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 traditio…

Back during the 2008-2009 strike at York University, when I was walking the picket line as a Teaching Assistant and just a year away from completing my PhD, there were graduate students in my department who refused to participate. Not only because they refused to see themselves as workers (and instead believed in the "respectability" of being philosophy graduate students) but because they felt that their individual rationality, granted to them by studying philosophy, meant that they were experts in all areas of thought, even those they had done little to no research in. One student whose area was the philosophy of mind thus declared that the strike was "irrational" merely because he thought it was irrational. When asked about the meaning of a union, his understanding of what strikes were, and even basic information about what that strike concerned, he had nothing substantial to say except to repeat the talking points of anti-union columnists in a right wing newspap…

With the Inquiry on Murdered and Missing Indigenous Women and Girls (MMIWG) having released its final report, a not so curious and all too predictable phenomenon has manifested in the general Canadian public. Despite the fact that the Inquiry used the term genocide, and connected the tragedy of MMIWG to colonialism, politicians, journalists, pundits, social networking personalities, the "average Canadian citizen", and even some self-proclaimed "leftists" are loudly proclaiming this tragedy is not genocidal and ignoring what it would mean to recognize its connection with colonialism. This was predictable because the same groups of people (and indeed some of the identical individuals) made similar proclamations when the Truth and Reconciliation Committee that investigated the Residential School system also used the word genocide and implicated Canadian settler-colonialism.

Although it is important, maybe even monumental, that the Inquiry the Liberals set in motion an…

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 rhetoric…

Recently, after yet another re-read of Lenin's State and Revolution, I found myself thinking about that post-Marxist/post-Heideggerian concept of "sovereignty" received from Agamben (with some origin in Foucault) that has become doctrine for so many social theorists. Not that I haven't thought about this concept––or the way it has been linked to conceptions of biopolitics, governmentality, control, etc.––or bothered to think this concept before. I have taught it when I have had to teach those thinkers that use it, I have criticized it, and often I have dismissed it altogether. It's just that––and bear with me here because this will be a loosely structured meditation/intervention rather than the rigorous essay it deserves and that I might write at a later date––I haven't directly thought "sovereignty" in relation to Lenin's theoretical work on the state.


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Some background: I return to classics such as State and Revolution quite frequently. Lenin i…

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 academ…