What is Bluebird?

[Note added December 12, 2025: There is a third section to this article called “Bluebird after Bluebird,” but we cannot write it ourselves. This section has to be written in history before it can be committed to text. — Bluebird I]

“[T]he beginner who has learned a new language always translates it back into his mother tongue, but he assimilates the spirit of the new language and expresses himself freely in it only when he moves in it without recalling the old and when he forgets his native tongue.” — Karl Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte

Since we’ve begun publishing our work in 2024, we’ve gotten a great deal of feedback from people. Over time, we’ve built a small audience and have received no shortage of questions about our writing. After having played with the idea for some time, we have decided that it would be useful to create a document where we give a structured explanation of our writing.

If there’s an aspect of our writing that people ask about most frequently, it would probably be our usage of plural pronouns when referring to ourselves.

To us, our self-referential usage of the first person plural pronoun is inseparable from our Marxist practice. Since many original Marxist texts were written by both Marx and Engels, their usage of the first person plural “we/our” does not require explanation, as it was contextually correct for them to do so. However, since the two of them synthesized the most revolutionary philosophy in history, there has also been a long tradition of individual Marxists referring to themselves as “we/our” even in works for which they were the sole author. Sometimes this is because they are speaking for a larger group, like a political organization, sometimes not. We can’t ask them why they did so since they are no longer alive and, as far as we are aware, did not leave an explanation as to why they made these stylistic decisions, we can only guess as to what their reasoning may have been, and look to examples in Marx’s writing, such as the following example:

“The wealth of those societies in which the capitalist mode of production prevails, presents itself as “an immense accumulation of commodities,” its unit being a single commodity. Our investigation must therefore begin with the analysis of a commodity.” (Marx, Capital Vol. 1, Chapter. 1, 1867)

We don’t know why Marx wrote this way in many of his major works—and it should also be noted that Marx also makes frequent use of the first person singular in Capital—all we can do is offer our own reasons for imitating him.

Firstly, Marxism predates us, and everyone reading this document, by a very long time. There are not any established rules governing the stylistic conventions of Marxist texts, and not all Marxist writers follow the same stylistic conventions, however, these conventions, for us, serve as a sort of shibboleth. Usage of self-referential first person plural pronouns is by no means the only one, but by following established conventions of Marxist writing, we acquire an ability to hide in plain sight among non-Marxists. We can write entire works which do not reference Marxism, Marxist texts, or Marxist writers, yet our work will still be immediately recognizable to those who are familiar with such conventions because we are speaking the same language. This can be especially useful when trying to present Marxist analysis and ideas to certain kinds of people, who may be reasonable, but become scared of something if it becomes associated with something which they have been propagandized to view negatively.

There is also a deeper ideological reason for our refusal to refer to ourselves in the first person singular.

At the risk of sounding like the anti-communist parody of a communist, we do not recognize our own individuality. We were raised to believe that it is virtuous to put the needs of others before the wants of oneself. This was further reinforced by the movies we consumed growing up, namely the Sam Raimi/Toby Maguire Spider-Man movies. As an unintentional consequence of this unintentional conditioning, we simply never learned how to self-actualize. For as long as we can remember, we have always performed individualism in our daily life without ever truly feeling it. Individual personality, for us, has always felt like a mask that we put on in the morning before going outside. If one were to ask us to define ourselves, we simply wouldn’t know where to start. Our first impulse would probably be to ask them to elaborate further on their question. Not even our legal name is unique to us, as it is commonplace for all first-born sons to have the same name in Irish families. To refer to ourselves as “I” simply feels unnatural much of the time. It’s something that we only do consistently in our speech, but never in our thoughts.

This is also why we depict Bluebird as a masked figure and generally do not show our face when acting officially as Bluebird. Similar to how the creators of the Halo video game franchise never depict the face of Master Chief John-117, so as to allow the player to project themselves onto John, we depict Bluebird as faceless so that they hopefully never become too closely associated with any individual person. Bluebird is a person in the literal sense, but not in a specific sense. Bluebird is more of a symbol; an avatar; a character which one inhabits and portrays. But Bluebird is not something that someone inherently is or can be. The person portraying Bluebird has a face, but Bluebird has no face.

Then there is also our more philosophical reasoning for referring to ourselves as “we.” When asked how he was capable of his great scientific achievements, the physicist Sir Isaac Newton is rumored to have replied “if I can see farther than others, it is because I stand on the shoulders of giants.” The idea expressed in this reply has always stuck with us. Newton very much revolutionized physics and mathematics, yet he supposedly refused to take all the credit for himself, opting instead to acknowledge how his achievements were only made possible by the advancements of many predecessors. This is quite relevant to how we understand Marxism. For us, to be a Marxist is to carry the torch of a vibrant and revolutionary tradition. To the extent that we make any advances within that tradition, which is not our goal, those advances belong just as much to the Marxists who have influenced us. As a communist, we simply aren’t very interested in the idea of ownership in any capacity anyway. What matters to us is not who expressed what idea, but the correctness of the idea. Hence why we also go to tremendous lengths to avoid personal bias in our writing. We do not try to “substantiate our conclusions,” but, rather, make sure that our conclusions are substantive, and we consult many sources in the pursuit of our conclusions. We give credit where we believe it is due, but we do not claim it for ourselves.

