Miscellany

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Miscellany

7 hours ago
10 min

Detritus from a dead poetic imagination

Life in the 21st century as we all wait consciously or unconsciously for the apocalypse is boring and driven by distractions, an endless ...

Jun 16
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 accumula...

Jun 12
4 min

Student notes on "Poor People's Movements"

[Maybe it's self-indulgent of me to keep posting old notes from my student years, but just in case anyone out there gives a shit, I guess...

Jun 6
17 min

Rambling reflections on Camille Paglia

I've been reading Camille Paglia's collection of essays Sex, Art, and American Culture (1992). I disagree with a lot of Paglia's opinions...

Jul 16, 2019
7 min

Thoughts from the dark

Lugubrious. That's the word for how I'm feeling tonight. That and self-indulgent. So I thought I'd write a blog post. These midnight mood...

Jul 11, 2019
10 min

What will "the revolution" look like?

Here's a blog post for you masochists who are interested in the debates that go on among Marxist intellectuals over questions around revo...

Dec 20, 2018
1 min

The evolutionary history of life on Earth

I recently read a great book called A New History of Life: The Radical New Discoveries about the History of Life on Earth. Couldn't resis...

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 lis...

May 28, 2018
5 min

"Social Democracy Is the Best Form of Government"

[As an undergraduate at Wesleyan University I wrote hundreds of essays not all of which, I think, are worthless. Here's a short one on so...

Nov 10, 2016
2 min

The necessity of revolutionary violence

You should read Lance Hill's The Deacons for Defense: Armed Resistance and the Civil Rights Movement. Gives a compelling argument that, d...

Nov 8, 2016
4 min

Skeptical thoughts on the Russian Revolution

[From an email.] …Of course it's true that every event in history depends on contingencies. [I had said the Russian Revolution depended o...

Jul 2, 2016
4 min

On "lesser evilism" in politics

The following is a long comment I wrote on a Facebook thread months ago arguing against a left-wing friend that--in swing states--one sho...

May 23, 2016
3 min

Far-left, i.e., rational and open-minded

[Old notes from my journal.] A lot of mainstream people would criticize me for immersing myself in leftist scholarship and journalism, wh...

May 21, 2016
1 min

Historians and existentialism

In a sense, writing history is an intrinsically moral activity -- although different kinds of history embody different degrees of moralit...

May 16, 2016
6 min

More thoughts on the French Revolution

Marxism and the French Revolution.— Let’s grant that, as non-Marxists like to remind us, the French Revolution was precipitated more by t...

May 6, 2016
3 min

On the French Revolution

It’s interesting that the French Revolution’s liberalism in some ways helped make possible its illiberalism, its nationalism and authorit...

Jan 24, 2016
2 min

Glib thoughts on the fall of capitalism

The fulfillment of the [Marxian] prophecy.— As capital has become more mobile internationally since the 1970s (the era of globalization),...

Jan 13, 2016
4 min

Dropping the atomic bomb

[Excerpt from this book.] A celebrated bureaucrat.— In the library today I happened to pass Harry Truman’s memoirs. Picked the book up an...

Sep 19, 2015
3 min

A 25-year-old's love affair

[From an old journal entry.] Noam Chomsky is my intellectual conscience. I think about him every day, multiple times a day. He helps guid...

Sep 10, 2015
1 min

"The human harvest"

From Peter Marin: “Kant called the realm of [human] connection the kingdom of ends. Erich Gutkind’s name for it was the absolute collecti...

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