M-L-M Mayhem!

In the wake of the current round of atrocious settler-colonial assaults on the Palestinian people, even the indie media thinks it is important to remind people that any criticism of Israel's genocidal offensive should be balanced against the shibboleth of anti-semitism.  Take, for example, the Huffington Post's recent article about how synagogues in France were attacked and how we need to recognize that anger over Israel's violence should not permit us to become anti-semitic. Well no shit.  I've been part of the pro-Palestinian circles for years, arguing for the importance of recognizing Palestinian self-determination, and have always understood that it should have nothing to do with adopting a backwards anti-semitism in response.  So has the majority of the movement; the fringe conspiracy theorists with anti-semitic overtones were always understood as the fringe, just as Truthers and Illuminati conspiracy theorists have been understood as the fringe of the anti-impe...

The supposed "shock" of the NDP's support of Israel's attack on Gaza is merely an echo of the same shock, experienced by the mainstream left, of the NDP's further shift to the right in the most recent Ontario elections.  More evidence that this party is no longer "left", more horror at being betrayed.  The problem, however, is that the NDP's reinvention of itself as a neoliberal party is less of a betrayal and more of completion of its own logic as a parliamentary bourgeois party.  There will be those who claim that is position on Israel-Palestine now is just the result of its recent shift to the right, but this is merely willful denial of a pre-existing tendency. Let's be clear, Canada is a settler-colonial state as much as it is capitalist and imperialist; these three aspects cannot be divorced and determine the structure of its class struggle.  Since the NDP has been a bourgeois party, even when it was still social democratic, it has alw...

One of my good friends and comrades, knowing that I'm a sci-fi/fantasy geek at heart, recently emailed me a link to the translated file of Kirill Eskov's The Last Ringbearer .  For those who are unaware of this novel, it is to The Lord of the Rings  trilogy what Jean Rhys' Wide Sargasso Sea  was to Jane Eyre  or, more appropriately perhaps, what Gregory Maguire's Wicked  (the novel, not the simplistic musical adaptation) was to The Wizard of Oz .  That is, a political literature of detournement: Rhys wrote the story of the racialized first wife of Rochester, excavating the colonial commitments of British gothic literature; Maguire challenged the colonial and sexist chauvinism of Frank L. Baum (it is worth recalling that this was a man who penned articles about the necessity of extreminating indigenous peoples) by transforming a Wicked Witch into a revolutionary, the Wizard into an imperialist.  Now we have Eskov who, in 1999, wrote a book that was both...

As I noted in an earlier post , all of the things some of us were saying about the NDP's drift to the right during the 2011 Elections Boycott was proved in the 2014 Ontario Provincial elections.  Although some of those leftists who were desperate to cling to the myth that the NDP was somehow a "working class party" then continued to persist with this illusion (coming up with innumerable sophistries to justify this irrational belief), most realized what was happening and could not in good conscience continue to support a party that was barely even social democratic in name.  The problem, however, is that this insight did not permit a break with the ideology of bourgeois democracy amongst the majority of mainstream leftists and left organizations. Take, for example, the Bullet 's recent article, NDP Lurch to the Right Underscores Need for a New Left-wing Party in Canada  by Roger Annis.  Here we have a stunning example of an inability to think outside the box of ...

Finally, after all my complaints about looking for publishers, my first book is being published by the good folks at Kersplebedeb , the press that brought us the RAF books, Sakai's Settlers (the second edition of which will be out soon), Butch Lee's Night Vision , Cope's Divided World Divided Class , Yaki-Sayles' Meditations , and many other amazing radical texts.  Although this book will be released in August, pre-orders are already being taken at the Kersplebedeb online store . The book in question is not the manuscript (which I'm still working on) about the role of philosophy in the shadow of Marx's 11th thesis––a project that I have mentioned at various points on this blog––but a small treatise entitled The Communist Necessity  that is a book length expansion of the essay of the same name that I placed on this blog nearly two years ago.  Since that essay was only 15 pages, and the book version is around 150 pages, the expansion was clearly substantial.  M...