We also make use of the first person plural for rhetorical reasons. We try to structure many of our arguments like a sort of guided discussion. We try to speak with our readers as much as we are speaking to them. Part of the way we try to achieve this is by guiding the reader through the steps we took to reach our conclusions, or at least try to structure our writing so that each point builds successively on the previous one. If done correctly, we feel that this will make it so that when we state our conclusions, our readers will feel these conclusions as if they are their own. Nobody did this better than Lenin in our opinion. His conclusions always strike like lightning, with such force and clarity that they feel as natural as they are irrefutable. We can only hope to bring such magic to our own writing.

Our self-referential use of first person plural pronouns is but one aspect of Bluebird. There is still much to explain.

The origin of the pseudonym came about largely by coincidence. It was first bestowed upon us as a simple nickname by a former romantic partner. We know not whether the name had a deeper meaning to her, or if she simply thought it sounded nice, but she was the first to call us Bluebird. As that relationship was ending around mid-2022, we began working on what we intended at the time to be our first major work, a book we titled Red Storm on the Horizon. The manuscript ended up being around 50,000 words. Our goal in writing it was to establish a revolutionary program for the United States in the face of the impending demise of bourgeois democracy. Despite completing the manuscript and sending it to a couple publishers, we were never fully satisfied with it. We made small edits on several occasions and so around 5 different versions exist somewhere on the internet. Though not satisfied with the manuscript, we had still convinced ourselves of its importance, and so we leaked the manuscript after becoming impatient.

We are thankful that the manuscript was never published. We now consciously understand what we intuitively felt at the time: that the manuscript contained too many harmful Marxist-Leninist dogmas, and that, despite our best efforts, it could never be the revolutionary program we wanted it to be. Anyone who finds the manuscript will see that despite our best efforts, we were never the stereotypical Marxist-Leninist, and that there are moments where we manage to break out of the dogmas, even at a very early stage in our development. But we still were not a real Marxist yet.

It was during the writing of Red Storm on the Horizon that we really created Bluebird. We had been struggling to rewrite the introduction after completing the other chapters. The original opening line had been Mao’s “revolution is not a dinner party…” but something about that phrase felt very wrong and unrelated to the rest of the book. The breakthrough came when we realized that the book wasn’t about revolution at all, but about change. The opening line was then changed to “there are decades when nothing happens, and there are weeks when decades happen.” In the same moment we had this realization, we also realized that Bluebird had to be the name we took for this book and all subsequent works. Where we are from, birds are a symbol of changing seasons, so the pseudonym had a very direct connection to the book’s subject matter in our mind—the major irony, however, is that the great majority of Blue Jays are nonmigratory. Additionally, the idea of looking at things from a bird’s eye view resonated with us and reminded us of Engels’ criticism in Socialism: Utopian and Scientific of the metaphysical mode of thought. And finally, the name reminded us of the singing of birds heralding the sunrise every morning, signaling the start of a new day.

The stronger parts of the manuscript still serve as reference points for us on occasion. Our first published work Towards a Marxist Stance on Electoralism—published in May 2024—was largely written around the same time we were submitting Red Storm to publishers—early 2023—and was based heavily on the third chapter of Red Storm. So our first published article serves as a sort of transitional document in our chronology, containing remnants of those old erroneous ideas, but also having largely broken from them.

While we welcome the possibility of other people adopting the Bluebird pseudonym in the future, the current style of Bluebird, which we intend to maintain, is to some extent inseparable from us and our upbringing. We spent a very long time studying music, even becoming a Bachelor of Music, and we feel that it bleeds into our writing. Virtually all the music we enjoy and studied revolves around developing a theme or motif of some sort. There is probably no more famous example of this than Beethoven’s fifth symphony. Likewise, most of our published and unpublished work has a central theme of some kind; Red Storm on the Horizon: change; Towards a Marxist Stance on Electoralism: there can be no proletarian movement without a proletarian party; Farce is Dead! Long Live Farce!: the old status quo is dead; Birth of a Bonaparte?: the new status quo is being born. It’s really our musical influences that have shaped the prose of our writing as well; we weren’t much of a reader before discovering Marxism.

