M-L-M Mayhem!

As some of my faithful readers might have noticed the comments on MLM Mayhem have been closed until further notice. Indeed I was planning to close down the comments earlier but allowed them to go on for a little bit right when a regular commenter started arguing about my last post just so I could admit their first two rounds of comments, respond to them, and then do what I intended to do before they appeared. (Truthfully, right before I went on holidays when I had no access to email because I wasn't interested in returning to a box full of comments after a week break.)

Some background… For the past year and a half the vast majority of comments have been more of a time suck than anything else. Back in the early 2000s when I started this blog comment strings were still semi-vital spaces where useful discussions could take place but now, at least with this blog, they have largely degenerated into echo chambers that most of my readers do not seem to engage with. Indeed, I've disco…

Since it's over a year since the 2015 CUPE 3903 strike in Toronto you would think that any Marxist analysis of its vicissitudes would, having the benefit of perspective, be somewhat thorough. Unfortunately Kyle Bailey's recent article for The Bullet is about as thorough and rigorous as think-piece for a student newspaper. It's written from the perspective of a vacuum, with no real recognition of the legacy of the local's contentious history and as if the 2015 strike was somehow sequestered from previous strikes; it obliterates, and I'm unsure if this intentional or simply ignorant, key moments of rank-and-file "extra-parliamentary" action in 2015, culminating in the largest and longest march/demonstration in the local's history on March 27, 2015. Indeed, although the author can be partially forgiven for a failure to recognize the strike history of the local––since the local's reality is such that it often promotes a short term perspective and dele…

Long time readers and supporters! My upcoming book with Zero, Continuity and Rupture, will be released early December and I hope that all of you, if you possess the means, will support it so as to let progressive publishers know that the Maoist turn in theory/philosophy is not unpopular. Since many of you supported my last book with Kersplebedeb (and from what I heard there was recently a reading group dedicated to The Communist Necessity in Austin) I figure you'll do the same with this one… But because it's larger and with Zero it's about three times more expensive in dead tree (around $30 instead of $10) but much cheaper as an ebook.

Yeah, I sympathize with the wallet strain and I get that the pricing of this kind of book is a detriment to those it speaks to most directly. All I can say is that I hope that those of you who do possess the means, or can at least plan ahead to salvage the means, care enough about supporting this sort of politics to let Zero know that it'…