M-L-M Mayhem!

As I've mentioned before I'm in the process of releasing my next book with Zero Books––the contract has been signed and the latest draft is with the editor––which is both unexpected and exciting. This particular book is one that I've been working on for over three years (off and on alongside other manuscripts, such as the abandoned one I've been serializing on this blog).  The Communist Necessity  actually came about because, while I was working on this longer manuscript, I was thinking about the need for a longer introduction about movementism, a polemical settling of accounts: hence the subtitle of TCN indicating it was a prolegomena. So the book in question is entitled Continuity and Rupture: Philosophy in the Maoist Terrain  and will hopefully be printed and available for purchase in the fall. I've even managed to obtain the endorsements of some pretty cool people, but I'll save the surprise of who read the drafts and agreed to write blurbs for the book

Years ago I ended up in an argument with a friend about the problems of "intellectual property" and whether or not radical engagements with this concept might be misunderstanding what was at stake. While he was arguing for a rejection of copyright, and I didn't disagree with the general contours of this position, my point was simply that an unqualified rejection of someone's personal intellectual property might end up valorizing private property in general.  That is, I was interested in making sense of how the labour of a writer or academic might be appropriated by others in an exploitative sense.  It is one thing to be opposed to bourgeois copyright laws, it is quite another to spend a significant amount of time producing a variety of ideas that could be plagiarized or commodified by others under the auspices of rejecting these laws. To be clear, the fact that I spend a significant amount of time blogging and producing articles and documents that are free should de

For those who happen to live in the Toronto (Ontario, Canada) region, the following event is happening tomorrow and, since I spent hours designing the poster/image, I feel the need to advertise it here.  Those of you who do not live in Toronto/Canada can just enjoy (or not enjoy) the image. When: March 2nd, 2011 Time: 7-9 pm Where: OISE (252 Bloor Street West), Room 5280 In 1996 the Communist Party of Nepal (Maoist) began its people’s war against the existing tyrannical monarchist regime with the support of the majority of people in Nepal. In 2005 as part of a seven-point agreement with other opposition parties the Communist Party of Nepal (Maoist) helped launch a people’s revolt in Kathmandu which led to the ouster of the monarchy and declared a ceasefire. Subsequently the Communist Party of Nepal (Maoist) entered the parliamentary process to write a constitution that fulfills the political, economic and social aspirations of the peoples of Nepal. This panel seeks to examine the

Olivier Assayas' recent film Carlos , the five and a half hour biopic about the notorious "Carlos the Jackal", has garnered a significant amount of critical acclaim ever since it played at the 2010 Cannes Film Festival. Beautifully shot, cleverly edited, and extremely ambitious, this film could have been another Che , or, at the very least, a Bourne Identity with revolutionary politics. Unfortunately Carlos was an insulting and politically offensive piece of ahistorical trash that, after the first promising hour and a half, degenerated into retrograde confusion. Perhaps this confusion was promised in the first third of the film, when the titular protagonist proclaims, in defense of his Marxist-Leninist principles, "we are not nihilists" - a statement the audience, by the end of the film, should understand as ironic. Indeed, Assayas' film is tainted by that postmodern irony and cynicism that cannot help but suspect revolutionary principles and must sacri

This is a paper I presented at the A-Space Gallery Symposium a year and a half ago.  It was inspired by my partner's frustrations over the left's inability to properly engage with art, and the status quo world of art's suspicion and dismissal of "political art."  It also inspired a comic that I posted earlier , which probably explains the essay's overall thesis better than the essay itself...  The examination of art and its connection with politics requires in engagement with, to use the words of Mao Zedong, “a two-line  struggle.”  On the one hand there are those who insist that art does not necessarily (and perhaps should not) have any connection with politics––a rehash of the nineteenth century “Art for Art’s sake” slogan coined by Gautier––while, on the other hand, there are those who respond that the only worthwile art must adequately and didactically demonstrate progressive politics.  And between these two interpretations of art, there is much confusio