M-L-M Mayhem!

Several months ago one of my best friends showed me an episode of the comedy show Letterkenny where a tiki-torch wielding reactionary, "Hard Right Jay" (played by Jay Baruchel), arrives at the eponymous town and attempts to convince the denizens to be outraged over the fact that a local soccer team is planning to change its racist name ("Chiefs") to something that is more "politically correct." Not only does Hard Right Jay discover that most of the town doesn't give a shit about his cause, and largely has no problem with the reasons for the name change, but the episode ends with the Indigenous characters of the show confronting the attempted racist protest and uniting with other members of the town to punch the nazis. Aside from the awesomeness of celebrating punching nazis in a popular comedy show right after Richard Spencer was punched on camera and liberals got upset about violence directed towards fascists, the depiction of the way in which today...

Whenever there is a political movement our job as anti-capitalists––as communists––is to analyze the class content of the movement. Such an analysis does not mean to examine it according to its appearance but according to its substance: the politics it mobilizes, and thus its dominant political line, and thus its proximity to state power and the ruling class. Moreover, this analysis always needs to take into account the way in which class contradictions are articulated in the social formation in question and the conjuncture of that social formation. If we fail to examine a movement according to its substance (the content as articulated through the class politics it expresses, state proximity, the social formation of the current moment) then we fail to grasp its essential meaning. At best we end up with a poor analysis of what is taking place, and thus a failure to conceptualize a proper response to events; at worst we end up with a mechanical workerist analysis that, taking "class...

On the same date as the 1973 coup in Chile, one of the great revolutionaries of the 21st Century, Abimael Guzmán ("Gonzalo"), has passed away at 86 after having spent nearly three decades incarcerated. As the Chair of the Communist Party of Peru's (PCP) Central Committee, Gonzalo was responsible for leading the People's War in Peru and initiating the theorization of Maoism as a third stage of revolutionary science. Moreover, the now defunct Revolutionary Internationalist Movement responsible for crystallizing Marxism-Leninism-Maoism (as opposed to "Mao Zedong Thought") was only able to reach the ideological and organizational heights it once had due to the participation and influence of the Gonzalo-led PCP. For those of us who all ourselves "Maoists" because we recognize Maoism as a development in the same sense that Leninism was (however we position ourselves in the international debate about the meaning of MLM now) there is no avoiding or denyi...

In the wake of the recent violence in Palestine, of the ongoing ethnic cleansing that is yet again patently evident, I cannot help but reflect on the state of academia and the discourse of free speech that normalizes this ethnic cleansing while at the same time demonizing anyone who names it for what it is. Especially in the discipline of philosophy which, for so long, has pretended that it is the guardian of truth and critical thinking. Why is it that scholars who challenge dominant politics––who, to cite the old adage, “speak truth to power”––are maligned as being political whereas scholars who either explicitly support ethnic cleansing or implicitly support it with liberal “both sides are wrong” discourses are treated as rational? And why do scholars who are critical of this ethnic cleansing also defend their liberal and conservative colleagues who are not? The free speech absolutism of the liberal university not only stands in the way of rigorously thinking thought and challenging...

I have recently tried to get back into reading poetry, which once upon a time I read a lot of, because I feel I need more poetry in a reading life that is largely filled with theory and philosophy. By "recently" I mean since the summer of 2020. And by "try" I mean slowly and not regularly, though I want to make it more regular. In August I read Mia S. Willis' excellent Monster House . Now I'm rereading Dionne Brand's brilliant Ossuaries . There's something meditative and calming, while at the same time provocative, about reading good poetry by politically committed poets who are also attentive to their craft. When I read poetry regularly in the past, along with well-written literary fiction, I found that it impacted by own writing and thinking in a positive way, and I would like to think that readers can see a poetics in my style due to my past immersion in poetry––but not too much that I'm writing pseudo-poetry instead of philosophy! Throughout ...

It's been a while since I've posted. Work, childcare, political work, manuscript projects, everything overdetermined by pandemic and pandemic exhaustion has got in the way of blogging. So in lieu of having anything that meaningful to say, and simply to write an enjoyable blog post, I want to blog about the 2021 book pile (excluding my job related reading, which is largely a massive amount of rereading) I'm currently working my way through. These are the books I'm currently working my way through, moving from one to the other, and not the ones I recently finished (such as Dylan Rodríguez's White Reconstruction  and LaRose T. Parris' Being Apart ), since I tend to read multiple books at once. Also, I tend to be a slower reading during work seasons due to work related reading––and also the pandemic has made me slower. Still, I'm enjoying the ongoing process of reading these books and finding interesting connections as I jump back and forth between texts. 1. Epi...