Hi! Welcome to Marxist Soapbox. I’m Ben, also known as @ComradeQuail on twitter. I started this blog because I am in need of an outlet other than social media, and I’d like to practice writing a bit. I’m a self described Marxist and communist, and while I like to think I have a decent understanding of the works of Marx, I’m continuously learning. I’m also a programmer who works for a small company, and currently I mostly write python code to process COVID genetic data.
I think it’s pretty easy to spend a lot of your time writing up little tweets which necessarily can only have a small amount of content. You can convince yourself you’re participating in some conversation in a meaningful way, when in reality you’re just giving twitter something to fill up others endlessly scrolling timeline. It’s very difficult to actually express yourself or have a meaningful conversation on such platforms, so I hope to acheive it here instead. At the very least if I’m going to yell into the digital void, I’d rather do it via a medium that allows me to yell for more than 280 characters. I plan to mostly use this blog to talk about Marxism and Communism, and reflect on the various things I’ve read, conversations I’ve had, and takes I’ve seen. You can expect a mixture of relatively serious articles hopefully focusing on specific concepts or readings, and some less serious reflection on current events or general internet discourse.
Since the main goal of this blog is mostly for me to have a place to satisfy my need to hear myself speak, there will probably also be some off topic posts about various interests I have. I might talk about mushroom hunting, programming, or another of the various hobbies I pick up and put down at random. I’m not sure what writing style to use going forward. While I’d like to not depend on the informal first person style that’s common online, I’ll probably default to it sometimes like I have in this first post. Surprisingly this is my first time using Markdown, so hopefully the formatting here becomes prettier over time.