M-L-M Mayhem!

One of the topics I keep returning to on this blog, since it has to do with my social circumstances, is the role of academics vis-a-vis the revolutionary movement. As one of my old posts makes clear (and includes back links to previous posts) I'm always caught between the problematic of the over-valorization of academic expertise amongst some leftists and the anti-intellectualism amongst others, both of which are erroneous positions. Although what I'm going to write in this post will probably repeat my thoughts from these older articles, the reason I keep returning to this topic is because it concerns my job and training and the way I cognize this part of my life in relation to the politics to which this life is dedicated. Mainly I want to focus on a question that I keep seeing raised, either online or directly to me, by other leftists embedded in academia, particularly those who come from proletarian backgrounds. "How is pursuing an academic career, or any form of acad

As some of my long time readers and supporters might be aware I have a new book coming out with Zero, most probably at the end of 2019 after Methods Devour Themselves  has been given time to find an audience and thrive. This book, Demarcation and Demystification , is that book on philosophy that I have mentioned multiple times on this blog and elsewhere, a manuscript that took around 7 years to complete. Started just before I started the draft of Continuity and Rupture  it developed, going through multiple rewrites and revisions, alongside that project and others. Concerned with the meaning of philosophy in the shadow of Marx's eleventh thesis on Feuerbach, and particularly the meaning of the Marxist practice of philosophy, it was a manuscript that I put a lot of time and energy into since it also functioned as a way to clarify what it was I did as someone trained in "philosophy" who was also a Marxist. Since I plan to release a supplementary and promotional essay closer

Anti-Duhring  remains one of the greatest works of classical Marxist theory despite all attempts to claim that, being written by Engels, it is somehow separate from or even opposed to Marxism-qua-Marxism. In 1979, for example, Jack Mendelson wrote a journal article that was paradigmatic of this claim that Engels' conception of Marx's project was a "metaphysical" distortion of a proper Marxism. Indeed, in On Engels' Metaphysical Dialectics , Mendelson describes and defends the commonplace argument that Engels, specifically in Anti-Duhring (though he cites Ludwig Feuerbach And The End of Classical German Philosophy  as a secondary symptom), produced a warped ontology of the Marxist project that, by providing us with notions such as "dialectical materialism" and claims that Marxism was a "world outlook", wrongly mutated Marxism into an orthodoxy that was not properly Marxist. It is strange that these claims linger. This strangeness becomes most a

In 2016 I joined Twitter so as to promote, following the publisher's suggestions, Continuity and Rupture . Although I suppose that site is useful for self-promotion since it allows me to introduce my work to a broader audience (and I can't deny it put me in touch with the author who would collaborate on Methods Devour Themselves  with me) most of the time I find myself annoyed, stressed, and enraged. Aside from the vast amount of reactionaries and liberals who like to parachute into strings to troll, there are the Marxists of all types (sometimes including my own type) who also tweet infuriating things, performing Marxism in the same way identity opportunists perform radical liberalism. Even worse are the Marxist edge-lords who say the most infuriating things and make Marxism look dumb and/or elitist. Usually when I get involved in these debates I end up wasting my time across several days, exchanging tweets with these people (who double down just as much as reactionaries), s

In lieu of having written a substantial post in quite some time here is some shameless self-promotion: my newest and co-written book, Methods Devour Themselves , is now available. I wrote it with one of my favourite contemporary SFF authors, Benjanun Sriduangkaew, and it is a conversation between fiction and non-fiction, literature and essay. Specifically, the concept of this book is the following: I would respond to a story of Sriduangkaew's with an essay provoked by the story (not an analysis or review but a discrete essay inspired by elements of the story, using these elements as analogical details), Sriduangkaew would respond to the essay with another story provoked in the same manner, and we repeated the process twice. I wrote a promotional essay about the book on Medium that explains the project and my feelings about it in detail, but since I'm of the mind that you can never have too much promotion (see for example how many promotional posts I've written about all

When I heard about Amin's death I was on holiday with sporadic online access. This is what I wanted to write seven days ago… When I began my PhD I was still an autonomist Marxist who was under the impression that my doctoral work would have something to do with Deleuze and Guattari, whose work had formed a central part of MA dissertation. But I also felt that something was missing, mainly a thorough understanding of Marxist political economy. Hardt and Negri's Empire  had just been released and, despite my autonomist Marxist sympathies, I felt that there was something fundamentally wrong with the Empire thesis. I could not explain this wrongness in the language of philosophy, not without a proper understanding of political economy, so I knew that I needed to develop my understanding of Marxist economics. Naturally I dove into Capital  but, because I felt I needed a contemporary political economist to help with this exploration, I picked up some books by Samir Amin. My c

Thinking back on this blog from my current perspective and concrete circumstances is difficult. Nearly a decade has transpired since, out of boredom and in the midst of graduate student frustration, I created MLM Mayhem . The name was an afterthought and the the URL ill-considered, the product of someone who wasn't interested in social media savvy and who believed that nobody would read whatever ill-considered thoughts he sent out into the void. (Also the choice of Blogger rather than Wordpress was a poorly reasoned decisioned. To be fair, however, in 2009 Blogger [or, rather, Blogspot ] was the dominant blogging platform.) It was months after my union local's bitter strike of 2008/2009, right when I was engaged in finishing my dissertation, and was conceived of as little more than a space to post random thoughts and frustrations. Hell, my first post was entitled I Hate Nietzsche  and was far from rigorous. Successive posts were either asinine comics made from GPCR clip art o