M-L-M Mayhem!

After all the hoopla declaring the "Arab Spring" of 2011 a "revolution" predictably receded, as I once argued it would , the events surrounding the recent military coup in Egypt have once again made Egypt the focus of the same socialist groups who see every mass movement as automatically revolutionary.  And though anyone who dares to call themselves a socialist, let alone a communist , must agree that it is right for the masses to rebel , we must also demarcate our support for spontaneous uprisings from our definition of revolutionary movements––without a party capable of organizing these explosions of mass rebellion into a coherent formation unified by revolutionary theory and practice, all we can do is rebel rather than make revolution.  Unfortunately, since the tendency to see every rebellion as a revolution is a common mindset amongst the dormant mainstream left at the centres of capitalism, and we get excited by massive demonstrations in other countries, the 20

Here is the final page of the Tao of Mao ABCs .  Although it might not be the strongest ending (Z was difficult––I almost went with "Zinoviev"!), at least it's finished.  Now I can get back to writing substantial entries without having to worry about finishing this project.  Who knows when this sad little comic strip will return. Letters W - Z [If you have enjoyed this comic series, or even passed it along to friends out of sheer disgust, please feel free to donate to this blog !]

Here is the fourth page of the comic, offensively humorous as usual.  Only one more page after this, and then I will return to more substantial and sober-minded posts.  Just remember: if you're offended, it's probably about you! Letters  R to V.

I have often been concerned with how communists should conduct themselves amongst the masses.  Some time ago I complained about that pernicious activist attitude to appear " more radical than thou " which is a common amongst the activist left.  That is, more experienced activists will work hard to cultivate an aura of radicalism, and work even harder to sneer at and belittle less experienced activists who are only beginning to learn that capitalism needs to go.  In this context, individuals will attempt to commodify themselves, competing to become the most important activist.  Rather than accept that becoming a revolutionary is a process, and that all of us require constant education and re-education , so many of us would rather pretend that we have already solved every question and are beyond criticism. Ironically, those who demonstrate this authoritarian attitude are most often self-satisfied anarchists (a contradiction which helped push me away from my youthful anarchism

Yesterday, during the initiation of #occupytoronto , the group with which I was involved brought a banner of Mao's face to our anti-imperialist march and into the occupy site.  This was appropriate because, as the person who painted the banner reminded me, today is the anniversary of the beginning of the Long March. Although I'm not always into expressing my politics through floating heads (because I think that sometimes this facialization might obscure political content), what made the banner interesting in this specific context was that it encouraged more attention and interaction than the majority of other banners that were mainly acronyms, abstract designs, and not entirely distinguishable from each other. For most of yesterday the banner was photographed by pretty much everyone with a camera (sometimes these people asked us to pose, or asked to take a picture with Mao's head), but more importantly we were forced to interact with a constant barrage of people who want

In a recent post I complained about the intentional misconceptions some petty bourgeois academic leftists promote when it comes to Marxism-Leninism-Maoism.  So it was hilarious to accidentally encounter, after a fundraiser on Friday, a Frankfurt School hipster marxist blog that promotes the same idiot and intentionally ignorant garbage regarding Maoism in general, and the Revolutionary Communist Party of Canada (PCR-RCP) in particular, with a confidence spawned from reading too much Adorno and not much critical history of actually existing communist movements.  The main point of my aforementioned post was that without investigation of what Marxism-Leninism-Maoism actually means, then there should be no right to speak. The anti-Maoist post on the hilariously entitled "Frankfurt Fist" blog (do Frankfurt School politics ever lead to the confrontation that the word "fist" implies or do they mean the exact opposite?) is paradigmatic of analysis without any concrete i

Yesterday, in a conversation with a friend on the bus, I once again encountered one of the typical arguments raised by a certain sector of student and trade union socialists whenever they hear the words marxism-leninism-maoism : "why maoism, isn't that just something that applies to third world movements––what does it have to do with Canada or the United States?"  The friend who brought it up this time, I should point out, was only curious and, after hearing this dismissal of maoism from others, was only asking the question because he honestly wanted to know what I thought.  Unfortunately, I feel that most people who ask this question are doing so rhetorically in order to dismiss a revolutionary theory that they know nothing about but imagine, as is typical amongst self-proclaimed "radical experts", that something they've never honestly investigated can be dismissed with a snide comment.  Without investigation there should be no right to speak, we maoist-inf

