M-L-M Mayhem!

The bizarro anti-intellectualism that tends to manifest itself in leftist circles has always been paradigmatically represented by perspectives put out by the International Marxist Tendency (IMT)––whether they are shitting on BDS, claiming that the coup in Egypt several years ago wasn't really a coup, or claiming that physicists are liars––and yet again they've proved this anti-intellectualism with their recent hatchet-job on the late Mark Fisher's Capitalist Realism . These days I try to ignore their embarrassing hot-takes but both a local comrade and a twitter mutual sent me this article and it's the kind of thing that would make anyone who actually read Fisher's book gape and face palm. It also demonstrates something significant about the IMT and groups like the IMT: they are incapable of critical thought, their critiques of positions that are not wholly their own rely on straw-person misrepresentations, and so their political lines about reality in general––the i

Although I was given the opportunity to read an early draft of Tyler Shipley's Ottawa and Empire , that reading was overdetermined by my job as a "slash and burn" editor. That is, Shipley recruited me to help transform his doctoral dissertation into an accessible book since, due to his proximity to the project, he knew he lacked the objectivity to make hard decisions about what parts of the book to sacrifice. Since (as I have joked with him) the manuscript was not mine, and thus I felt no personal attachment to its contents, I spent many hours cutting out the necessary academic redundancies and pages upon pages of research that would cause the lay reader's eyes to glaze over. While I learned a lot about the book's subject matter in that reading (the 2009 coup in Honduras, Canada's complicity in this coup, and its historical context), my ability to fully process the manuscript's contents was partially compromised by my editorial duty. Hence, it has been a

NOTE: I found this review in my drafts bin. It was written months ago when I read the book in question  and missing only a conclusion but, because of work/organizing/childcare, I must have forgotten about it. Indeed I only have a vague memory of writing it! In any case, I think some of the substance of this review has found its way into other things I've written but it's still worth putting out in full. It's worth reading this kind of critical scholarship in light of the *The Continent* controversy or, more productively, for writing the kind of politically charged literature that the left sorely needs. I recently finished Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz's An Indigenous People's History of the United States  and was not at all surprised by its quality and content. It is pretty much what I expected it to be, but I would be shocked if Dunbar-Ortiz had failed to live up to the expectations that she set in her previous work. While there is not a lot of new material that she

The People's War in Nepal was a significant event for the Maoist International Communist Movement. Like the People's War in Peru years earlier, this protracted event was another site of theoretical and practical explosion that demonstrated that the revolutionary ethos of the end of the 20th and beginning of the 21st Century was in fact Maoist. While it was indeed the case that the PW in Nepal was largely ignored by the mainstream left in the imperialist metropoles it was still something that mattered for those who cared about third world revolution: the theoretical developments it produced (for example Hisila Yami's work on proletarian feminism), the practical experience it imparted, seem all the more tragic in its failure to accomplish its aims when the Prachanda-led leadership capitulated to revisionism––the always present danger that the Maoist theoretical tradition has elucidated. Yogendra Dhakal's Revolution Yes! Right Liquidationism No!  is a book that returns u

I'm finally reading my doctoral supervisor's seminal work on Antonio Gramsci: Gramsci's Historicism  by Esteve Morera. Originally published in 1990 but rereleased in 2011 as a "Routledge Revival", Gramsci's Historicism was influential for a whole generation of Gramsci scholars (many of whom are now seen as Gramsci "authorities") who broke from post-modern and post-colonial appropriation of Gramsci in order to return to this thinker's Marxist roots. Although my doctoral work was not on Gramsci (it was a philosophical engagement with anticolonial theory in the present conjuncture of ongoing settler-colonialism ), Morera was the departmental Marxist who was happy to work with anyone doing radical philosophical work in this tradition. Since his brilliance was quiet and humble, he never tried to force his own work on me, or demand that I put more Gramsci in my project, but instead encouraged my thought in an organic manner. [My second reader, Lo

Usually I review books and not essays but Josephine Armistead's  The Silicon Ideology  was such a clear, timely, and engaging twenty pages that I believe it deserves a review post. Indeed, I think it is best understood as an extended abstract to a book that needs to be written [or might have already been written if the soon-to-be published Neoreaction A Basilisk  by Phil Sandifer is anything like an expanded version of Armistead's essay] particularly since the centres of global capitalism are witnessing the rise of various fascisms and ur-fascisms. Ostensibly about neo-reaction and the alt-right, The Silicon Ideology  also attempts to provide a "unified theory" of fascism so as to demonstrate that the neo-reaction/alt-right ideological milieu is united around an emergent fascism that is connected to the old fascisms and multiple contemporary fascisms. Rather than focus on the more seemingly popular fascist movements (fascist political parties in Europe, the Trump po

It's been a while since I posted for a variety of reasons, but mainly the energy consumed by work and childcare. In the spare writing time I've possessed I have preferred to work on other projects: essays for journal submission, manuscripts for future publication considering that I seem to be having luck with that, and reading notes for books I've been trying to eliminate from my always growing book queue. But two things that I've been writing, amongst other things, in the interim were not intended for journal submission and do not work as parts of larger book projects although they did come out of these projects. Hence, I will be posting them, in some shape or form, on this blog. The first, which I will be posting later when it is properly edited, is a fun engagement with the concept of the party that, inspired by reading Jodi Dean's recent book and tangental concerns of my upcoming Continuity and Rupture , will work as a kind of promotional for this book's r

As regular readers of this blog will be aware, though I tend to be sympathetic to many of the positions expressed by some Maoist Third Worldist groups, particularly the Maoist Internationalist Movement [MIM], I identify with the Marxist-Leninist-Maoist movement that comes through the groups involved in the now-defunct RIM project, as well as the Communist Party India (Maoist) and the Communist Party of the Philippines.  Since I've outlined the reasons for this theoretical commitment elsewhere, I feel no reason to go into it here in any real detail, nor waste time expressing why I disagree with MIM's assessment and critique of the RIM experience (which, to be fair, would conversely contain a recognition of aspects of their critique of the RCP-USA).  I bring up this theoretical demarcation, therefore, not to get into it in any real detail but to highlight the fact that, despite this qualification, I still enjoyed––and indeed highly recommend due to the fact that I believe it is a