Dusk in Vietnam
[This is a short story I wrote twenty years ago after visiting Vietnam for a couple of weeks. It starts with a dream and ends with...
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Wright's Writing
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- Feb 25
- 7 min
How to rebuild the left
[Published in Dissident Voice because no one else would publish it, since today's "leftists" aren't really leftists. Common sense is...
- Feb 3
- 21 min
The righteous outrage of Norman Finkelstein
[A book review published at Common Dreams.] As I was reading Norman Finkelstein’s new book, I’ll Burn That Bridge When I Get to It!:...
- Jan 31
- 55 min
The Book of Joe: A Satire of Capitalist Society
Here's an insanely long post. It's actually a "literary experiment" I wrote almost twenty years ago (as the following preface says, which...
- Nov 4, 2022
- 22 min
Only class struggle can save the left
[This article was published at Sublation.] A striking paradox of the history of the left is that it is full of self-defeat. From the...
- Sep 25, 2022
- 3 min
A free copy of my book
In June I published the book version of my Ph.D. dissertation, bearing the ungainly title Popular Radicalism and the Unemployed in...
- Aug 31, 2022
- 19 min
"Race reductionism" threatens to doom the left
[This article was published at Sublation magazine.] The reparations debate is getting old. But it shows little sign of abating. Academic...
- Aug 9, 2022
- 13 min
The myth of the "moderate" American
[This article was published at Compact magazine.] In the United States there exists today, and has existed since at least the 1950s, a...
- Jul 30, 2022
- 7 min
Classical music vs. mediocrity
On one side is the mediocrity of all functionaries. All bureaucrats. There’s no point in my writing about bureaucrats in the ordinary...
- Jul 29, 2022
- 8 min
Organized labor and the crisis of democracy
[This article was published at CommonDreams.org.] We live in a time when it’s become a boring cliché to say that democracy is under...
- Jun 13, 2022
- 30 min
Origins of the European state system
Reading Charles Tilly’s classic Coercion, Capital, and European States, AD 990–1992 (1992). Taking notes on it for myself, but also for...
- Jun 4, 2022
- 12 min
America's use of the atomic bomb on Japan
A long time ago I posted some thoughts on America's use of the atomic bomb at the end of World War II. I happen to be reading parts of...
- Jun 1, 2022
- 24 min
Critical thoughts on feminism and social constructionism
On various pages of this website and blog I've criticized some of the dogmas of feminism, for instance the social constructionist dogmas...
- May 29, 2022
- 8 min
Vivek Chibber's defense of materialism
[This is a review published at H-Socialisms.] Vivek Chibber. The Class Matrix: Social Theory after the Cultural Turn. Harvard University...
- Apr 8, 2022
- 9 min
On stupidity and the excesses of wokeness
One of the first laws of human existence, or at least of existence in class societies (determined by anti-human institutions that mold...
- Oct 10, 2021
- 9 min
Resisting fascism (a book review)
[This review was published at H-Socialisms.] The elevation of Donald Trump onto the national political stage in 2016 provoked a heated...
- Sep 8, 2021
- 11 min
Excerpts from "Battle Cry of Freedom"
In an effort to escape the dreary drumbeat of daily news, I'm reading James McPherson's mammoth Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era...
- Sep 1, 2021
- 4 min
The "paradox" of American freedom and slavery
[Old student notes on the early United States.] Quoting Edmund Morgan, in his famous 1972 article “Slavery and Freedom: The American...
- Aug 22, 2021
- 16 min
Eleven Theses on Socialist Revolution
The good folks at DSA (of which I'm a proud member) were kind enough to publish the following article recently in their online...
- Jul 10, 2021
- 15 min
Against liberal "pluralism"
In the time of Trumpism, Michael Paul Rogin’s great book The Intellectuals and McCarthy: The Radical Specter (1967) shouldn’t be as...
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