M-L-M Mayhem!

Ever since I wrote the rather polemical blog post Whose Speech and For Whom  four years ago I have been receiving, whenever it is reshared each year, complaints from people amongst the left who really want to preserve the liberal notion of free speech and completely misunderstand the motivation of the post in question.  Of course it doesn't help that this post is taken for some kind of total legislation against free speech/expression by those who have a monolithic conception of capitalism, but this is only a secondary problem considering that the offended parties, if they bothered to really read this article and similar ones, wouldn't be writing me asinine complaints about how I don't understand the importance of free speech.  How I am undermining the very existence of this blog by supposedly claiming I have no right to freely complain about free speech when I am freely speaking. How I benefit from free speech.  And etc. At this point I'm becoming rather annoyed by...

I'm slowly struggling through my reading list. That is, I'm getting to all those books that I've had on the back-burner for over a year, that I keep accumulating, but that I can only slowly get to due to: a) all the other books that have accumulated first; b) the stuff I have to read because of my job. Summers are always easier, because that's usually a period when I'm on EI, and so it won't be too long before I can eliminate a large swathe of my reading list. Generally my readings follow a particular instrumental hierarchy: texts connected to my organizational life (whether they be essays, position papers, or books), texts connected to my job (whether they be course material or student papers – argh Hegel's Philosophy of Right  again and hundreds of essays!), texts that are related to whatever paper or manuscript I'm working on, texts that follow the rule of my reading cue when this cue does not prioritize the previous categories. In any case, when it...

I probably should have made this available days ago, since the copy-editing was finished a day after Chapter 2 was downloaded, but my initial plan was to have another post finished on the whole "free speech" topic (based on all the recently weird and liberal comments that have appeared on my old posts on this topic, and the misunderstandings generated by those old polemic entries) between this serialized mini-manual's entries.  Moreover, and I'll write more on this later, one of my manuscripts was accepted for publication by Zero Books and I have a Monday deadline to prepare said manuscript into the publisher's format guidelines so it can go to the editor––this has dominated my free this week and will also over-determine my weekend. Here is the Table of Contents with the entries to date: Introduction Chapter One: The Meaning of Dialectical Materialism Chapter Two: Dialectical Logic Defined Chapter Three: Pseudo-dialectics Chapter Four: Unity of Opposit...

Keeping with my promise to make my unpublished draft manuscript about dialectical materialism–– Torsion & Tension ––available as a serial, I have copy-edited and prepared the second chapter, turned it into a PDF, and provided the download link at the bottom of this post.  This chapter is called "Dialectical Logic Defined" and it is focused on looking at the simplest definition of dialectical logical, while relating it to analytical logic. As noted in previous posts about this retired manuscript, there are aspects about this project that I'm now ambiguous about.  One of the things that bothers me here, though I did try to account for this bothersomeness in the draft a little bit, is the way in which I represent dialectics according to the formalization of analytical logic.  Although I did qualify that it was a crude analogy, and that you really can't formalize dialectics in the same way, I'm unsure now if I should have just dropped this attempt from the get-g...

Due to the frenetic need, in the face of capitalism's current crisis, for the ruling class to reinforce the ideology that capitalism is the end of history––that nobody should even think about communism––the Spectator has recently argued that " Britain needs a museum of communist terror ."  Not only do they join the ranks of other ruling class attempts to decide on the memory of anti-capitalist resistance , there is something creepily ironic about this latest presumption about the "massive death toll" of communism.  The article's picture of stacked skulls, the notorious image of the Khmer Rouge's "Killing Fields" says it all: while I'm not interested in defending the Khmer Rouge (my thoughts on them are best represented by this AWTW article ), it's a little weird that a British museum wants to go all "skull crazy" about the victims of communism. This was the image from the Spectator article. The weirdness and irony lies i...

Although I'll be posting the next entry in Torsion and Tension  soon, since it's hard to find the time to even do copy-editing, I feel it's worth posting an article of mine that was recently published in the Socialist Studies Journal, Quartermasters of Stadiums and Cemeteries .  As faithful readers of this blog will be aware, I have posted often about the problematic of revolutionary strategy.  So here is a more rigorous engagement with this problematic. Neat looking: 1st article by Himani Bannerji! Abstract:  In this article I examine the problematic of revolutionary strategy and how it is under-theorized at the centres of global capitalism, often confused with the theory of organization.  Arguing that the theory of insurrection is often and uncritically accepted as normative, I discuss the necessity of returning to a critical engagement with the theory of strategy in the context of a modern capitalist military.  By examining Karl Liebknecht's exami...