Public Service Announcement: "Selling Out"!!!!

Although I plan to write a follow up post to my recent entry on Gramsci soon, I would like to interrupt the MLM Mayhem broadcast to bring you, the readers, a Public Service Announcement.  Not that I have any illusions about providing a public service; this is more like a public announcement about services I want to, um, provide for myself.  That is, I've been seriously considering the possibility of monetizing this blog and/or adding some sort of paypal donate-to-me link.

Yes, yes, I know that this is a possible lapse of revolutionary discipline on my part.  "He's thinking of selling out," you may say and in this you might be correct, though I doubt such a manner of selling out will be entirely lucrative.  I am thinking of doing such a dastardly act of money grubbing because, well, there are bills to be paid and I am not a lifestyle anarchist who believes that getting money to pay said bills is essentially evil.  My job situation is currently (and has been for the past two years and a half) extremely precarious and, since I am about to become a father (in September!), this precarity is becoming more and more frightening.

This is you screaming at me.

Currently I work as a casualized university employee who has to reapply for contract jobs every school semester while searching for a more secure job.  This blog is mainly an act of love, where half-baked and semi-academic ideas either go to die or find life, the labour of which is performed in the wee hours of the night/morning around and betwixt my precarious job(s) and attempts to find non-precarious job(s).  Now that I have an average of a 1000 readers a day (who would have ever thought that a blog with a shitty name and URL that is Maoist for crying out loud could end up with this many readers!), it would be nice if this traffic translated into some sort of help-me-live scenario.  I mean, if I was a published dead tree marxist author with this sort of audience I would be getting some sort of returns for my labour.


Unfortunately, although I probably have a larger readership than a lot of academic marxists who are not Zizek, I do not have a publishing deal.  I suspect this is because leftist presses, academic or otherwise, are run by either trotskyists or anarchists and thus, on principle, would never consider publishing a dodgy maoist.  Let's face it: when it comes to hip leftist books, maoism just isn't cool these days––unless, of course, you're Badiou and can make it seem cool with set theory.  But hey leftist book publishers, if any of you are amongst my readership and want to prevent me from bastardizing this blog with monetization and/or paypal, then go right ahead and offer to publish either my doctoral dissertation (it's on anti-colonial theory!) or this other non-fiction book I'm working on about the philosophy of marxism.

I thought not

Just look at it this way… You pay about––what?––a dollar something for your morning coffee?  So why not donate the same amount to this blog, once in a while and only if you can, in appreciation for the brain caffeine I sometimes provide.  Or, if reading this blog is your guilty pleasure because you're an anti-communist who feels that maoism is going to rot your brain but for some reason you're addicted, then donate the equivalent of whatever crack costs in your neck of the global woods.  Or, if you're just a bored reader who finds my blog mediocre but interesting, feel free to treat me like that busker in your local subway station mangling a 90s alterna-rock song and donate your pocket change out of sheer pity.

Obviously I haven't yet monetized or paypaled this blog; at this point I am merely being hypothetical.  (Again, I wait on you leftwing publisher readers who may or may not be out there to consider stooping to the level of publishing a maoist and thus save yet another progressive blogger from propositioning a most probably unwaged readership!)  Furthermore, if I do decide to sell out in this manner and, by some miracle, figure out this paypal shit, then I won't at all expect those blogosphere comrades who are jobless and in a worse situation than myself to donate shit.  Clearly it should function under some each-according-to-their-means principle.

Furthermore, it would be nice to get some input regarding this possibility of "selling out" from my general readership.  In all honesty, if I receive an avalanche of private emails or comments expressing outrage––if you the faithful reader curses at me for even considering this possibility––then I probably won't go forward with these dodgy plans.  No point in alienating my readership, even if it turns out that all of you are f@¢%ing lifestyle anarchists.  Also, if I end up monetizing and it turns out I'm advertising for services and corporations that are more dodgy than usual (no, I don't have a scientific assessment of what this means), or it makes this blog more clunky than usual, the monetization venture will end.

In any case, let me know what you think, either privately or on the public comment string, as I consider how to get some sort of monetary compensation for this beloved but unwaged labour.