M-L-M Mayhem!

It's that time again––that time where I use a post to promote the most popular posts of the year, thus saving me from the hard work of creating something new.  2014 was a year where MLM Mayhem witnessed less posts than usual (around 20 less than 2013), partially because of living disruptions and the fact that we took our daughter out of daycare in September, meaning more domestic responsibilities (a toddler is exhausting!).  There's also the fact that I was able to release a book this year , which also took up a lot of time during the hours I might have spent blogging. I never tire of this shit! In any case, here is a list of the blogposts that were the most popular (and/or controversial) in 2014… 10) The Hard Sell of Revolution in the First World A close contender to an earlier and less popular post about internet leftism , and in some ways a more thorough companion piece to that rant.  After all, as I recall, some people were offended by my post about inter...

So the Seth Rogen and James Franco film, The Interview , will not be released in the theatres this December because hackers .  Boo-fucking-hoo.  The popular, common sense narrative is that this hacking was a DPRK job, but so what?  The film is some asinine comedy about two Americans travelling to North Korea to assassinate Kim Jong Un, replete with the requisite "chinaman" racism (as the trailer made it very clear with its yellow peril "ching-chong-strawhat-buckteeth" chauvinism), and what existent nation would ever tolerate a mainstream and international film promoting it dissolution as a nation?  Can you imagine a film comedically celebrating the assassination of the US president?  You should, because it would be awesome, but the moment you imagine it you would also have to imagine its non-existence, the feds showing up at your door if you were part of such a project, or the country guilty of making such a movie being subjected to sanctions.  Which are f...

The blog Rectification Rumpus Room has written a response to my 10 Theses on Regroupment Politics and, though I usually try not to respond to every provocative bad faith "screw you" polemic, I decided it was worth writing some sort of response.  First of all, the author has accused me of "ruining thinking" in a single post (amusing but rhetorical); secondly they accuse me of being pompous simply because of ten theses designed to be provocative but (like my theses on identity politics ) not to be the be-all-and-end-all of the story; thirdly, because they seem to be someone in my city who has decided (pompously, perhaps?) that they despise the mass orgs I associate with since an earlier post of theirs targets, snidely and dismissively, an advertisement for an RSM study group.  The irony of the third point should be clear: while they accuse me of being opposed to left unity, implying sectarian and all manner of nonsense, it seems as if the blog exists primarily to ...

Due to the default opportunism that festers at the centres of capitalism, organizing in the so-called first world possesses particular challenges that exist as stumbling blocks and/or anti-organizational principles that even the most radical marxist in theory might end up incorporating in their practice.  Whereas the challenges of organizing in the peripheries are indeed monumental––since revolutionaries in these contexts experience the entire brunt of imperialist super-exploitation––the fact that, as Amin once pointed out, the contradictions are clearer in these contexts due to the very fact of super-exploitation means that revolutionary consciousness also possesses a clarity.  A comrade of mine who was politicized in a third world context lamented the fact that his children were not interested in communism, despite his best efforts, whereas he grew up in a context where his entire family was politicized as communists due to their experience. But here, at the centres of ca...

1 The left regroupment strategy is a rightist approach to organization with left costuming.  Although it likes to imagine itself as a "left" alternative to the supposed "rightism" of building the kernel of a revolutionary party that is united in theory in practice, in practice it is a generally conservative theory of organization. The fact that it dares to imagine itself as a strategy of taking state power, when it is simply a theory of developing an organization, demonstrates its conservatism: it cannot think beyond the baby-steps of building a movement and so pretends that these baby-steps amount to revolutionary strategy. 2 Proponents of left regroupment begin with the proposition of a project wherein a vague  communist pole  is hypostatized as a magnet, a position in which to draw in all the fragments of a shattered left who will agree with this project.  The point is to initiate a process, the end goal of which might be a party, and to reject those appro...

EDIT/UPDATE (25/01/2016): When I wrote this it was directly following the Mixon Report and thus was unable to a thorough social investigation beyond what was already written and claimed. Since then I have become convinced that my initial suspicions about the Report's opportunism, and the character of those lining up to punish/silence Sriduangkaew, were not only correct but did not go far enough. Only a few months after I wrote this at least one response to the Mixon Report was written, thus providing me with a bigger picture of the event. Since then (based on investigation, my own experience with Sriduangkaew's blog, interactions with her detractors and Sriduangkaew) I have become convinced that the targeting of Sriduangkaew was not only designed to silence her criticism of an author who was poised to release a best-selling work that was extremely orientalist (Tricia Sullivan's Shadowboxer ), but was isometric to the open reactionary politics expressed by the "Puppies...

There are now a number of reviews of my book, The Communist Necessity , that have thankfully proven it has not been greeted with silence.  Although two of these reviews, to date, have been completely negative, four of them have not, even if they have been critical about certain aspects of my treatise.  But as the adage goes, no press is bad press––and so I am thankful for even the negative reviews, as baseless as I feel these reviews might be.  In any case, for those who have not yet read my book––or for those who have read it and might still be convinced to write a review––I am going to use this post to provide something of a map of the reviews to date, as well as providing two PDFs of my responses to those reviews that I felt were extremely problematic. 1) The Good Four of the six reviews that exist so far have been generally positive, though still critical.  Of course, I am happy that they are critical; the different criticisms they have raised have co...