M-L-M Mayhem!

Anti-Duhring remains one of the greatest works of classical Marxist theory despite all attempts to claim that, being written by Engels, it is somehow separate from or even opposed to Marxism-qua-Marxism. In 1979, for example, Jack Mendelson wrote a journal article that was paradigmatic of this claim that Engels' conception of Marx's project was a "metaphysical" distortion of a proper Marxism. Indeed, in On Engels' Metaphysical Dialectics, Mendelson describes and defends the commonplace argument that Engels, specifically in Anti-Duhring (though he cites Ludwig Feuerbach And The End of Classical German Philosophy as a secondary symptom), produced a warped ontology of the Marxist project that, by providing us with notions such as "dialectical materialism" and claims that Marxism was a "world outlook", wrongly mutated Marxism into an orthodoxy that was not properly Marxist. It is strange that these claims linger. This strangeness becomes most appa…

In 2016 I joined Twitter so as to promote, following the publisher's suggestions, Continuity and Rupture. Although I suppose that site is useful for self-promotion since it allows me to introduce my work to a broader audience (and I can't deny it put me in touch with the author who would collaborate on Methods Devour Themselves with me) most of the time I find myself annoyed, stressed, and enraged. Aside from the vast amount of reactionaries and liberals who like to parachute into strings to troll, there are the Marxists of all types (sometimes including my own type) who also tweet infuriating things, performing Marxism in the same way identity opportunists perform radical liberalism.

Even worse are the Marxist edge-lords who say the most infuriating things and make Marxism look dumb and/or elitist. Usually when I get involved in these debates I end up wasting my time across several days, exchanging tweets with these people (who double down just as much as reactionaries), so n…

In lieu of having written a substantial post in quite some time here is some shameless self-promotion: my newest and co-written book, Methods Devour Themselves, is now available. I wrote it with one of my favourite contemporary SFF authors, Benjanun Sriduangkaew, and it is a conversation between fiction and non-fiction, literature and essay. Specifically, the concept of this book is the following: I would respond to a story of Sriduangkaew's with an essay provoked by the story (not an analysis or review but a discrete essay inspired by elements of the story, using these elements as analogical details), Sriduangkaew would respond to the essay with another story provoked in the same manner, and we repeated the process twice.

I wrote a promotional essay about the book on Medium that explains the project and my feelings about it in detail, but since I'm of the mind that you can never have too much promotion (see for example how many promotional posts I've written about all of …

When I heard about Amin's death I was on holiday with sporadic online access. This is what I wanted to write seven days ago…

When I began my PhD I was still an autonomist Marxist who was under the impression that my doctoral work would have something to do with Deleuze and Guattari, whose work had formed a central part of MA dissertation. But I also felt that something was missing, mainly a thorough understanding of Marxist political economy. Hardt and Negri's Empire had just been released and, despite my autonomist Marxist sympathies, I felt that there was something fundamentally wrong with the Empire thesis. I could not explain this wrongness in the language of philosophy, not without a proper understanding of political economy, so I knew that I needed to develop my understanding of Marxist economics. Naturally I dove into Capital but, because I felt I needed a contemporary political economist to help with this exploration, I picked up some books by Samir Amin.



My choice of …

Thinking back on this blog from my current perspective and concrete circumstances is difficult. Nearly a decade has transpired since, out of boredom and in the midst of graduate student frustration, I created MLM Mayhem. The name was an afterthought and the the URL ill-considered, the product of someone who wasn't interested in social media savvy and who believed that nobody would read whatever ill-considered thoughts he sent out into the void. (Also the choice of Blogger rather than Wordpress was a poorly reasoned decisioned. To be fair, however, in 2009 Blogger [or, rather, Blogspot] was the dominant blogging platform.) It was months after my union local's bitter strike of 2008/2009, right when I was engaged in finishing my dissertation, and was conceived of as little more than a space to post random thoughts and frustrations. Hell, my first post was entitled I Hate Nietzsche and was far from rigorous.

Successive posts were either asinine comics made from GPCR clip art or my…

In reading Sayak Valencia's Gore Capitalism I was again struck by the way in which the Marxist theoretical tradition is deleted according to opportunistic identity politics. Theoretically, this deletion is quite strange, though practically not so much: we should not forget that the editors of the Semiotext(e) "interventions" series (of which Gore Capitalism is a recent publication) have no problem breaking political boycotts and justifying their actions by appealing to liberal ideology. Valencia and her book had nothing to do with the behaviour of the Semiotext(e) editors, however, though her inclusion in the series is symptomatic of what perspectives are allowed to circulate as "radical".

Gore Capitalism follows intentionally Marxist interventions that have drawn upon genre violence to explain the state of affairs, such as Mark Steven's Splatter Capital. And yet Valencia's analysis rejects Marxist analyses because Valencia does "not need First Worl…