M-L-M Mayhem!

With the proliferation of social networking technology online political discussion/debate has become prevalent. The so-called "Social Justice Warrior" [SJW], which is now a pretty stale cliche, has found its home on Twitter, Reddit, Facebook, etc. In such a context, particular "left experts" have emerged whose expertise is premised primarily on their online following. Certain individuals on Twitter/Reddit/Facebook, based on their ability to promote themselves and gain recognition, sometimes emerge (and sometimes just as quickly vanish) as authorities due to nothing more than self-promotion. Some individual who only discovered Marxism two years ago, for example, is suddenly the de facto expert on Marxist theory even if they do not appear to be organizing outside of their tweets/reddits or have any other credentials beyond their own belief in the efficacy of their analysis backed by some followers. No point in naming names; I'm sure you can imagine quite a number

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

[I originally planned to post this on July 4th but then, partially because I didn't have the time or energy to finish it, decided that it would be better to post it on the date of Marat's execution by a reactionary agent.  And no, I do not think that Charlotte Corday was some "hero" for assassinating a revolutionary simply because she was a woman; there were far more women who were on the side of the French Revolution and Corday was a royalist.] Despite the fact that the American and French Revolutions overlapped, and despite the fact that historians have attempted to draw parallels (particularly since Thomas Paine visited France at the height of its revolution), there is a significant theoretical distance between these two events.  The way this distance is charted by historians and popular culture is often quite telling in that it tends to reveal one's political commitments. Just as a European historian's identity as a progressive or a reactionary is reve

Today, after reading Kersplebedeb's repost of Emmanuel Ortiz's seminal poem A Moment of Silence  and Zak Brown's reflections on his childhood experience of September 11th 2001, I also found myself reflecting on this event. (More accurately a date that became an event because it was forced into significance by US imperialism––in some ways the only event , as Ortiz pointed out, that is allowed to count as a contemporary event according to imperialist discourse.)  Due to this date's significance in initiating the so-called "War in Terror" I cannot help but reflect on it from time to time, particularly whenever I am faced with the fact that the majority of my students were children when it happened and that t his is often their cultural reference point .  Brown's article was salient in this regard; he reflects on a childhood dominated by this event and the ideology to which he was subjected in the following years. The fact that the event of "9-11"

The recent Pelican Bay Prisoner Strike  has reminded me, yet again, of how I am immeasurably sickened whenever someone talks about the United States being a beacon of freedom.  After all, we have to wonder about how free a country is when it has the highest incarceration rate in the world.  In this context, it is ludicrously hypocritical to speak of wars being waged in the name of "freedom" when there is really no content to this claim of freedom: a country that maintains the largest population in human history of people who are literally unfree must be confused whenever it uses the concept of "freedom" to justify its violence.  In this context it is also ridiculous for peace-loving liberals to talk about how much they love their country, babbling about how, if it would only forsake the supposedly aberrant wars it is waging, it would be lovely if it would work according to a set of authentic freedom-loving values that never existed to begin with. Hence, there i

Although the strength of marxism has always resided in the fact that its method stands over and above its specific adherents, it is still disappointing when important marxist theorists, or more importantly a communist organization, fails in their fidelity to the method.  A knee-jerk reaction is to denounce this betrayal, and the entire history of those involved in this betrayal, as if they had nothing worthwhile to offer (this is being done, here and there, with the evaporated Peoples War in Nepal as if it is irrevocably tainted by the current revisionism of the party that had once led the revolution), and I myself have made this mistake more than once. The betrayal I am talking about here, however, concerns Samir Amin's recent analysis of Mali  that came as a shock to both myself and others.  As faithful readers of this blog will probably be aware, I have been highly influenced by Amin's anti-imperialist political economy and his creative application of marxism that has af

Since today, in Canada, it is Remembrance Day  I figured it might be worthwhile remembering, as revolutionary communists, the social context and historical meaning of this day.  Readers from outside of Canada might not be aware that November 11th is a day where the "sacrifices" of soldiers to Canada's existence as Canada are expected to be recognized––this is a day to celebrate and mourn war veterans with an entire minute of silence, poppy pins, and other such conventions.  Readers from inside Canada might not be aware that there is a vital communist tradition of remembering that might rub against the grain of this supposedly sombre day.  So, with all of this in mind, let's begin the remembering. Today, on November 11th, we remember that Remembrance Day and the convention of wearing a poppy pin was instituted just after World War One and our involvement in this war as part of the British [colonial] commonwealth.  It was not initiated after World War Two and is n

"There on the margins between known and unknown, the male conquistadors, explorers and sailors become creatures of transition.  As such, they were dangerous..." (Anne McClintock, Imperial Leather ) 1: civilizational delirium A village burned to the ground.  Corpses stacked in heaps of ash and bone.  Women shuddering, huddled together.  Armed men, crusaders at the edge of Christendom, presiding over the post-slaughter.  This landscape is one of the many nightmare settings of Nicholas Winding Refn's strange and obscurist film Valhalla Rising .  Encountered by the film's mute protagonist One-Eye in the second chapter, the post-massacre village is significant because it is one of the only two settings in the film that references a settled and civilized stability, but a stability marked by absence––an erasure.  It is also the only setting where women are depicted, however briefly, on camera. trailer for Valhalla Rising (2009) Having escaped and murdered the men who

"The West saw itself as a spiritual adventure. It is in the name of the spirit, in the name of the spirit of Europe, that Europe has made her encroachments, that she has justified her crimes and legitimized the slavery in which she holds four-fifths of humanity." - Frantz Fanon , The Wretched of the Earth Pascal Laugier’s Martyrs [view the trailer here ] represents one of the more complex and difficult horror films produced in the last decade. On the one hand it can be treated as another example of brutal “torture porn”––the grittier and most recent iteration of horror’s slasher sub-genre. On the other hand it is a film that transcends the genre, a meditation on horrific violence rather than simply a genre film. Indeed, I plan to argue that Martyrs is a horror film in the same way as The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari . That is, it is horror like all great works of horror fiction: the concerns traditional to the genre are given further significance because they connect to oth