M-L-M Mayhem!

The Toronto launch of Continuity and Rupture  yesterday evening went better than expected. Indeed, I was quite surprised by the turn out and support. Although this is my second book, and so I should be a little familiar with launches, since C&R  was shorter than The Communist Necessity , less a polemic and more of a rigorous examination of Marxism-Leninism-Maoism, and the result of three years of writing and rewriting, I was far more anxious about its reception. Moreover, the DIY aesthetic of my first Toronto book launch (it happened in the back room of a bar) made it feel less official and thus less nerve-wracking than this one which happened in Toronto's oldest still operating independent book store. Hence, I feel that I need to deliver an extended thank-you to the people who made yesterday night's event a success. First of all, I want to thank Another Story Book Store  that took a chance on me and provided a comfortable launch space. Another Story  has been my favourit

As regular readers of this blog will be aware, though I tend to be sympathetic to many of the positions expressed by some Maoist Third Worldist groups, particularly the Maoist Internationalist Movement [MIM], I identify with the Marxist-Leninist-Maoist movement that comes through the groups involved in the now-defunct RIM project, as well as the Communist Party India (Maoist) and the Communist Party of the Philippines.  Since I've outlined the reasons for this theoretical commitment elsewhere, I feel no reason to go into it here in any real detail, nor waste time expressing why I disagree with MIM's assessment and critique of the RIM experience (which, to be fair, would conversely contain a recognition of aspects of their critique of the RCP-USA).  I bring up this theoretical demarcation, therefore, not to get into it in any real detail but to highlight the fact that, despite this qualification, I still enjoyed––and indeed highly recommend due to the fact that I believe it is a

The blog Rectification Rumpus Room has written a response to my 10 Theses on Regroupment Politics and, though I usually try not to respond to every provocative bad faith "screw you" polemic, I decided it was worth writing some sort of response.  First of all, the author has accused me of "ruining thinking" in a single post (amusing but rhetorical); secondly they accuse me of being pompous simply because of ten theses designed to be provocative but (like my theses on identity politics ) not to be the be-all-and-end-all of the story; thirdly, because they seem to be someone in my city who has decided (pompously, perhaps?) that they despise the mass orgs I associate with since an earlier post of theirs targets, snidely and dismissively, an advertisement for an RSM study group.  The irony of the third point should be clear: while they accuse me of being opposed to left unity, implying sectarian and all manner of nonsense, it seems as if the blog exists primarily to

1 The left regroupment strategy is a rightist approach to organization with left costuming.  Although it likes to imagine itself as a "left" alternative to the supposed "rightism" of building the kernel of a revolutionary party that is united in theory in practice, in practice it is a generally conservative theory of organization. The fact that it dares to imagine itself as a strategy of taking state power, when it is simply a theory of developing an organization, demonstrates its conservatism: it cannot think beyond the baby-steps of building a movement and so pretends that these baby-steps amount to revolutionary strategy. 2 Proponents of left regroupment begin with the proposition of a project wherein a vague  communist pole  is hypostatized as a magnet, a position in which to draw in all the fragments of a shattered left who will agree with this project.  The point is to initiate a process, the end goal of which might be a party, and to reject those appro

Recently, Zak Brown at Anti-Imperialism.com wrote a response to my claim that Protracted Peoples War (PPW) should be understood as a universal revolutionary strategy, particularly focusing on the problematic of universality.  I am going to try to keep my response constrained and limited, but first some qualifications: 1) Brown's article is written as if, and this might not have been his intention, I am a theorist of PPW who has spent an inordinate amount of time putting forward this theory.  This assumption is inherent in his claim, near the end of the article, where he talks about "the concerted efforts of JMP and his immediate allies" as if I am leading some revolutionary movement and am its principal theorist.  I am not.  My comments about PPW (and they have generally been comments and reflections) have to do with philosophically thinking through the already existing theory of PPW as universal that is something I encountered, but did not write, and obviously found i