary entries.

I know no one will read this, and I also know that making public my political wrestlings carries with it some risk. I hope to find a decent path, and comrades with whom to walk it.