M-L-M Mayhem!

 Jose Maria Sison, affectionately known as Joma, one of the great revolutionary figures of the latter half of the 20th Century, has just passed away. This death follows that of other revolutionaries of the same generation and camp: Comrade Zia in 2020 and Chairman Gonzalo in 2021 . Like them, Joma founded the contemporary revolutionary movement in his country, the Communist Party of the Philippines (CPP) with its New People's Army (NPA). Like them, he was the principle theorist of this revolutionary movement––writing also under the names Amada Guerrero and Armando Liwanag . After the reestablishment of the CPP in 1968, and the First Great Rectification Movement, Joma's leading role in the CPP and its people's war, led to his arrest in 1977 by the Marcos regime. After years in prison and solitary confinement he was released only to be exiled to Utrecht. Meanwhile the CPP/NPA generated new leaderships (and eventually a Second Great Rectification Movement) and Joma, though n...

One of the writing projects I've been working on for years––one that I've mentioned ever since Continuity and Rupture  was published––was a philosophical interrogation of the problematic of economism. Finally, after years of drafting and editing, it is being published by Foreign Languages Press . So much has changed since I first started working on this manuscript to its publication: the PCR-RCP, the vanguard project to which I was dedicated, went through various line struggles until ending in a unity process with other Maoist formations; the field of Maoism on the international level has been riven with its own line struggles (as I outlined in Critique of Maoist Reason ); bourgeois politics in the metropoles has gone through multiple shifts with reactionary elements becoming stronger leading up to a global pandemic where they became more endemic; and my posting here, which at one point of time was regular, has waned. But here we finally have it, Politics In Command , my philos...

 I was unaware of the existence of Renato Flores' article, Disarming the Magic Bullet , until recently, despite the fact that it was written over a year ago. This article purports to be a rejection of Marxism-Leninism-Maoism's status as the current stage of the science of revolution, being a response to a previous article by Cam W., and has a lot to say about what I've supposedly written about Maoism. I write "supposedly", here, because my biggest problem with this article is that, despite referencing my name and work at various points, it does not at any moment actually engage with what I have written. Rather, it seems to engage with an imaginary version of my work––what the author thinks I have written––and due to this kind of engagement ends up mobilizing a number of counter-arguments that either have nothing to do with what I have argued or were in fact counter-arguments I already considered. Flores' article also does the same with Ajith's work––though...

After a long struggle with cancer my friend and comrade, Mateo Andante, has passed. Mateo was a Maoist organizer in LA with a long history of class struggle work. He was also the creator of the Bourgeois Philosophy website and, among many other things, one of my co-authors of  On Necrocapitalism . Although I knew him only through his online presence, long message and email exchanges about politics and philosophy, a blurb he wrote for Demarcation and Demystification , collaboration on the aforementioned necrocapitalism book project, and a joint interview on a podcast resulted in a closer relationship than the relationship I share with some people I know in the offline world.  Months before learning of his passing, I had in fact resigned myself to Mateo's death. At the beginning of December he announced that things were bleak and that his current wave of chemo treatments might not succeed. I did not hear from him for months after this announcement and, having received no replie...

Several months ago one of my best friends showed me an episode of the comedy show Letterkenny where a tiki-torch wielding reactionary, "Hard Right Jay" (played by Jay Baruchel), arrives at the eponymous town and attempts to convince the denizens to be outraged over the fact that a local soccer team is planning to change its racist name ("Chiefs") to something that is more "politically correct." Not only does Hard Right Jay discover that most of the town doesn't give a shit about his cause, and largely has no problem with the reasons for the name change, but the episode ends with the Indigenous characters of the show confronting the attempted racist protest and uniting with other members of the town to punch the nazis. Aside from the awesomeness of celebrating punching nazis in a popular comedy show right after Richard Spencer was punched on camera and liberals got upset about violence directed towards fascists, the depiction of the way in which today...

Whenever there is a political movement our job as anti-capitalists––as communists––is to analyze the class content of the movement. Such an analysis does not mean to examine it according to its appearance but according to its substance: the politics it mobilizes, and thus its dominant political line, and thus its proximity to state power and the ruling class. Moreover, this analysis always needs to take into account the way in which class contradictions are articulated in the social formation in question and the conjuncture of that social formation. If we fail to examine a movement according to its substance (the content as articulated through the class politics it expresses, state proximity, the social formation of the current moment) then we fail to grasp its essential meaning. At best we end up with a poor analysis of what is taking place, and thus a failure to conceptualize a proper response to events; at worst we end up with a mechanical workerist analysis that, taking "class...