M-L-M Mayhem!

When I heard about Amin's death I was on holiday with sporadic online access. This is what I wanted to write seven days ago… When I began my PhD I was still an autonomist Marxist who was under the impression that my doctoral work would have something to do with Deleuze and Guattari, whose work had formed a central part of MA dissertation. But I also felt that something was missing, mainly a thorough understanding of Marxist political economy. Hardt and Negri's Empire  had just been released and, despite my autonomist Marxist sympathies, I felt that there was something fundamentally wrong with the Empire thesis. I could not explain this wrongness in the language of philosophy, not without a proper understanding of political economy, so I knew that I needed to develop my understanding of Marxist economics. Naturally I dove into Capital  but, because I felt I needed a contemporary political economist to help with this exploration, I picked up some books by Samir Amin. ...

Thinking back on this blog from my current perspective and concrete circumstances is difficult. Nearly a decade has transpired since, out of boredom and in the midst of graduate student frustration, I created MLM Mayhem . The name was an afterthought and the the URL ill-considered, the product of someone who wasn't interested in social media savvy and who believed that nobody would read whatever ill-considered thoughts he sent out into the void. (Also the choice of Blogger rather than Wordpress was a poorly reasoned decisioned. To be fair, however, in 2009 Blogger [or, rather, Blogspot ] was the dominant blogging platform.) It was months after my union local's bitter strike of 2008/2009, right when I was engaged in finishing my dissertation, and was conceived of as little more than a space to post random thoughts and frustrations. Hell, my first post was entitled I Hate Nietzsche  and was far from rigorous. Successive posts were either asinine comics made from GPCR clip art o...