M-L-M Mayhem!

It seems entirely natural to despise bureaucracy and compare bureaucrats to capitalists, imagining that an anti-capitalist politics is also synonymous with anti-bureaucracy.  In order for capitalism to function, after all, a vast bureaucracy is required––the rational distribution of exploitation, the maintenance of surplus, accumulation, militarism, and all of the institutional departments required for the machinery of capitalism to keep chugging along.  From the smallest to the largest site of exploitation, some form of bureaucracy is necessary to manage value.  The state is renowned for the level of bureaucracy it allows to develop.  All capitalist institutions, to a greater or lesser degree, require bureaucratic management; the larger the institution, the more arcane its bureaucracy. And so it's entirely too easy to despise this bureaucracy and feel that this spite is politically motivated.  Just the other day, for example, I was forced to [yet again] deal with the overly byza

Several days ago a close friend and comrade emailed me the comic collection This Godless Communism  which was a J. Edgar Hoover approved anti-communist propaganda series.  Although it is hilarious for its historical and theoretical inaccuracy, its mindless reification of capitalist ideology, and the fact that it is aimed at 1950s USAmerican families who are apparently all white and patriarchal, it is an interesting read due to the anti-communist discourse it represented.  All of the hallmarks of anti-communist ideology that continue to this day (communism was just as bad [if not identical as totalitarianism ] as fascism, communism is about mindless hive-mind collectivity, communism is about a flawed notion of "human nature", communism is anti-freedom, communism killed multi-millions, etc.), and that even infect some "leftwing" understandings of actually existing socialism, are present in this comic.  So I figured it might be useful to go through some of this comic&#

I despise driving cars and try to avoid it as much as possible.  Driving from one city to another is a necessary evil, and something I do when it is more of a necessity (and cheaper based on the amount of passengers I can take) than taking a bus or train.  Then there are the times that I have to use a vehicle in the city to pick up large and unwieldy things that I cannot transport via public transit.  Otherwise, I try to avoid driving because: a) I cannot really afford to be driving all the time and to every place; b) I hate the stress of traffic and the always-existing potential of dying in traffic accident flames.  Generally, I really hate the fact that so many people drive all the bloody time rather than take public transit in a city that has a somewhat decent public transit system.  And I especially hate the way that people become  their personal vehicles. I am ranting about this because I've recently been forced to utilize a car more than I usually would due to all of the tr

If you're one of those marxists who defends communism by arguing that the "true communism" promised by Marx and Engels has never yet existed, then please stop.  This is not a very good argument for communism because this is precisely what liberals argue in order to claim "communism is good in theory and bad in practice."  Indeed, they use the fact that "true communism" has never existed as proof that it cannot exist because it is little more than a utopian doctrine .  ( "That Marx meant well," the liberal anti-communist will argue, chortling slyly, "It's just too bad he was proved wrong by those horrible communist revolutions of the twentieth century!" )  Thus, if you're making some sort of idealist argument about true communism ––as if communism is a Platonic form in which the material world has not yet learned to participate––then all you're doing is telling the liberal anti-communist that s/he's correct. Utop

As regular readers of this blog will know, one of my constant obsessions has been with the role of leftist academics.  This obsession is primarily due to the fact that I am a leftist academic and so, because of the many years spent as a student (and now as semi-employed contractual labour trying to get papers published), I have a conflicted relationship with academia and the kind of leftism that is intimately connected to academia .  This conflicted relationship generally manifests itself as a critique of two positions vis-a-vis academics/intellectuals that I have always found troubling: a) the erroneous belief that leftwing academics/students are more inclined towards anti-capitalism and thus more advanced than the rest of the masses; b) the anti-intellectualism produced by the fetishization of a specific idea of the working class.  Although I believe that both positions are erroneous, criticizing one or the other often causes the misconception that I am supporting one rather than

In a recent post I ranted about the supposed trotskyist domination of first world marxist academia.  This post, however, raised more questions than it answered.  Intended to be a piece about the necessity of waging ideological struggle in academia––and using trotskyism/post-trotskyism as an example of a type of marxism that I believed had successfully waged this struggle at the centres of capitalism––it ended up devolving into something of a complaint about a possible trotskyist "gate-keeping".  Thus, two of my faithful readers and comrades were slightly confused about the focus of my argument: when they brought up examples of non-trotskyist first world marxism that was academically influential, and I replied that even these examples were influenced by a trotskyist discourse, it became evident that my messy rant had ended up being about something than it was initially intended.  Losing its focus halfway through, it had moved into a territory that I was unwilling at that time

Although maoism has been the most vital form of revolutionary communism in the world since the 1990s, those of us at the centres of capitalism who adopt the identity of Marxist-Leninist-Maoist  occasionally have to deal with some very annoying misconceptions about what we believe.  When we tell other leftists that we identify as maoist  we are sometimes met with bemused expressions, glazed eyes, and curious suspicion.  And despite our best efforts, we generally have to deal with the same bizarre assumptions about what we believe.  It doesn't matter how many times we correct these misconceptions, or how successful we are in organizing outside of the boundaries of the mainstream left, the same assumptions continue to be asserted irregardless––sometimes by the same people who have simply ignored everything that we've said to begin with.  So, while it probably won't matter one bit, I've taken it upon myself to list and again correct some of these erroneous claims about what