As a communist who endorses the revolutionary theory of Marxism-Leninism-Maoism  it is very important to insist that, whenever I refer to myself as a "maoist" (as often happens when I find myself enmeshed in theoretical arguments), that what I mean by "maoism" is something that goes beyond Mao Zedong the person.  Similarly, I believe in a leninism that stands over V.I. Lenin and a marxism that stands over Karl Marx.  Simply put, I treat marxism as a living science and not a set of religious texts codified by genius prophets whose words and actions are sacrosanct representations of a divine law of history.  Although years back, during the first few posts of the interblog dialogue I shared with BF of Workers Dreadnought , there was a discussion of the concept of a living marxism and a maoism beyond Mao, I want to reemphasize this position. Just as there are many Trotskyists who treat Trotsky as a prophet––who see themselves as guardians of a pure theory that emerg

Much hoopla is being made, and many tears being shed, amongst certain sectors of the self-proclaimed "left" about Jack Layton's recent death.  (For those readers who live outside of Canada, Jack Layton was the leader of Canada's New Democratic Party .)  But why should we, as the Canadian left, feel any grief for the death of a parliamentarian who was, by the time of his death, no longer a social democrat, let alone an anti-capitalist?  It's not like the people who are currently writing Facebook homages to the man knew him personally; these dewy-eyed obituaries are all about how he was a great crusader for justice or some other nonsense.  And yet Layton was more to the right than the classic social democrat traitor, Eduard Bernstein, and was leading a New Democratic Party that has become little more than a Trudeau era Liberal Party. Mao often quoted Szuma Chien's proverb about how some deaths carry meaning that is heavier than a mountain whereas other deaths

Although I used to find it funny, these days I'm getting tired of Trotskyists using the insult of "Stalinist" to declaim communist movements and theoretical commitments of which they are ignorant.  The crude and simplistic Trotskyist rejection of Maoism, after all, is that it is "Stalinist."  And then, following this charge, very simplistic analyses of Maoism and the Chinese Revolution are mobilized (most of which demonstrate an utter ignorance of history and bizarre willingness to conflate revolutionary China with today's pro-capitalist China), along with spurious complaints about Maoists killing Trotskyists in third world settings for being counter-revolutionary.  Hence: Stalinist . Earlier, in the context of another post , I briefly indicated that Trotskyism was flawed by an essentialist understanding of class; because of this the prototypical Trotskyist understanding of class consciousness, class position, and class struggle annihilates the possibility

The belief that all of our disparate and radical struggles will one day add up to the overthrow of capitalism and imperialism has been a general dogma of the North American left-activist scene.  Although many of these struggles refuse to imagine anything truly concrete beyond business as usual, and reject as a matter of principle any attempt to examine the methods that need to be taken to end capitalism and imperialism, we still like to believe that our various movements as a whole are more significant than they often are. In the year leading up to the G20, for example, the coalition of affinity groups involved in planning the demonstrations sometimes seemed like it was under the strange impression that it would WIN.  Indeed, on one of the organizational email strings, activists would often sign-off by claiming "we're winning."  But what could a weekend of heightened demonstrations  win ?  Clearly the overthrow of the state was not a feasible goal, nor could it be when

Over a year ago the inter-blog dialogue about Marxism-Leninism-Maoism philosophy, between myself and BF of Workers Dreadnought, was temporarily halted.  Thankfully, he just reinitiated the back-and-forth, which forces me, after a year and almost two weeks, to return to our meandering dialogue.  One of the problems with such a re-engagement is the potential for redundancy: I'm trying to reread everything we have written since the dialogue began, already marked somewhat by redundancy, but it is difficult to keep this sort of style conceptually clear––it has its strengths and its weaknesses. Whatever problems (redundancies, tangents, spiralling back-and-forths) result from this sort of theoretical discourse are balanced, I would hope, by the fact that theory is already improved if there is more than one (though there is never an individualistic and isolated "one") writer.  A sort of synthetic insight, I would hope, results from this practice.  Moreover, we hope to clear u

Despite my previous posts on the intifadas in Tunisia and Egypt, I think it is also important to be reminded of Mao's statement: "The people, and the people alone, are the active force in the making of world history, while we ourselves are often childish and ignorant."  We should note that when Mao says we ourselves  he means the party, the bureaucracy that had become enshrined in the party, and that the masses were often running ahead of the party's ossification: hence the requirement for the mass line and the germ-theorization of Cultural Revolution, the call to "bombard the headquarters." Although I stand completely behind my previous statements , and feel strongly that this post needs to be balanced by what I have already argued, I want to be clear that I also support the uprisings (but still qualify that the word "revolution" is conceptually inappropriate) and that we should all support the uprisings just as we should support any revolt, re