We feel that there is also a strong Romantic tendency in our writing. There are obviously many aspects of romanticism that are incompatible with Marxism. While the movement was a reaction to industrial capitalism and made critiques of industrial society, it almost always did so from a reactionary position. Nevertheless, we gravitate towards the expressiveness of romantic art, where ideas, emotions, and sentiments are exaggerated to the point of acquiring an almost sensuous/tactile quality. Our romanticism is not the bourgeois romanticism of the nineteenth century, but a self-aware, critical, and neo-modern romanticism which we display fully in the black comedy of Farce is Dead! Long Live Farce!

The next important aspect of Bluebird is our anger. We threw ourselves into Marxist literature to learn what we had barely been able to intuit up to that point. “Why reinvent the wheel when we can help make it more circular?” was, and remains our general ethos in our work and study. What we learned in the course of our study was not only the revolutionary insights of Marxism, but also the extent to which the labor movement has stagnated, if not retrogressed, since Marx’s time. It frustrates us to no end to read Marx’s critique of Lassalle, only to hear modern leftists, some of whom have the nerve to call themselves Marxists, triumphantly declare that “labor is the source of all wealth!” The same goes for the ideas of Herr Dühring, many of which have been enthusiastically adopted by Marxist-Leninists, albeit without their awareness. In short, the more we read, the more we learn, the more frustrated we become. And we can not always hide this frustration. The last section of Towards a Marxist Stance on Electoralism is essentially a tantrum brought about by our frustration that people are still having debates which we believe to have been settled over a century ago.

The final element of Bluebird is the imitation of Marx and Lenin’s writing style, often coupled with uncited quotations of famous lines from their works. This is part of the challenge of Bluebird. Imitation of Marx and Lenin’s style accomplishes two things for us: firstly, it makes our work more difficult to counterfeit. By writing in the style of Marx and Lenin, we largely ensure that anyone who wants to imitate us is obliged to be very familiar with the works of Marx and Lenin. And this, in turn, ensures that anyone writing as Bluebird is likely to be a formidable Marxist. And secondly, since those who may wish to slander us are unlikely to have the same familiarity with Marx’s work, they simply won’t be able to imitate us, and will instead have to either misquote us or misattribute quotes to us, which can be easily disproved as a result of our work’s availability. Our tendency to paraphrase Marx and Lenin in our work is also another expression of our romanticism, as a way of making our work a kind of love letter to Marxism; work which is in conversation with itself as much as with the past and present.

In summation, Bluebird is something bigger than us. Bluebird contains many authentic aspects of ourselves, but Bluebird is just as much a deliberate creation; a character which we assume when writing. In our opinion, the style of Bluebird is best characterized as Romantic Marxism. We are the first Bluebird, but we know that we won’t be the last if we do our job properly. Bluebird is not a person, but an idea.

It’s rather ironic that we write lengthy articles from a Marxist perspective nowadays. We weren’t much of a reader until midway through college. And there was a period of time in elementary school when the thought of writing sent a cold shiver down our spine. In our elementary school, students were allowed to write freely about whatever they wanted during english class. The idea sounds quite liberating and one was practically guaranteed a passing grade so long as they succeeded in writing something. That was precisely where we struggled. We knew we could write about whatever we wanted, but that could be anything. And where oh where to start?

We distinctly remember one such episode from when we were in the fifth grade. Our class got to write in the computer lab that day; a real treat. We opened the computer’s writing application at the beginning of class, and the page was still blank at the end of class. Then, at the end of class, when our teacher saw what we had accomplished, he asked us “why didn’t you write anything?” And on this particular day, he added “and don’t say you don’t know.”

We suddenly had no answer to his question, so we simply sat silently in our chair for what felt like an eternity, until our teacher said “incredible, you really don’t know,” and we went back to our regular classroom.

Apparently we were only sitting silently for about five minutes, we know because soon afterwards, we overheard our teacher telling another teacher about the whole episode. He was absolutely astonished. We didn’t understand it either though. All we could do was be truthful and say that we didn’t know why we didn’t write anything. We had no explanation and did not pretend otherwise. And every time we failed to write anything this teacher would tell us “this is a conscious choice you’re making.” All that did was confuse us more because we would’ve much preferred to have written something so as to avoid these embarrassing episodes at the end of every class. Despite the embarrassment we endured, we actually quite liked our fifth grade teacher and never held any grudges against him.

In an effort to improve our writing grades, our parents enrolled us in tutoring. It was quite successful in improving the quality of our writing, but unfortunately did not improve our creativity—to this day we avoid creative writing like it’s the plague.

Things took a turn for the better in the sixth grade. We had switched schools because our parents had separated and the one that had custody of us moved to a different town. At this new school, we were usually told what to write about, so there was little stress for us because we knew what we were assigned and what was expected of us. It allowed us to put our tutoring to good use. We made an immediate impression with our teachers by turning in rough drafts that were twice the length and twice the quality of everyone else’s final drafts. For the first time in our memory, we enjoyed writing and enjoyed feeling proficient at something. And it allowed us to occasionally humble the academic overachievers who got too full of themselves.

