What in the hell …

Rather organizationally specific and certainly too short, but if anyone’s interested a thing I wrote for the IW ended up reprinted at infoshop news here - http://news.infoshop.org/article.php?story=20081015160510410&query=industrial%2Bpower

I’m working on a thing partly about the third poem in this document - http://www.english.uiuc.edu/maps/poets/g_l/Hughes/alabama.htm. It’s weird to be working on a piece of literature. Lots of revision needed, I’ll make those changes right in this post. Feedback welcome. (more…)

This will help you understand the current crisis.

For the rest the only option is very heavy music.

Going to bed in a moment. Was all set and had two thoughts I wanted to type out for expanding on later. One - feminism offers support and a useful reworking of Carl Schmitt’s point that the issue of what counts as political or not is itself political. I have a quote relevant here from Sinha’s book Specters of Mother India that I’ll put up later. Two - both Walter Benjamin and Antonio Negri make rather obscure but still (perhaps strangely) compelling remarks on two different types of time, qualitatively different types. This can be mapped in two ways. One is conceptual - these times are present in the two basic modes of working class life, class-in-itself (variable capital, working class following orders working for the boss) and class-for-itself (working class fighting the boss for more and ultimately fighting for lives not reduced to and hemmed in by work). The second is historical, with a history of each mode of working class life and the relationships between the two.

And now, good night. (Note to self - post notes to students in case anyone can use, and ask for tips on teaching argument construction.)

Been a rough year. Rough few months anyway. Haven’t been feeling so hot. Stepped up physical activity as one piece of self-preservation routine. (Went kayaking today as part of that. Second time ever. First was over 2 years ago. It was hella fun. Some of the views were beautiful. Minneapolis can be spectacular. Muscles feel stiff now, will be sore tomorrow I’m sure.)

Need to refocus. Set priorities. What do I want out of the various things I put time into and that I draw upon? In terms of my reading, writing, thinking - what are the problems I want to work on? what positions do I want to advocate for (or against)? what do I want to understand better? Think this through.

“Are you better off now than you were four years ago?”

I posted a bit ago about how I wanted to know more about the origins of the term proletariat among radical folk. (more…)

Been a bit since I’ve thought about any of this Althusser stuff. I’ve not read near enough of E.P. Thompson. I’ve read more of Althusser, though there’s more I’d like to read (like the Machiavelli book). I’m much more pro-Thompson than Althusser. I find certain uses of Althusser insufferably annoying. Perhaps even pernicious. (more…)

Been a while since I’ve thought about this, never finished this stuff or anything related to it. It’ll be a while yet.

For now, I’d settle for just knowing more about the history of the use of the term on the left. When did it start being used by folk like Marx (the folk Marx read I mean), where did they get it from, what reasoning went into their use of the term, what was the context, etc.