M-L-M Mayhem!

Some of my colleagues underline and annotate books with pencil; I suspect this habit might have to do with the fact that, when returning to a text after years of intellectual development, they will have the option of erasing embarrassing marginalia made by their younger selves. Unfortunately, I have always preferred to use pens instead of pencils––not for any political reason, mind you, but simply because for some reason I own more pens than pencils and because I don't like the way that pencil smudges and fades.  Hence, whenever I return a particular book years after my initial reading I am met with more permanent traces of my previous self that can only be effaced by deliberate scribbling, a clear sign of guilt. Recently I have started re-reading Capital ––between other books I'm reading for the first time––in the interest of consolidating aspects of my ideology and practice.  I first read volume one during my MA, volume three by the end of my first year as a PhD student, an

For the fall semester I am teaching a 4th year seminar on 19th century continental philosophy.  The focus I chose for this seminar is Ludwig Feuerbach, a philosopher whose influence in the 19th century was immense but who ended up being overshadowed by his two most famous students, Marx and Engels, and remembered only according to this shadow.  Despite his marginalization, we can still find traces of Feuerbach's influence in later philosophers such as Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Merleau-Ponty. The first time I encountered Feuerbach outside of references made by Marx and Engels was during a PhD level course where we were reading a manuscript by Robert Brandom on Hegel's Phenomenology .  There was something about Brandom's reading of Hegel that, though coming from the analytic tradition, reminded me of critiques Marx and Engels had made about Feuerbach's philosophy.  Thus, for my paper in that class, I read some Feuerbach so as to make the comparison directly.  I always w

Bourgeois moralism continues to haunt the left even though some of us should know better.  Some of the predictably banal responses to Thatcher's death, for example, are proof of this haunting: that, in the midst of all the laudable celebration of a dead reactionary, you have the occasional "leftist" chiming in with some appeal to liberal humanistic platitudes ("celebrating the death of any human is wrong", or "we socialists should be more humane", or etc.) was annoying but predictable.  Thankfully, there are enough people who remember the violence of Thatcher's politics countering this pseudo-Gandhian ideology that, for once, this moralism was buried in an avalanche of anti-Thatcher articles and parties.  And so, because I don't feel the need to write what so many people have written already, I'm not going to bother posting an obituary about why there is nothing wrong with celebrating the death of a reactionary.  Rather, I think it is simpl

Recently, EDB, comrade blogger of  The Fivefold Path , wrote an insightful post about controversies within the New Atheist movement.  Her commentary on blog atheist Jen McCreight's account of chauvinism within this movement explained what so many of us leftists have known, for quite a while, about the inherent contradictions of this movement: that it is a club primarily for privileged pro-imperialist petty bourgeois males who imagine that they're subversive for rejecting God while, at the same time, accepting everything capitalist-imperialist society has socialized them into believing is holy.  EDB's article, along with the McCreight article she was referencing, got me thinking about the long-standing [non-]issue of atheism and communism.  Moreover, it made me again think through the reasons why Marx and Engels, who did not believe in God or any non-materialist account of reality, at the same time rejected atheism  as a viable political project. As many of my readers ar

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

Due to the fact that I've often thrown the term science  around on this blog in reference to the historical and dialectical materialism initiated by Marx and Engels, I have decided that it might be worthwhile to discuss what I mean.  Considering that we live in a time where this concept is prevalent, and where it is applied to a variety of disciplines, I realize that when those of us who are committed to communism speak of a revolutionary science , or a science of history , we are often misunderstood. To be clear, when I apply the word "science" to the methodology of historical marxism, I am not attempting to conflate it with those scientific disciplines that are now, thanks to a long post-enlightenment history of experiment and technology, considered to be the  sciences.  That is, I do not think that historical and dialectic materialism are completely identical to biology, chemistry, physics, or the queen of the sciences, mathematics.  These sciences, obviously, have b

Marx and Engels' categorization of the lumpenproletariat  as a counter-revolutionary class is well-known by those familiar with the term.  In The 18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte , Marx refers to the lumpenproletariat as "the refuse of all classes" and points out how they were connected to reactionary, counter-revolutionary forces in France.  And then there is the famous passage by Engels, in The German Revolutions , that is clear about the class consciousness of the lumpen: The lumpenproletariat , this scum of the decaying elements of all classes, which establishes headquarters in all the big cities, is the worst of all popular allies.  It is an absolutely venal, an absolutely brazen crew.  If the French workers, in the course of the Revolution, inscribed on the houses: Mort aux voleurs!  (Death to the thieves!) and even shot down many, they did it, not out of enthusiasm for property, but because they rightly considered it necessary to hold that band at arm's lengt

Recently, the author of the target of my last post responded to my critique.  Initially, since I found the response to be little more than a dodge of the criticisms and a flight into the supposed theory of historical materialism (apparently he was doing proper historical materialism and I wasn't), I planned to only respond in the comments string.  A response that fails to answer specific criticisms, and side-steps the issue with a red herring debate, is usually a response I wouldn't bother to take seriously.  But since he was making claims about historical materialism, and attempting to argue that my critique had nothing to do with proper historical materialism, I decided that the issues raised in my original comment deserved further exploration because of a larger problematic.  That is: what is historical materialism ? As someone whose doctorate was earned through a study and application of historical materialism, and as someone who is currently working on a book about the

In a recent post I complained about the intentional misconceptions some petty bourgeois academic leftists promote when it comes to Marxism-Leninism-Maoism.  So it was hilarious to accidentally encounter, after a fundraiser on Friday, a Frankfurt School hipster marxist blog that promotes the same idiot and intentionally ignorant garbage regarding Maoism in general, and the Revolutionary Communist Party of Canada (PCR-RCP) in particular, with a confidence spawned from reading too much Adorno and not much critical history of actually existing communist movements.  The main point of my aforementioned post was that without investigation of what Marxism-Leninism-Maoism actually means, then there should be no right to speak. The anti-Maoist post on the hilariously entitled "Frankfurt Fist" blog (do Frankfurt School politics ever lead to the confrontation that the word "fist" implies or do they mean the exact opposite?) is paradigmatic of analysis without any concrete i