M-L-M Mayhem!

(In lieu of other posts, book reviews are an easier way to keep this blog a-hopping!) I have to say that, aside from the design principles, I have not been a fan of semiotext(e)'s intervention  series.  The Invisible Committee's The Coming Insurrection was made more politically significant by Glenn Beck's ravings than any actual movement––even the bourgeois press that wanted the French state to be correct about its supposed "home grown terrorism" has grudgingly admitted that there wasn't any anarchist conspiratorial actions.  Then there are all of the Tiqqun books, the IC's predecessor, that the series is releasing––annoying trash theory that is sometimes, particularly in the case of Theory of the Young-Girl , just misogynist even though the authors would like to pretend, as is typical of this elitist radicalism, that anyone who would charge them with misogyny "doesn't get it." Excuse me while I stifle a yawn.  All of this being said, Ser...

Polemical essays, due to their angry immediacy, can be easily dismissed by an audience uncomfortable with the subject matter.  Not that this is really a problem: such essays are usually designed to implicate such audiences.  Hence, the essays in Kersplebedeb's recent Bottomfish Blues collection, Amazon Nation or Aryan Nation: white women and the coming of black genocide , will most certainly offend those readers who have no intention of even entertaining the notion that there is such a thing as even a tendency towards black genocide in the everyday operations of US political/economic power. The first two essays of this collection were written in 1989/90, right when the imperialist camp declared capitalism to be the end of history, and were intended to describe the functioning of white power capitalism at the heart of global capitalism.  The first, "Kill the Kids First: the Coming of Black Genocide", already possesses a certain level of notoriety, and was republished...

At this year's Historical Materialism conference at York, though I was unable to attend any panels, I had the pleasure of visiting the book table shared by Kersplebedeb and PM Press so as to hang out with the representative of the former.  As some of my readers might know, I have been an avid reader of the titles printed by Kersplebedeb and have reviewed some of them on this blog: Butch Lee and Red Rover's Night Vision , Zak Cope's Divided World, Divided Class  ( twice , in fact), James Yaki Sayles' Meditations on Frantz Fanon's Wretched of the Earth , and J. Sakai's Settlers .  Those familiar with the press will also be aware that it has, among other things, published Kevin "Rashid" Johnson's Defying the Tomb  as well as, jointly with PM, the RAF: A Documentary History  series.  As a leftist academic who has always been drawn to subterranean marxist traditions I have found the work of Kersplebedeb refreshing, often an enjoyable break from the innu...

Despite my (apparently failed) attempts to be nuanced, I still keep encountering complaints about my supposed anti-intellectualism.  Such complaints, which most probably ignore an old post I wrote about anti-intellectual Marxism , rely on those other posts I have written about the ways in which Marxist academics are able to resign themselves to capitalism , the petty-bourgeois nature of capitalist academia (particularly first world capitalist academia), and other similar problems.  Indeed, the first time I posted something about Marxist academics "selling out" and the way in which this "selling out" tends to happen, a popular leftist website––that shall remain unnamed so as to avoid a flame war––decided to inform me that I must not be aware of the casualization of academic labour, the supposed proletarianization of academics, and all the things that I knew better than the complainer because, unlike them, I was (and am) a casualized, contract academic labourer who ha...

After my most recent post I realized, and not for the first time, how annoyed I get by the discourse that "capitalism doesn't work."  This is because I hold that capitalism works very well according to its intrinsic logic and that is this logical working-out of capitalism that needs to be rejected: it works and what it accomplishes is its problem, not its failure to accomplish its logical aims.  Although this annoyance is mainly driven by some desire for philosophical precision, and thus carries problems that might be distant from the tactical use of the discourse, I do feel that is for the most part justified. To be fair, when some people raise the slogan "capitalism isn't working" they are not arguing that there is a gap between capitalism's logic and implementation.  Usually they mean that capitalism isn't working for  people, that it is not working in the service of humanity as a whole.  Sometimes they might be attacking the most asinine capit...