born in the mid-90s in Detroit at a time when the traces of it as a previous industrial powerhouse had completely disappeared. One of six brothers, Denning was the only to strike out on a political path. He worked briefly in the Chrysler Mack plant on the city’s east side where he became interested in the question of how labor’s circumstances became so dire. He first read the Detroit labor radicals – the Boggses, Babson, Widick, among others – until he realized that labor might not ever recover from the absolute beating it took from the state and employers in the 1970s and 1980s. Where to turn? First toward one sectarian Trotsky organization, then another, until he became disillusioned with their obsession with old questions and old strategies. He entered the academy in the late-2010s in an effort to pursue lingering intellectual interests amid a flatly dead political scene. He’d hoped to read Du Bois, Marx, Luxemburg, and Harold Cruse but was instead inundated with Butler and Hartman and scholars revealing the many ‘indigenous ways of knowing’. More disappointing was the intellectual milieu: scholars lying about what they’ve read; stupiod phrases like ‘my work sits at the intersection of…’. He is now effectively in exile from academia, living in his hometown where instead of working on his dissertation he marvels at the works of the greatest British intellectual of the second half of the twentieth century, wondering how that guy constantly reads and constantly writes. The dissertation will get done, he assures, but he much prefers if the whole academic enterprise came crumbling to the floor. It is well on its way. He will keep you updated on his progress in the meantime.
