M-L-M Mayhem!

Having lost the US election to Trump reactionism, rather than recognize their role in the reemergence of fascism the Democrats have resorted to magical thinking. Rather than realizing they were part of the problem of fascism––that they enabled Trump, that they were part of the settler-garrison racist ethos that is USAmerica and thus presented not even the ghost of a marginal alternative––the Democrats resorted to conspiracy theories about Russian hacking. As one of my good friends joked, the neo-liberals that once prided themselves in their hawkish realism have taken to bandying about the kind of conspiracy theory crackpot explanations that they always accused Republicans of making. Anything but realize that there is something deeply wrong with US democracy and the USAmerican project. This magical thinking is all the more ludicrous since, like most conspiracy theories, it is necessarily ineffective. Trump will still be inaugurated in a few days, the liberals will crow about foreign h...

The Toronto launch of Continuity and Rupture  yesterday evening went better than expected. Indeed, I was quite surprised by the turn out and support. Although this is my second book, and so I should be a little familiar with launches, since C&R  was shorter than The Communist Necessity , less a polemic and more of a rigorous examination of Marxism-Leninism-Maoism, and the result of three years of writing and rewriting, I was far more anxious about its reception. Moreover, the DIY aesthetic of my first Toronto book launch (it happened in the back room of a bar) made it feel less official and thus less nerve-wracking than this one which happened in Toronto's oldest still operating independent book store. Hence, I feel that I need to deliver an extended thank-you to the people who made yesterday night's event a success. First of all, I want to thank Another Story Book Store  that took a chance on me and provided a comfortable launch space. Another Story  has been ...

Continuing the serial of my pamphlet on bourgeois free speech, I'm posting the link to its second chapter. This chapter concerns the boundaries of free speech, the metaphor of the marketplace of ideas, the supposed "black market of ideas" that is used in anti-censorship discourses, and the free market logic behind this liberal discourse. It leads up to the concept of the harm principle which will be discussed in the following chapter. Download Right Against Right (Chapter 2)

Now that it 2016 has passed it is time for my traditional "best of" article where I catalogue the most popular posts of the year. These might not be the best posts in my opinion, but they are the ones that have been most read. This time from most to least popular. 1. the Torsion & Tension  serial : Since all of these entries on my unpublished draft manuscript about dialectical materialism had roughly the same amount of hits, I'm including them as a single category. As I noted in my explanation of this serialized manuscript, it was a flawed project that I halted after the initial draft because I wasn't necessarily in agreement with many of its claims but still felt that it possessed some important aspects for understanding materialist dialectics. 2. Legislation of Liberal Discourse : Yet another post on the bourgeois convention of free speech, this one based on the ways in which my previous posts were misunderstood. It is in fact this post that necessitated le...