Wright's Writing

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

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...

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

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

Marxism and the French Revolution.— Let’s grant that, as non-Marxists like to remind us, the French Revolution was precipitated more by...

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

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

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

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

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

Leftists are sometimes criticized for being condescending toward the masses, for arguing that they are prone to displaying "false...

Here’s a (somewhat oversimplified) one-sentence summary of the origins, trajectory, and outcome of the American Revolution: it “ended in...

From an academic paper. (See my book on worker cooperatives, where this is all fleshed out in much more detail.)-- The Food Wars (2009),...

In retrospect it’s obvious that something like socialism couldn’t have happened until the nation-state system had disintegrated (which...