What in the hell …

I have a thing for old pamphlets. Occasionally when I have the cash I’ll get one or two off the interweb, related to a subject matter or group I’m interested in. I have a few about Italian stuff in the 70s. (more…)

Marcos, excerpt 3. (more…)

Marcos piece, excerpt 2. (more…)

A friend sent me a recent piece by Subcomandante Marcos. (more…)

I took these notes on a scrap of paper at a coffee shop this afternoon during a needed break from reading. Via the coffeeshop speakers Tom Petty crooned, over over the drumnbass and Fugazi in my headphones, “there ain’t no easy way out,” an instance of pop music truth to rival any others I can think of. (more…)

The Tronti symposium has started at Long Sunday. Jon’s contribution has started a bit of discussion on what Tronti means by the term ‘intellectual’. That’s actually one of the terms I planned to use this blog to get my head clearer on when I initially set this thing up. Haven’t done so yet. (more…)

I don’t like ideology critique. I generally find it underwhelming, and suspect there’s a lingering idealism at work there, of the sort that implicitly holds to one or more of the following: “X idea in the mind of Y means Z act will follow”,”Changing Z circumstance requires instilling W idea in the mind of Y”, and “Instilling W idea in the mind requires U discursive act (defined as the exchange of the propositional contents of sentences)”. None of that strikes me as very compelling, and it also can easily imply a sort of “one road to revolution only” kind of attitude (and, more importantly, that road is not mine!) and a “people are dupes” kind of attitude. The combination of these two is part of why there seems to be an overlap (though by no means an identity) between the populations of self-important asshole intellectual bullies and Marxists. (more…)