M-L-M Mayhem!

I've always had some sympathy with various left communist theoretical traditions.  The autonomists (if you can call them left communists) have a special place in my heart because they were my gateway drug to Marxism, though even when I was an autonomist I disliked Empire .  Despite my [many] complaints about their theoretical positions, Tiqqun  and The Invisible Committee  are sometimes a guilty pleasure, at least they aren't a chore to read.  And until recently, because now and then I read Endnotes and the "communization" folks, I enjoyed mining the work of Gilles Dauvé because, regardless of my significant disagreement with his overall political line, he always seemed to have insights that I found half-ways compelling. But then I encountered Dauvé's essay Alice in Monsterland , purely by accident.  I mean, it's not like I'm out googling Dauvé all the time: I find his overall arguments unconvincing, I'm not a left communist (though admittedly sympat

The cult of the princess, with all of its feudal and patriarchal aspects, is so intrinsically tied to the socialization of little girls that my daughter was already consuming it, despite the fact that both my partner and I haven't been feeding it to her, because contemporary gender socialization is what it is. Meaning, it's fucking immanent. Thankfully, I had something of a breakthrough several days ago when my discovery of an unopened "Wonder Woman" bendable toy––a gift from one of my daughter's aunts––coincided with my daughter's decision to, in the midst of her claims about being a princess (which means, for some reason, nothing more than wearing dresses) suddenly declare herself a "super hero", pretend that a kitchen towel was a cape, and run about the kitchen/living room.  And yes, before you say it, I am aware that Diana is the princess of Themyscira (I used to be a comic geek, peoples, thanks to a dad who read me his original Daredevil comic

(In lieu of other posts, book reviews are an easier way to keep this blog a-hopping!) I have to say that, aside from the design principles, I have not been a fan of semiotext(e)'s intervention  series.  The Invisible Committee's The Coming Insurrection was made more politically significant by Glenn Beck's ravings than any actual movement––even the bourgeois press that wanted the French state to be correct about its supposed "home grown terrorism" has grudgingly admitted that there wasn't any anarchist conspiratorial actions.  Then there are all of the Tiqqun books, the IC's predecessor, that the series is releasing––annoying trash theory that is sometimes, particularly in the case of Theory of the Young-Girl , just misogynist even though the authors would like to pretend, as is typical of this elitist radicalism, that anyone who would charge them with misogyny "doesn't get it." Excuse me while I stifle a yawn.  All of this being said, Ser

I first realized that the "sex positive" turn in feminism––with its treatment of pornography, "sex work", and sexual practice in general as emancipatory––represented a rightward drift in mainstream left activism in 2005.  Before then I found it disagreeable but could, at the very least, countenance some of its arguments: I might have been uncomfortable, for example, with its pro-pornography position but I understood that there were indeed problems with the way in which some anti-pornography radical feminists agitated within the bourgeois legal system; I might have been annoyed with how it framed all radical feminists as "sex negative" due to misreadings of Dworkin's Intercourse  but I also recognized that Dworkin's analysis––as masterful as it was––was not without its problems.  But it was in 2005, when the film Sin City  was released, when I decided this "sex positive" brand of feminism was intrinsically liberal if not implicitly reactio

For my first post of 2014, and because my collective blog on leftist parenting didn't succeed in getting off the ground, I'm going to reflect on some of my most recent thoughts about being a father of a girl who is now over fifteen months old.  Since she is a significant part of my life, and parenting takes up a significant chunk of my time, I obviously spend more time thinking about raising her than I do about my academic life.  And aside from the logistical thoughts regarding how to organize everything else in my life around her schedule, and how to share childcare equitably with my partner, I also find myself ruminating quite a bit about the larger ideological problems I will be forced to encounter as she grows up in a capitalist world. Particularly, I have thinking a lot about a certain poem by Caitlyn Siehl ( it is not your job ), that has been circulating on innumerable tumblr sites, which succinctly explains some of my fears regarding my daughter's future.  Maybe I

One of the reasons I stopped being an anarchist was because, due to anarchism's often unquestioned utopianism, I was incapable of theorizing a mechanism that could suppress reactionaries.  Instead I wanted to believe that a revolution, if it was truly a revolution, would somehow convince those reactionaries who were too cowardly to fight and die for their beliefs in the moment of revolutionary upheaval, would somehow be convinced of the righteousness of the cause.  I believed that any attempt to build a state capable of legislating against their behaviour would be authoritarian and that this legislation, amounting to "Stalinist gulags", was also counter-revolutionary. This is indeed an extreme form of utopianism because it is premised on the idea that there is some root and nebulous human nature that, once we remove the authoritative mechanisms, would flourish and immediately evolve into something entirely socialistic.  Humans would become as they really are (as if the

Some time ago, I wrote something about the liberal notion of free speech called Whose Speech and for Whom .  At the moment it's one of my more popular posts [oddly enough, the rather strident entry about the attractiveness of the young Stalin is the most popular] and now and then, when I chase down the links that appear in my traffic, I discover cross-postings where it is either enjoyed or reviled.  Generally, my reason for writing it in the first place was because I was growing rather tired of the uncritical acceptance of liberal notions of freedom––and the entire liberal ideology of "free speech"––amongst the internet left.  Indeed, those internet leftists whose entire anti-capitalist praxis appeared limited primarily to internet forums and/or university class rooms were the same leftists who tended to yammer on about some platonic notion of free speech, complain about "censorship" whenever they were banned from anti-capitalist forums for problematic speechify

After my most recent post on the lifestyle politics surrounding the sex industry , and probably because of the back-links, I have noticed that my older posts on prostitution and the polyamory/monogamy binary have again become popular.  (In my "year in review" entry I joked about making this blog partly about SEX!, due to the popularity of these posts, and it seems that I was not entirely off-base.)  Moreover, I've been forwarded some of the comments made outside of this blog––and have read some dodgy "left" idiot blog posts––about my supposed position on these matters which has caused me to be simultaneously amused and annoyed. Sometime ago, I complained about the inability of people to read and understand the arguments I was actually making.  I have become convinced that blog frequenters, redditors, and internet self-proclaimed "experts" are generally incapable of properly assessing arguments, especially nuanced arguments, defending a position tha

Recently I learned of yet another "leftist" in my region who, convinced that prostitution is an essentially liberating vocation, has decided to dabble in being a call girl in order to demonstrate her politics in practice.  Perhaps she feels that this experience will give her the necessary clout––the anecdotes, the street cred––to argue her prostitution-equals-feminism position in future arguments with those feminists who maintain that prostitution is an essential pillar of patriarchy. Since I have already written a long post about the stupidity of the "feminist" position that conflates sex work with feminist agency, I won't bother rehashing in my arguments in significant detail.  Rather, I am interested in the class position that produces not only the prostitution-equals-feminist-agency political commitment––the position that leads certain privileged individuals (like the one mentioned above) to dabble in prostitution in order to declare the practice liberati

Back from a brief vacation with a long post that will probably annoy some people, but is the result of a long-standing annoyance... By now I am getting extremely annoyed with a certain discourse around sex work that has become popular amongst some sectors of the North American (and occasionally European) left.  Originally a discourse that was limited to lifestyle [and predominantly male] anarchists, as well as a few hippy sex fetishists, the political assertion that sex work is liberating, and that the liberating potential of sex work should be treated as part of a radically progressive politics, is now being embraced by the broader left-wing population and gaining the support of so-called feminists, socialists and communists who should know better.  Indeed, the unqualified pro-prostitution position is being treated by some as a litmus test for numerous radical commitments as it is now attached to, and turned into a falsely essential component of, feminism, queer and trans libera