M-L-M Mayhem!

I grew up familiar with a lot of Christian circles, because of my family's Christianity, and some of them were quite weird. Despite the fact that my family, regardless of its own and sometimes odd commitments, was critical of mainstream Canadian evangelicalism, I still encountered those kids from Christian families that lived in weird little worlds of confirmation bias.  For example, I remember sleeping over at the house of a friend who was "pentacostal" on Halloween and being taken to a church drama ("Heaven's Gate and Hell Fire" – yes I remember the title) that scared the bejeezus out of me because it was about how all unbelievers would die screaming in hell. And this from a family that thought horror films were Satanic and yet subjected me to the worst kind of horror imaginable. To their credit my parents, whose commitment to Christianity was connected to conceptions of "the social gospel", were incensed that I had been subjected to such an expe

There seems to be a minor trend of people connected to revisionist communist organizations investigating the New Communist Movement (NCM) and broadcasting their thoughts on this period as if they have somehow become experts in the past anti-revisionist sequence. I've been noticing this on Twitter––where people I've muted because of their connected to the Communist Party Canada and their annoyingly bad takes get re-tweeted by mutuals whenever they say something random about the NCM––so it may be a relatively minor trend. But its ideologues are loud and confident enough that, even if the trend is minor, it piques my interest. It's like these individuals recently read Max Elbaum's old book, heard some things about the NCM, and then embarked on a cursory investigation of articles hosted by the Encyclopedia of Anti-Revisionism Online (EROL) so as to designate themselves experts of a period that was politically opposed to their chosen politics. That is, they tend to embark

My upcoming essay for Abstrakt forms the completion of my trilogy concerning the emergence of Marxism in the context of modernity and the bourgeois order. Being a series of philosophical treatments (rather than a historiography, sociology, or political economy) these three essays focus on key and interconnected themes––Enlightenment, science, sovereign power––that are related to Marxism's manifestation as a "modernity critical of modernity". The point is to think Marxism's meaning against the ideological constellation from which it emerged as a challenge, as well as contemporary criticisms of Marxism that seek to crudely identify it with this ideological constellation thus reducing it to an antiquated philosophy amongst the other philosophies of the space and time of Marx and Engels. In this sense, Marxism is treated as an inheritor of the European Enlightenment project, no more or less meaningful than liberalism, notable only because it influenced a radical tradition

With the Inquiry on Murdered and Missing Indigenous Women and Girls (MMIWG) having released its final report, a not so curious and all too predictable phenomenon has manifested in the general Canadian public. Despite the fact that the Inquiry used the term genocide , and connected the tragedy of MMIWG to colonialism, politicians, journalists, pundits, social networking personalities, the "average Canadian citizen", and even some self-proclaimed "leftists" are loudly proclaiming this tragedy is not  genocidal and ignoring what it would mean to recognize its connection with colonialism. This was predictable because the same groups of people (and indeed some of the identical individuals) made similar proclamations when the Truth and Reconciliation Committee that investigated the Residential School system also used the word genocide  and implicated Canadian settler-colonialism. Although it is important, maybe even monumental, that the Inquiry the Liberals set in motio

With Methods Devour Themselves  nearing its release date, and thoughts of Continuity & Rupture  on my my mind due to another manuscript (about philosophy) I recently prepared for submission, I felt it might be worthwhile to talk a bit about what I do as a philosopher. Specifically, what I do as a philosopher of Marxism and how I generally understand the meaning of philosophy within the boundaries of historical materialism. Such reflections will, at the very least, prevent my blog from languishing in stasis. Since the manuscript I recently submitted for publication concerns this question (what it means to practice philosophy as a Marxist, what philosophy means under the shadow of the 11th Thesis on Feuerbach) I am not going to get into the meaning of Marxist philosophy in any real depth. I wrote that book because in order to deal with this question in depth it required, in my mind, an entire book.  In fact I've already written three posts that serve as entry points into that p

After attending Jasbir Puar's recent Toronto talk and book launch the other night I was struck again with the dilemma that post-  theory presents to Marxists, particularly Marxists like myself who occupy some sort of academic space. We all, to different degrees, represent the deep-seeded problem with what is often called "post-modern" philosophy/theory: its displacement of Marxism upon the sanctified pedestal of recognized radical theory, its idealist (and quite often obscurantist) bases that permit identity politics and movementism to proliferate as praxis, and (most damningly) the fact that the foundational authors of this tradition only achieved academic hegemony through a translation project funded by the CIA . I have diagnosed this problem in previous posts, and in Continuity & Rupture  I attempted to provide a general explanation for the rise of "post-modernism" by linking it to a Marxist retreat forced by the "end of history" narrative of c

The bizarro anti-intellectualism that tends to manifest itself in leftist circles has always been paradigmatically represented by perspectives put out by the International Marxist Tendency (IMT)––whether they are shitting on BDS, claiming that the coup in Egypt several years ago wasn't really a coup, or claiming that physicists are liars––and yet again they've proved this anti-intellectualism with their recent hatchet-job on the late Mark Fisher's Capitalist Realism . These days I try to ignore their embarrassing hot-takes but both a local comrade and a twitter mutual sent me this article and it's the kind of thing that would make anyone who actually read Fisher's book gape and face palm. It also demonstrates something significant about the IMT and groups like the IMT: they are incapable of critical thought, their critiques of positions that are not wholly their own rely on straw-person misrepresentations, and so their political lines about reality in general––the i

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

Lionel Shriver's recent complaint about charges of "cultural appropriation" has caused me to think again about the uses and abuses of the term. For those unfamiliar with Shriver's speech regarding cultural appropriation it goes something like this: at the Brisbane Writer's Festival the author of We Need To Talk About Kevin  and The Mandibles delivered a speech about " fiction and identity politics " that was about the right of authors to write and represent any culture they desired and that all charges of racism or cultural appropriation were attacks on a writer's essential right to free expression. Since the speech was driven by her anger at a particular criticism made of The Mandibles , it was in many ways a knee-jerk "how dare you tell me what I can write about" screed. In the context of recent debates in literary forums about the ethics of representation that have raised a number of important concerns (i.e. when and how is it justified