M-L-M Mayhem!

As some of my faithful readers might have noticed the comments on MLM Mayhem  have been closed until further notice. Indeed I was planning to close down the comments earlier but allowed them to go on for a little bit right when a regular commenter started arguing about my last post just so I could admit their first two rounds of comments, respond to them, and then do what I intended to do before they appeared. (Truthfully, right before I went on holidays when I had no access to email because I wasn't interested in returning to a box full of comments after a week break.) Some background… For the past year and a half the vast majority of comments have been more of a time suck than anything else. Back in the early 2000s when I started this blog comment strings were still semi-vital spaces where useful discussions could take place but now, at least with this blog, they have largely degenerated into echo chambers that most of my readers do not seem to engage with. Indeed, I've dis

Since it's over a year since the 2015 CUPE 3903 strike in Toronto you would think that any Marxist analysis of its vicissitudes would, having the benefit of perspective, be somewhat thorough. Unfortunately Kyle Bailey's recent article for The Bullet  is about as thorough and rigorous as think-piece for a student newspaper. It's written from the perspective of a vacuum, with no real recognition of the legacy of the local's contentious history and as if the 2015 strike was somehow sequestered from previous strikes; it obliterates, and I'm unsure if this intentional or simply ignorant, key moments of rank-and-file "extra-parliamentary" action in 2015, culminating in the largest and longest march/demonstration in the local's history on March 27, 2015 . Indeed, although the author can be partially forgiven for a failure to recognize the strike history of the local––since the local's reality is such that it often promotes a short term perspective and del

Long time readers and supporters! My upcoming book with Zero, Continuity and Rupture , will be released early December and I hope that all of you, if you possess the means, will support it so as to let progressive publishers know that the Maoist turn in theory/philosophy is not unpopular. Since many of you supported my last book with Kersplebedeb (and from what I heard there was recently a reading group dedicated to The Communist Necessity  in Austin) I figure you'll do the same with this one… But because it's larger and with Zero it's about three times more expensive in dead tree (around $30 instead of $10) but much cheaper as an ebook. Yeah, I sympathize with the wallet strain and I get that the pricing of this kind of book is a detriment to those it speaks to most directly. All I can say is that I hope that those of you who do possess the means, or can at least plan ahead to salvage the means, care enough about supporting this sort of politics to let Zero know that it&

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

With Continuity and Rupture  about to be released I have decided to edit and release an extended essay I started working on a month after the manuscript was accepted by Zero Books. This essay was the result of reading Jodi Dean's recent Crowds and Party : part of me wished it had been released earlier so I could engage with it before I finished the manuscript of my upcoming book, especially since it echoed some of the concerns in The Communist Necessity , made up for some of the short-comings of her The Communist Horizon , and dovetailed with some sections of Continuity and Rupture . Hence the essay in question was written as a kind of tangental exploration of an area adjacent to the territory delineated by the boundaries of my two books. Really, what Dean's recent book encouraged me to write was a meditation on the concept of the vanguard party in the face of the normative anti-party ideology that underlies the ideology of a good portion of the first world establishment left

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

Once in a while some truly terrible pieces of left anaylsis come along that confirm each other's intellectual vapidness: two articles that read as if they were written for each other by two frienemies on different sides of a poorly understood debate, justifying their respective analysis in their hermetically sealed echo chamber they believe is reality. When this happens the temptation is to believe in poetic fate or synchronicity: what a weird coincidence! This was my instinct when I read that self-important " We Are The Left " article around the same time that I read another eye-roll inducing Identity Politics is Shit article: they must have been written for each other, they both take the analysis of their opposite as the straw-person of their object of critique and in doing so become caricatures of themselves. First, the article by "We Are The Left" that is entitled, with the same self-importance, "An Open Letter on Identity Politics To and From the Le