M-L-M Mayhem!

In a recent post I complained about the intentional misconceptions some petty bourgeois academic leftists promote when it comes to Marxism-Leninism-Maoism.  So it was hilarious to accidentally encounter, after a fundraiser on Friday, a Frankfurt School hipster marxist blog that promotes the same idiot and intentionally ignorant garbage regarding Maoism in general, and the Revolutionary Communist Party of Canada (PCR-RCP) in particular, with a confidence spawned from reading too much Adorno and not much critical history of actually existing communist movements.  The main point of my aforementioned post was that without investigation of what Marxism-Leninism-Maoism actually means, then there should be no right to speak. The anti-Maoist post on the hilariously entitled "Frankfurt Fist" blog (do Frankfurt School politics ever lead to the confrontation that the word "fist" implies or do they mean the exact opposite?) is paradigmatic of analysis without any concrete i

When I started this blog my first post was a somewhat strident entry on why I hate Nietzsche .  In retrospect, it was probably not the most logical choice for my first blog-post, but since I was my blog's only reader at the time, and was under the impression that this would be the normative state of affairs forever, I just wrote a quick rant to try out the space.  (Also in retrospect, I should have thought more clearly about the name and url of the blog rather than, in my typical slap-dash manner, just throwing something together randomly.)  Apparently my sloppily written rant about Nietzsche has annoyed at least one reader who felt the need, like a first year philosophy student, to "correct" my understanding with a rather typical pro-Nietzschean response in that entry's comment string. Although I do not feel the need to write a prolonged and devastating critique of every aspect of Nietzsche's philosophy now or ever (I have better things to do with my time), I w

At the very beginning of  Negative Dialectics  Theodor Adorno writes, "Philosophy, which once seemed obsolete, lives on because the moment to realize it was missed.  The summary judgment that it had merely interpreted the world, that resignation in the face of reality had crippled it in itself, becomes a defeatism of reason after the attempt to change the world miscarried."  For those of us who are familiar with Marx, we cannot miss the fact that Adorno is referring to Marx's famous 11th Thesis on Feuerbach: "philosophy has only interpreted the world, the point is to change it."  Adorno, however, is arguing that since the communist attempts to change the world have failed, this proud Marxist assertion––this claim that philosophy could not resign itself to interpretation and needed to face the reality––has become a "defeatism of reason."  Thus Negative Dialectics  becomes a flight back into the ivory towers of philosophy, an attempt in some ways to rees

IV - praxis We can understand the quality of any given Marxist theory by its relation to human praxis. Marx and Engels' writings are no exception. Marx’s occasionally bad work on India, so often criticized by post-structuralists, is the result of his disinvolvement with burgeoning anticolonial struggles in that country. If he had been working with these struggles, perhaps, Marx might have written a different analysis of India. Indian Marxists, after all, have developed their own historical materialist analyses. Knowledge, as aforementioned, cannot be divorced from one’s social position. We should note here, however, that there is a general tendency to read Marx’s work on India and non-European regions/events through Edward Said’s quotations and commentary in Orientalism , which seriously distorts Marx’s original writing. Aijaz Ahmad, in his book In Theory, claims that “[a] striking feature of this portrayal of Marx as an Orientalist, based as it is on some journalistic obse