Postliberals against the common good
[Published at Common Dreams.] “The Republican Party is the most dangerous organization in human history,” says Noam Chomsky. It seems...
top of page
Wright's Writing
Search
- Sep 6
- 8 min
Nikole Hannah-Jones, Frederick Douglass, and the Left
[Published at Dissident Voice and other places.] Twitter conversations with public intellectuals are rarely worthy of note, but a recent...
- May 18
- 9 min
Love of freedom defines the political left, not the right
[This article was published at Sublation and other venues.] Political discourse in the United States consists largely of lies and...
- May 2
- 9 min
What “security threat” does China pose?
[This article was published at Common Dreams.] Everyone who abhors war, detests imperialism, and favors cooperation between nations on...
- Apr 21
- 7 min
The second Cold War is more dangerous than the first
[Published in Compact magazine.] Twenty years ago, Noam Chomsky published a bestselling book called Hegemony or Survival. Since then, the...
- Apr 19
- 4 min
The left and the war in Ukraine
[Published at Common Dreams.] To be a leftist in the United States is a dispiriting experience, but in the last year one of the more...
- Mar 11
- 26 min
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...
- Feb 25
- 7 min
How to rebuild the left
[Published in Dissident Voice.] One might as well state the matter clearly: given the realities of global warming, rampant environmental...
- 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
- 2 min
A free copy of my book
Last summer 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...
bottom of page