Two Million Page Views

Boffy's Blog has now had more than 2 million page views.  In fact, in recent weeks and months, the volume of traffic has been increasing.  It shows that there is a need for an honest, independent, Marxist analysis of what is going on in the world, and readers have been searching it out on the pages of this blog, as bourgeois media pounds them with propaganda on every issue under the sun from the cost of living crisis to the war in Ukraine, and nearly all of the so called left-wing media has been found wanting, as an alternative.

Many other bloggers, whilst appearing as individuals, are nothing of the kind, and I don't mean the trolls and bots utilised by various state actors.  Some are former leaders of left-wing organisations, like The Militant, as well as being former investment bankers and consultants, with all of the resources and support that goes with that.  Others, are professional academics with all the resources that go with it.  Many more are members of various left-wing sects, and have the support that goes with that, including being able to simply copy and paste not just the sect's line, but entire articles.  Others are hangers on of one or other of these sects, and the various fronts they establish.

Despite having none of that, Boffy's Blog has arrived at 2 million page views and rising.  I could have, no doubt, have had more if I had a presence on social media such as Twitter, Facebook and so on, as I have been advised to do.  Perhaps if I had a smartphone, I might have been more inclined to do that, but I have better things to do than continually swiping left and right, up and down, and trying to respond to every bit of minutiae going on in the world, which, of itself, makes rational consideration of what is going on impossible, and leads to moralism not Marxism, the approach of a social worker not a socialist.

As Trotsky put it,

"That policy which attempts to place upon the proletariat the unsolvable task of warding off all dangers engendered by the bourgeoisie and its policy of war is vain, false, mortally dangerous. “But fascism might be victorious!” “But the USSR is menaced!” “But Hitler’s invasion would signify the slaughter of workers!” And so on, without end. Of course, the dangers are many, very many. It is impossible not only to ward them all off, but even to foresee all of them. Should the proletariat attempt at the expense of the clarity and irreconcilability of its fundamental policy to chase after each episodic danger separately, it will unfailingly prove itself a bankrupt. In time of war, the frontiers will be altered, military victories and defeats will alternate with each other, political regimes will shift. The workers will be able to profit to the full from this monstrous chaos only if they occupy themselves not with acting as supervisors of the historical process but by engaging in the class struggle. Only the growth of their international offensive will put an end not alone to episodic “dangers” but also to their main source: the class society."

But, also, many years before he was as old a I am now, Marx had taken to spending a lot of his time with his grandchildren, and walking on Hampstead Heath.  Some sense of balance in life is required.

But, I was talking to Sraid Marx, by e-mail, recently, about this, and it clearly is a disadvantage to all of us that operate as independent, authentic Marxists.  It is, of course, one reason for needing the creation of a genuine, revolutionary workers' party.  But, again, Marx and Engels spent a lot of their life, basically, as individuals.  Engels advised Eleanor Marx and Edward Aveling to ignore the sects of their time, such as the ILP and SDF, and instead to direct their work to the working-class itself, organised at that time, in the Liberal Clubs.  Similarly, the Russian Marxists spent a long time in Marxist discussion circles before they had the resources to begin building a revolutionary Marxist party.

The condition of "The Left" today is dire, as the collapse into social-imperialism, on one side or the other, of the majority of it, demonstrates.  Authentic Marxism has been buried not just under more than a century of Lassallean/Fabian reformism and statism, but also under a century of Stalinist distortion, followed by half a century of petty-bourgeois distortion, of the so called "Trotskyist Left", thoroughly imbued with studentism, and an attendant cliquism.

As I discussed with Sraid Marx, individuals cannot cut out all of the dead wood, and begin to cultivate a healthy new movement.  But, its necessary to begin to bring together the individuals, on a loose networked basis, across the globe, to begin that process, a capacity which the Internet now provides, and which our predecessors did not enjoy.