M-L-M Mayhem!

With the Inquiry on Murdered and Missing Indigenous Women and Girls (MMIWG) having released its final report, a not so curious and all too predictable phenomenon has manifested in the general Canadian public. Despite the fact that the Inquiry used the term genocide , and connected the tragedy of MMIWG to colonialism, politicians, journalists, pundits, social networking personalities, the "average Canadian citizen", and even some self-proclaimed "leftists" are loudly proclaiming this tragedy is not  genocidal and ignoring what it would mean to recognize its connection with colonialism. This was predictable because the same groups of people (and indeed some of the identical individuals) made similar proclamations when the Truth and Reconciliation Committee that investigated the Residential School system also used the word genocide  and implicated Canadian settler-colonialism. Although it is important, maybe even monumental, that the Inquiry the Liberals set in motio

Charles Post's Actually Existing 'Socialism' – A Critique of Stalinism  is such a mess of ideological nonsense, category mistakes, and predictable Trotskyist adages that, as one of my comrades pointed out, it must have been rushed to publication since Post, regardless of his flaws, is usually much more rigorous. In a context where people are turning to variations of Marxism-Leninism that are decidedly not Trotskyist I suppose it is natural that academic Trotskyists, who have worked hard to control the discourse about Marxism in the imperialist metropoles, would react with alarm. Post's article thus functions as a banal work of confirmation bias in that it repeats what Trotskyists have told themselves for decades, which just so happens to run parallel to the "common sense" of bourgeois ideology. As I've been arguing for a while, "Stalinism" has to be one of the worst conceptual categories and Post proves, yet again, that this is the case. Genera

Drexel University's recent decision to penalize George Ciccariello-Maher because of pressure from multiple right-wing campaigns demonstrates why reactionaries understand how to fight a war of position, and thus pursue hegemony, better than most progressives. As Ciccariello-Maher himself pointed out in an article regarding these campaigns and his discipline , there have been more successful campaigns to silence leftists than the much publicized leftist activism aimed at shutting down Nazi rallies and alt-right speakers, and the former have received little if any attention from those liberals who are already hand-wringing over free speech. In fact, one would think that it would be quite telling that white supremacists such as Philippe Rushton and Jordan Peterson have been able to retain their tenure whereas anti-racists such as Ciccariello-Maher, Tommy Curry, and Johnny Eric Williams have been slated for academic removal. The liberal self-righteous adage of "I will defend

A common adage about the "alt-right" repeated ad nauseum on social media by liberal journalists and alt-right trolls themselves is that its emergence has a lot to do with angry online leftists, particularly the "Social Justice Warriors" (SJWs), as well as call-out culture, identity politics, virtue signalling, etc. The assumption here is that most of these new white supremacists wouldn't have existed if they weren't dog-piled by self-righteous SJWs or anti-oppression university academics: these alienated young whites could have been won over if they had been treated differently, and it is in fact the committed anti-capitalist broad left that is at fault for the resurgence of white supremacy not the white supremacists themselves. In some ways this reads like a new version of the horse-shoe theory and, like the horse-shoe theory, it is thoroughly unscientific. To be fair, I get the concern of the more well-meaning individuals who make this claim. They wonder

Like so many others I avoided writing about the recent massacre of Québec Muslims because I felt the message of the attack was clear: fascism was alive and well in Canada, that its reemergence was not simply tied to Trump's election, and that there was no point in misery blogging an event that possessed such a clear message. That is, if we care about humanity, our outrage about an event should not require another online article that states the obvious; such articles might serve to cheapen the violence by using the massacre to make a point that was already clear. Islamophobia is alive and well, it's part of the politics of an ascending right, and this political sequence was already determined by multiple Canadian politicians and organizations who have sanitized ahead of time this indefensible violence. But then Counterpunch published an article by Robin Philpot, The New World Order Hits Quebec City , and I'm so incensed by such a distortion of reality and avoidance of culp

Having lost the US election to Trump reactionism, rather than recognize their role in the reemergence of fascism the Democrats have resorted to magical thinking. Rather than realizing they were part of the problem of fascism––that they enabled Trump, that they were part of the settler-garrison racist ethos that is USAmerica and thus presented not even the ghost of a marginal alternative––the Democrats resorted to conspiracy theories about Russian hacking. As one of my good friends joked, the neo-liberals that once prided themselves in their hawkish realism have taken to bandying about the kind of conspiracy theory crackpot explanations that they always accused Republicans of making. Anything but realize that there is something deeply wrong with US democracy and the USAmerican project. This magical thinking is all the more ludicrous since, like most conspiracy theories, it is necessarily ineffective. Trump will still be inaugurated in a few days, the liberals will crow about foreign h

Trump's victory is not an anachronism. USAmerica has always been a settler-colony par excellence , more muscular in its colonialism and white supremacy than Canada and even the late British Empire, and so the emergence of a fascist figurehead is in fact a consummation of what that country has always been. Trump represents a certain apex of what this national project's essence, though stripped of its liberal pretensions. The fact that a rich rapist who was successful only insofar as his dad loaned him money––who pretends to be a self-made man despite having weathered bankruptcy because of his inheritance––and because he was a media spectacle, and yet at the same time could pretend he was the accomplishment of the American Dream demonstrates that this dream is not only vacuous but that it is in fact based on the reality of Founding Fathers: wealthy, slave-owning, settler aristocrats who liked to proclaim their colony's "greatness" while pursuing the most egregious a

Is there anything more annoying than those individuals who imagine that they are "saving the left from itself"? You know the people I mean and if you don't you will soon: self-proclaimed gadflies who believe that their own personal understanding of the world is more rational and correct that the left as a whole, who worry that the left is going to far (and sometimes inaccurately use the words "fascist" when they aren't using "totalitarian" to describe said left), who maintain that they are the true left critics of progressive populations who just don't get it, who natter on about liberal free speech as if this convention is inherently progressive, who are repulsed by political violence, and who occasionally like to cite Orwell. None of this is to say that the broad and mainstream anti-capitalist left does not deserve critique from this very same left, that lines of demarcation need to be drawn between tendencies, and that some practices the l

Ever since I wrote the rather polemical blog post Whose Speech and For Whom  four years ago I have been receiving, whenever it is reshared each year, complaints from people amongst the left who really want to preserve the liberal notion of free speech and completely misunderstand the motivation of the post in question.  Of course it doesn't help that this post is taken for some kind of total legislation against free speech/expression by those who have a monolithic conception of capitalism, but this is only a secondary problem considering that the offended parties, if they bothered to really read this article and similar ones, wouldn't be writing me asinine complaints about how I don't understand the importance of free speech.  How I am undermining the very existence of this blog by supposedly claiming I have no right to freely complain about free speech when I am freely speaking. How I benefit from free speech.  And etc. At this point I'm becoming rather annoyed by th