M-L-M Mayhem!

Although I was given the opportunity to read an early draft of Tyler Shipley's Ottawa and Empire , that reading was overdetermined by my job as a "slash and burn" editor. That is, Shipley recruited me to help transform his doctoral dissertation into an accessible book since, due to his proximity to the project, he knew he lacked the objectivity to make hard decisions about what parts of the book to sacrifice. Since (as I have joked with him) the manuscript was not mine, and thus I felt no personal attachment to its contents, I spent many hours cutting out the necessary academic redundancies and pages upon pages of research that would cause the lay reader's eyes to glaze over. While I learned a lot about the book's subject matter in that reading (the 2009 coup in Honduras, Canada's complicity in this coup, and its historical context), my ability to fully process the manuscript's contents was partially compromised by my editorial duty. Hence, it has been a

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

Now that a very busy semester is nearly over, my marking is almost finished, and I'm about to enter a jobless EI summer between contracts, I'm finally going to have time to do some reading that is not job related. Thinking about the amount of reading time that has opened up has also got me thinking about the books coming out this year that I've marked in my to read  lists. In lieu of a substantial post, and in an effort to stop this blog from being empty, I've decided to provide a list, in no particular order, of the soon-to-be-published books on my radar. 1. Ottawa and Empire by Tyler Shipley A year and a half ago I had the opportunity to help with some thesis-to-book editing of this upcoming work on Canadian imperialism in Honduras. The problem with doing this kind of editing on a piece-meal basis is that it is difficult to get a picture of the book as a whole since you're focused on the minutia. I'm looking forward to reading it as a completed coherent w

In To Our Friends  the Invisible Committee writes: "Historically, the anti-globalization movement will remain as the first attack of the planetary petty bourgeoisie against capital––a touching and ineffectual one, like a premonition of its coming proletarianization." (223-224) Back in 2014 I wrote The Communist Necessity  as a critique of the movementism that, following a sequence from the anti-globalization movement to Occupy, was enshrined as dogma amongst the first world left. The Invisible Committee's earlier work was a defense of this dogma. My argument then was that this movementism was indeed the manifestation of a petty-bourgeois politics on the part of a privileged first world social class that was about to face an economic crisis that would drag it down to the level of the proletariat. It is thus interesting that the Invisible Committee has since recognized the "ineffectual" nature of the opening chapter of movementism approaching closure with a "

One of the reasons I was drawn to Maoism was because of its conceptualization of the imperfect party. That is, rather than seeing the party as a top down monolith that enforces perfect discipline, Maoism recognizes the importance of line struggle, endorses the messiness that this brings, and sees such struggle as a way to renew the party formation. Of course, being aware of this conception of the party and experiencing it are two different things. Hence my sadness upon discovering that the Maoist organization I support, and that is growing across Canada, has now entered a stage of acute line struggle. Since I have written about the importance of line struggle as key to an understanding of the Maoist Party of the New Type (in Continuity and Rupture  and elsewhere) I of course don't see the PCR-RCP's recent entrance into a stage of acute line struggle as undermining Maoism. Rather, it confirms what we Maoists have always said: line struggle is inescapable since we bring all of

Since the release of Continuity and Rupture  in December I have been busy hustling this book at launches in various cities. Thankfully it's doing quite well (or so it seems) and so far has garnered two favourable reviews: one by Hamayon Rastgar in Marx and Philosophy Review of Books , and one over at Tiger Manifesto . In lieu of editing, laying-out, and posting the final section of my Right against Right  extended essay, I've decided to blog a little (that is, shamelessly self-promote) on my book launch experiences to date. 1. Toronto Launch Hosted by Another Story Bookstore , this launch was packed with Toronto colleagues, comrades, and fellow travellers. Anjula Gogia, formerly the key organizer of the late Toronto Women's Bookstore , was the Another Story  events coordinator who made the event a success and I'm very thankful for her kindness and acumen. She was also generous in allowing me to have a panel where the politics of the book were discussed rather than

Like so many others I avoided writing about the recent massacre of Québec Muslims because I felt the message of the attack was clear: fascism was alive and well in Canada, that its reemergence was not simply tied to Trump's election, and that there was no point in misery blogging an event that possessed such a clear message. That is, if we care about humanity, our outrage about an event should not require another online article that states the obvious; such articles might serve to cheapen the violence by using the massacre to make a point that was already clear. Islamophobia is alive and well, it's part of the politics of an ascending right, and this political sequence was already determined by multiple Canadian politicians and organizations who have sanitized ahead of time this indefensible violence. But then Counterpunch published an article by Robin Philpot, The New World Order Hits Quebec City , and I'm so incensed by such a distortion of reality and avoidance of culp