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...