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...
Wright's Writing
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- Aug 9
- 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 29
- 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 10, 2021
- 22 min
Introduction to my forthcoming book
If 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...
- 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 4, 2020
- 35 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
- 54 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
- 25 min
The radical dimensions of mass consciousness, part 2
Here'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, 2020
- 45 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...
- Jun 29, 2020
- 15 min
Laboring Against Racism: The Textile Workers Union of America in the South during the 1960s
[An old student paper.] The conventional understanding of labor unions and their membership in the 1960s is of a conservative and...
- Jun 16, 2020
- 2 min
Primary sources on Communists and the unemployed during the Great Depression
While writing my PhD dissertation a few years ago ("Down But Not Out: The Unemployed in Chicago during the Great Depression"), I...
- Jun 13, 2020
- 6 min
Gender norms in a Chilean copper mine
[This was supposed to be a short outline for a student presentation I had to give. So excuse the roughness. Here are more book reviews.]...
- Dec 9, 2018
- 4 min
Brief notes on a classic historical work
[Old notes on David Montgomery’s great book Citizen Worker: The Experience of Workers in the United States with Democracy and the Free...
- Jul 27, 2018
- 3 min
Industrial unionism in the meatpacking industry
Here are old notes of mine on a very good book by the historian Roger Horowitz, “Negro and White, Unite and Fight!”: A Social History of...
- Jul 22, 2016
- 5 min
The meatpacking industry; or, hell on earth
Here are some excerpts from a review article of a book I’m reading called Slaughterhouse (1997), by Gail Eisnitz: [....] The agony starts...
- Aug 10, 2015
- 4 min
The making of the working class
I'm finally reading [in 2011] E. P. Thompson’s classic The Making of the English Working Class (1963). Query: why was England so...
- Sep 22, 2014
- 14 min
U.S. labor history
Power-structures never want people to remember history, because knowledge empowers. Knowledge of how the oppressed have won victories, or...