Mike Harman's blog

I recently read Cedric J. Robinson's Black Marxism, the Making of the Black Radical Tradition, here's some quick notes.

In critiquing Silvia Federici's Caliban and the Witch Gilles Dauvé highlights limitations in his own conception of the creation of the proletariat internationally, and his understanding of Marx’s work on slavery. These limitations are not unique to Dauvé, but as someone libcom cites as an influence, especially due to his insistence on the proletariat as a negative rather than positive category, and who has been influential on the communisation tendency generally, we should expect better.

Nagle's poorly sourced book on the online culture wars includes a copy and pasted definition of a fascist ideology and misrepresents non-binary genders.

One of the stranger developments of the past five years has been the resurrection of the word tankie. It's time for an explainer.

From the end of the Second World War until the mid-'60s there was a wave of strikes in British East and West Africa, French West Africa, South Africa and Zimbabwe. The history of this class struggle has been neglected by both mainstream historians and most revolutionary tendencies based in Europe and the US.

School students in the US are organising a national high school walk out against gun violence on 20th April, the 19th anniversary of the Columbine shooting.

Paul Mason's response to BAE job losses has been to promote a 'left-wing' brand of militarism, summing up many of the problems facing the UK left as it coalesces around the Labour Party, and the limits of this politics as it approaches the reality of state power.

Looting is a rational response to disaster situations and price gouging. Liberals would prefer people to dehydrate, starve, or drown, while food rots underwater.

When criticism of ‘identity politics’ is just an argument for class representation under capitalism.

In recent days, my twitter feed has contained many calls for accountability, and a smaller number of people describing those calls as ‘unreasonable’, ‘impossible’ or ‘grotesque’. We may publish a blog post about the specific events, but for now I want to talk about a case where the libcom collective was ‘held to account’ and how we responded to it.

Some things should have been left in 2011, the mystifying 99 percent slogan is one.