M-L-M Mayhem!

A common adage about the "alt-right" repeated ad nauseum on social media by liberal journalists and alt-right trolls themselves is that its emergence has a lot to do with angry online leftists, particularly the "Social Justice Warriors" (SJWs), as well as call-out culture, identity politics, virtue signalling, etc. The assumption here is that most of these new white supremacists wouldn't have existed if they weren't dog-piled by self-righteous SJWs or anti-oppression university academics: these alienated young whites could have been won over if they had been treated differently, and it is in fact the committed anti-capitalist broad left that is at fault for the resurgence of white supremacy not the white supremacists themselves. In some ways this reads like a new version of the horse-shoe theory and, like the horse-shoe theory, it is thoroughly unscientific. To be fair, I get the concern of the more well-meaning individuals who make this claim. They wonder...

I have been called a "propagandist" a number of times due to my political commitments. This blog,  The Communist Necessity , and especially Continuity & Rupture  have been treated as philosophy masquerading as propaganda by more than one reader who, aware of my organizational activities, recognized that my work also functioned to justify and signal-boost these activities. Like I had a doctorate in propaganda instead of a doctorate in philosophy, that all my academic training resulted in becoming a simple propagandist. Originally this charge annoyed me. After all, it was not as if I arrived at my organizational commitments in an empty-headed manner; it was my training, along with my practical experiences, that led me to embrace Maoism and the requirements of Maoism. What I would write and publish later was simply a reflection of the many arguments I had with myself and others much earlier, the culmination of holding my life and my position in this world under the magnify...

Now that it has been a little over half a year since Continuity & Rupture was released I think it is time to do another post about this book. There are several reasons for this new round of shameless self-promotion: i) I recently signed a contract for another manuscript (details to follow at an unspecified future date – enjoy the mystery!) so I'm thinking about the reception of previous work; ii) though Austerity Apparatus is my latest, Continuity & Rupture remains the more rigorous work that is centered between Austerity Apparatus and The Communist Necessity ; iii) sales for Continuity & Rupture have been quite good for a piece of uber-left non-fiction; iv) while the reception of C&R has been generally good, when it hasn't critiques have tended to misrepresent the book. The fourth of these above points is the most salient because, as faithful readers will be aware, I tend to get extremely annoyed when readers misrepresent what I produce. Although it is ...