History of capitalism

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Apr 5
30 min

The rise of right-wing libertarianism since the 1950s

Sometimes as I read books I like to simultaneously summarize them in my own words, to facilitate the intellectual digestion. And also to...

Sep 24, 2020
4 min

A despairing rant

These are interesting times. We have the "privilege" to be living in the era when centuries of capitalist evolution are approaching their...

Sep 11, 2020
35 min

The history of tax increment financing in Chicago

Here's a very dry paper I wrote for a class in 2012. I thought I should know more about urban public policy, so I decided to research the...

Sep 10, 2020
12 min

DuBois's "Black Reconstruction"

W. E. B. DuBois’s great work Black Reconstruction in America: 1860-1880, published in 1935, isn’t a very easy read. But it’s important as...

Sep 8, 2020
22 min

From Steve Fraser's "The Age of Acquiescence"

I just finished reading Steve Fraser's masterful The Age of Acquiescence (2014), which compares the popular responses to America's two...

Sep 5, 2020
5 min

The commodification of education

David Noble's essay "Digital Diploma Mills," written in the 1990s, is a brilliant and still timely critique of the automation and...

Sep 4, 2020
39 min

The Workers' Bill

Here's the last section of chapter 6 of my dissertation on the unemployed in Chicago during the Depression. The previous two sections are...

Sep 3, 2020
66 min

On the Unemployed Councils and the Chicago Workers' Committee

The last chapter of my dissertation on the unemployed in Chicago during the Great Depression is, I think, more interesting than the...

Aug 23, 2020
36 min

The radical dimensions of mass consciousness, part 2

Here's the sequel to this post, on my preference for anti-Gramscianism. It's from the last chapter of my Ph.D. thesis. I'm putting it on...

Aug 23, 2020
51 min

The radical dimensions of mass consciousness, part 1

I'm kind of a "vulgar Marxist." In this respect, I suppose I'm a lot like people in the American ruling class, except that their values...

Aug 21, 2020
56 min

Homeless men in the Great Depression

Here's another over-long blog post. It's a chapter from my dissertation, on homeless men during the Great Depression. I'm not sure it's...

Aug 17, 2020
7 min

Fragments on Marxism and anarchism

April 2010.— One of the advantages of Marx’s equation of progress with the expansion of productive capacity is that it provides a clear...

Aug 5, 2020
6 min

Thoughts on classical fascism

[Student notes from ten years ago.] Reading Robert A. Brady’s classic Business as a System of Power (1943), which influenced Chomsky....

Jun 26, 2020
8 min

Capitalism and colonialism

As I constantly and tiresomely reiterate, academic writing tends toward sophistry, superficiality, and obscurantism. Personally, my...

Jun 9, 2020
8 min

Old syllabus and lecture notes

[Here are some notes from the first syllabus I wrote for the U.S. History After 1865 survey course. Below them are overly ambitious notes...

Jul 30, 2019
18 min

Notes on a radical interpretation of the Cold War

[Also here]. I’ve been reading Gabriel and Joyce Kolko’s classic The Limits of Power: The World and United States Foreign Policy, 1945–54...

Jul 22, 2019
10 min

Marxist theories of imperialism

[Years ago I took notes on the book mentioned below, which I thought I'd post here for the heck of it. Maybe someone will find them...

Dec 13, 2018
5 min

100 (more or less) left-wing books

Here's a list of some good leftist books I've come across over the years. Click on the titles for the PDFs. It's a somewhat arbitrary...

Dec 4, 2018
3 min

Notes on Indian resistance to the Spanish empire

With regard to the period between the 1530s and 1640s, the great Marxian historian Steve Stern divides the economic system that prevailed...

Jul 25, 2018
8 min

Grad-school notes on Populism and Progressivism

In The Populist Vision, Charles Postel argues persuasively that Populism, the greatest popular movement in American history, should not...

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Wright's Writing