What in the hell …

I ran across this article, “Toward a Breakdown of the Capitalist Subject?” via a post at Jodi’s. I think the piece is inadequate and evidences a widespread and mistaken understanding of capitalism which overemphasizes the sphere of circulation; this is common in conversations that conflate (anti-)capitalism with (anti-)neoliberalism. (more…)

I took a whole mess of notes on Don Hamerquist’s recent essay on Lenin and contemporary radical organization. Then I beat those notes into a slightly less jumbled thing, trying to work out what I think is going on in the piece and what I think of it.

The essay is doing a lot. (more…)

There’s an essay on that topic by Don Hamerquist here. Definitely worth a look, as are the responses. I took notes on a printout of the essay, I’m working on typing them up in the body of this post, when I’m done I need to read over all these notes and see what, if anything, they add up to, then I’d like to bang them into a more concise and coherent reply to at least some parts of the essay. (Don suggested I might do something that “extends Wetzel’s response in relationship to “autonomy for mass organizations”" and asked about my views “on democracy, participation, consciousness, and organization in terms of revolutionary strategy.”)

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This old post over at Jim’s music blog reminded me that I want to write about singing to my daughter. Jim’s post is about the Dismemberment Plan. Despite the fact that I don’t have their first record - actually, I don’t even know how many records they have, I have two of them - I consider them one of my favorite bands. I love how off-kilter the music is, and yet strangely no off-kilter. I love the dissonance, and I love the melodies, and I love how sometimes the dissonance resolves into melodies and sometimes it doesn’t. I also love the singing. I sometimes sing “Life of Possibilities” to my daughter. (more…)

During my baby induced blogging hiatus I thought a lot about the blog, in part because the blog is a bit of a habit and stopping or suspending a habit usually leads me to think about (but only sometimes to reflect on) that habit. One of the things I thought I’d like to do is to write regularly about parenting. I’ve gotten more comfortable over time talking about my personal life and so on here but remain a bit hesitant for whatever reason. Anyway, I want write more about being a dad. For now the plan is to sometimes just set a fifteen minute timer (literally if necessary) and free write about parenting. (more…)

I’ve had all this common/commons stuff on my mind lately (I got some links to toss in here later, they’re on another computer). A while back when I was doing a bit of reading on slavery in the US it struck me that slave labor at least some of the time involved an ongoing use by slaveholders of land which slaves held in common, in a sense. That is, slave owners could offload reproductive costs and so forth onto slaves, cheapening the cost of maintaining slaves. (In my opinion one of the many things that’s interesting about the history of slavery - really, the history of any forms of exploitation - is how it can clarify one’s marxism.) At this level of generality, this is what goes on with waged labor as well - we reproduce ourselves day to day and year to year and many of us reproduce in the sense of having children, thus making more workers. We don’t do so in order to enrich anyone monetarily, but we still produce life and lives appropriated under capitalism. (more…)

okay so I got home kinda late from a work thing and my wife was a bit frazzled cuz the baby had been crying a lot and the dog needed to go out and my wife wanted to walk around anyway to decompress so after a while I held the baby and my wife had the dog and the leash and we walked up the street outside. The baby fell asleep. It was nice, we went like 3 blocks up.

On the way back at the corner right by our place while I was entering the crosswalk this white convertible went by and threw something and hit me in the foot. It felt like a snowball. I sort of lost it. I ran into the street part way then followed the car, bellowing at the top of my lungs “I’ve got a fucking baby in my fucking arms motherfuckers” or something to that effect. I kept going up the street to see where they went and I called the cops, a futile effort.

I know, just some idiot teenagers fucking around. If I’d had a gun I’d totally have shot them, I had this like gut level “you remotely threaten my baby I’ll kill your fucking family” reaction.

And so, here’s my argument in favor of gun control.
1. The kids today! Bastards!
2. ARGH KILL SMASH DESTROY!
3. Therefore, making available the means to kill people in fits of strong emotion is a bad idea.

I’m still in prefatory mode with regard to the reading group on chapter 25 of v1 of Capital. Duncan and NP have kicked things off good and proper with posts on chapter 25. There’s been some particularly substantial discussion at Duncan’s, I need to re-read it soon when I’ve had more sleep than I did during my first read through. Check it out.

Like I said, I’m in prefatory mode still. This post is my notes on chapter 24. Chapter 25 next, soon-ish. (more…)