Things continued as such through middle school and high school for us. We were by no means an academic overachiever, we had little interest in such things, but our teachers always took note of our newfound talent as a writer. It was also while in high school that we began to become more aware of social issues, but this is not due to any virtue of our own, the social issues dominated the news cycle. It was during this approximate time that the rise of the Islamic State overseas deepened the US quagmire in West Asia and further contributed to Islamophobia within the US. The Black Lives Matter protests of 2014 happened while we were in high school, and dramatically changed the way we saw the US. Then, just as we were finishing high school and heading to college, the twin rises of Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump on opposite ends of the political spectrum happened.

We were skeptical of Sanders from the beginning due to the anticommunist education we received in the Maine public school system, but his message and policy platform was consistent with the solutions we were investigating for the social problems that were of interest to us. For this reason, we could hardly condemn Sanders, for we could see too many similarities between he and ourselves despite the fact that we simultaneously saw him as something quite different from us at that time. We were also unsure of what to make of Sanders’ enigmatic status as a socialist. On the one hand, he openly embraced the title of “democratic socialist,” something which the mainstream press has always ridiculed him for. On the other hand, we were aware from the start that there were many who claimed that Sanders “wasn’t a real socialist.” And this only contributed to our curiosity towards Sanders. How could he so confidently call himself a socialist as so many others rejected his self-characterization with equal confidence? Surely he either was a socialist, or was not a socialist?

Our response was the same response we have to any sort of confusion: investigation. We understood that socialism was much older than Sanders, so surely if we studied the history and philosophy of socialism, that would allow us to make a more informed assessment of Sanders. It took us until 2020 to actually begin reading left wing political theory though, as we were busy pursuing a music degree in college in the years between 2017 and 2021. During those intervening years, we had to rely on nothing but our own intuition to arrive at our left wing political positions.

Though we no longer consider our earliest insights to be terribly insightful, it was enough to break out of a few very strong bourgeois economic dogmas. For example, we realized that the economy would have to stop growing at some point because infinite growth simply isn’t possible on a finite planet. Tax cuts and deregulation may temporarily stimulate a capitalist economy, but it inevitably stagnates again, and you can only continue to deregulate and cut taxes for so long before you run out of regulations and taxes to cut, at which point it can no longer be used as a method to stimulate the economy.

Our interest in economics was somewhat ironic, as it was largely sparked when our high school philosophy teacher, who we remain fond of, said to the class “no group of experts gets to be incorrect as economists and still retain their credibility.” Like the confusion surrounding Bernie Sander, this seemed so strange to us. It seemed impossible that someone could spend years studying and acquiring advanced degrees from accredited universities in a given field and still know very little about that field, especially if that field is economics. The whole population exists inside the economy and therefore has to navigate it whether they like it or not, and this necessarily requires a minimum level of understanding of the economy on the part of each individual. And yet my old philosophy teacher’s observation seemed to hold true. Every time we saw an economist speak about the economy on television, everything they would say sounded almost hilariously out of touch with the economic reality we saw around us. And we knew that we lived in a position of great privilege. If what the economists said did not match our reality, we could only imagine how things must be for those less fortunate than us. So we simply ignored the economists and taught ourselves the basics of economics from our own observations.

It was when talking to one of our fellow music majors about some of our economic insights that they asked us, “have you been reading Marx?” We were confused yet again. We still believed the anticommunist mythology we had been taught in school, so we were curious as to how our observations could have any similarity to those of Karl Marx. But it was this and our skepticism of Bernie Sanders that inspired us to read the Communist Manifesto for the first time in 2020. Much to our amazement, we found within those pages far more developed versions of the same concepts we had arrived at from our own independent observation. But we were also not fully convinced by the Manifesto alone. Though we no longer uncritically accepted bourgeois historical narratives by this point, we spent time interacting with streams of left wing politics outside of Marxism. We spent some time calling ourselves an anarchist, but grew frustrated with anarchists and anarchist theory around the same time we discovered Lenin. This was a positive development at first, but was followed by regression when we embraced Marxism-Leninism.

We have never uncritically accepted any political tendency as our own though. We are always hungry to learn more and grow intellectually. We also continued to read more Marx and Engels for the entire duration of our evolution, and this helped us to eventually outgrow Marxism-Leninism and understand how it distorts key concepts of Marx and Engels. The most recent landmark in our evolution came when we read Bordiga’s Dialogue with Stalin, but we do not consider ourselves to be a Bordigist or a left communist. What we strive for above all else is to replicate the analytical framework of Marx and Engels, and we believe that this can only truly be done by reading Marx and Engels, though we concede that Lenin, Luxemburg, Bordiga, Trotsky, Sohn-Rethel and many of those associated with the magazine Historical Materialism come incredibly close at times.

Bluebird I

October, 2025