Sep 8, 202111 minExcerpts 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, 20214 minThe "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, 202116 minEleven Theses on Socialist RevolutionThe good folks at DSA (of which I'm a proud member) were kind enough to publish the following article recently in their online...
Jun 26, 202149 minOn the inhumanity of Illinois's government in the 1930sIn case anyone is interested in the history of the Great Depression, particularly in Chicago, here's an excerpt from a chapter of my...
Jun 22, 202112 minThe secret history of automationHere are some notes on an unjustly neglected book by the great Marxist David F. Noble (social historian of technology) called Progress...
Jun 11, 202174 minMarxism and the solidarity economyAnother excessively long blog post. I recently published a long article ("Marxism and the Solidarity Economy: Toward a New Theory of...
Jun 10, 202122 minIntroduction to my forthcoming bookIf all goes well, I'll be publishing a book sometime in the not-too-distant future. It'll be called something like Popular Radicalism and...
Apr 5, 202130 minThe rise of right-wing libertarianism since the 1950sSometimes as I read books I like to simultaneously summarize them, to facilitate the intellectual digestion. And also to post my notes...
Sep 24, 20204 minA despairing rantThese are interesting times. We have the "privilege" to be living in the era when centuries of capitalist evolution are approaching their...
Sep 11, 202035 minThe history of tax increment financing in ChicagoHere'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, 202012 minDuBois'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, 202022 minFrom 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, 20205 minThe commodification of educationDavid Noble's essay "Digital Diploma Mills," written in the 1990s, is a brilliant and still timely critique of the automation and...
Sep 4, 202035 minThe Workers' BillHere'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, 202054 minOn the Unemployed Councils and the Chicago Workers' CommitteeThe last chapter of my dissertation on the unemployed in Chicago during the Great Depression is, I think, more interesting than the...
Aug 23, 202025 minThe radical dimensions of mass consciousness, part 2Here's the sequel to this post, from the last chapter of my Ph.D. thesis. It's just an excerpt. The main point of it is to argue against...
Aug 23, 202045 minThe radical dimensions of mass consciousness, part 1I'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, 202053 minHomeless men in the Great DepressionHere'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, 20207 minFragments on Marxism and anarchismApril 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, 20206 minThoughts 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....