M-L-M Mayhem!

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

1: The polemic is a genre intended primarily to draw lines of demarcation, a style of document wagered in the midst of line struggle. As such it possesses a political function that is immediate: every polemic is primarily intended to serve the struggle to which it is attacked, to pull in sympathizers and isolate opponents, and it is written with the intention of being an organizer. The polemic is an intentional literature. 2: As an organizer, the strength of a polemic is determined by how well it succeeds in demarcating so as to mobilize support and isolate dissenters. The quality of a polemical intervention––whether it is an essay or an entire book––is located in the strength of its intervention. Hence rhetoric plays a significant role on the formal level because the polemic must engage its audience and pull in sympathizers while castigating those who would sympathize with the line it is intended to attack. The polemic's genre  is located in its rhetorical form. 3: Although rh

One of the topics I keep returning to on this blog, since it has to do with my social circumstances, is the role of academics vis-a-vis the revolutionary movement. As one of my old posts makes clear (and includes back links to previous posts) I'm always caught between the problematic of the over-valorization of academic expertise amongst some leftists and the anti-intellectualism amongst others, both of which are erroneous positions. Although what I'm going to write in this post will probably repeat my thoughts from these older articles, the reason I keep returning to this topic is because it concerns my job and training and the way I cognize this part of my life in relation to the politics to which this life is dedicated. Mainly I want to focus on a question that I keep seeing raised, either online or directly to me, by other leftists embedded in academia, particularly those who come from proletarian backgrounds. "How is pursuing an academic career, or any form of acad

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

Charles Post's Actually Existing 'Socialism' – A Critique of Stalinism  is such a mess of ideological nonsense, category mistakes, and predictable Trotskyist adages that, as one of my comrades pointed out, it must have been rushed to publication since Post, regardless of his flaws, is usually much more rigorous. In a context where people are turning to variations of Marxism-Leninism that are decidedly not Trotskyist I suppose it is natural that academic Trotskyists, who have worked hard to control the discourse about Marxism in the imperialist metropoles, would react with alarm. Post's article thus functions as a banal work of confirmation bias in that it repeats what Trotskyists have told themselves for decades, which just so happens to run parallel to the "common sense" of bourgeois ideology. As I've been arguing for a while, "Stalinism" has to be one of the worst conceptual categories and Post proves, yet again, that this is the case. Genera

Now that it has been a little over half a year since Continuity & Rupture was released I think it is time to do another post about this book. There are several reasons for this new round of shameless self-promotion: i) I recently signed a contract for another manuscript (details to follow at an unspecified future date – enjoy the mystery!) so I'm thinking about the reception of previous work; ii) though Austerity Apparatus is my latest, Continuity & Rupture remains the more rigorous work that is centered between Austerity Apparatus and The Communist Necessity ; iii) sales for Continuity & Rupture have been quite good for a piece of uber-left non-fiction; iv) while the reception of C&R has been generally good, when it hasn't critiques have tended to misrepresent the book. The fourth of these above points is the most salient because, as faithful readers will be aware, I tend to get extremely annoyed when readers misrepresent what I produce. Although it is

Usually I review books and not essays but Josephine Armistead's  The Silicon Ideology  was such a clear, timely, and engaging twenty pages that I believe it deserves a review post. Indeed, I think it is best understood as an extended abstract to a book that needs to be written [or might have already been written if the soon-to-be published Neoreaction A Basilisk  by Phil Sandifer is anything like an expanded version of Armistead's essay] particularly since the centres of global capitalism are witnessing the rise of various fascisms and ur-fascisms. Ostensibly about neo-reaction and the alt-right, The Silicon Ideology  also attempts to provide a "unified theory" of fascism so as to demonstrate that the neo-reaction/alt-right ideological milieu is united around an emergent fascism that is connected to the old fascisms and multiple contemporary fascisms. Rather than focus on the more seemingly popular fascist movements (fascist political parties in Europe, the Trump po

Once in a while some truly terrible pieces of left anaylsis come along that confirm each other's intellectual vapidness: two articles that read as if they were written for each other by two frienemies on different sides of a poorly understood debate, justifying their respective analysis in their hermetically sealed echo chamber they believe is reality. When this happens the temptation is to believe in poetic fate or synchronicity: what a weird coincidence! This was my instinct when I read that self-important " We Are The Left " article around the same time that I read another eye-roll inducing Identity Politics is Shit article: they must have been written for each other, they both take the analysis of their opposite as the straw-person of their object of critique and in doing so become caricatures of themselves. First, the article by "We Are The Left" that is entitled, with the same self-importance, "An Open Letter on Identity Politics To and From the Le

It's been a while since I posted for a variety of reasons, but mainly the energy consumed by work and childcare. In the spare writing time I've possessed I have preferred to work on other projects: essays for journal submission, manuscripts for future publication considering that I seem to be having luck with that, and reading notes for books I've been trying to eliminate from my always growing book queue. But two things that I've been writing, amongst other things, in the interim were not intended for journal submission and do not work as parts of larger book projects although they did come out of these projects. Hence, I will be posting them, in some shape or form, on this blog. The first, which I will be posting later when it is properly edited, is a fun engagement with the concept of the party that, inspired by reading Jodi Dean's recent book and tangental concerns of my upcoming Continuity and Rupture , will work as a kind of promotional for this book's r