Origins of the European state system
Reading Charles Tilly’s classic Coercion, Capital, and European States, AD 990–1992 (1992). Taking notes on it for myself, but also for...
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Wright's Writing
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- 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...
- Apr 19, 2021
- 14 min
Review of "The Young Lords," by Johanna Fernández
[This academic review was posted at H-Net.] Johanna Fernández’s The Young Lords: A Radical History could hardly have been published at a...
- Mar 4, 2021
- 9 min
Personal reflections on anarchism
Anarchism (anti-authoritarianism, love of freedom) is an essential thing, an essential guide for our thinking and action, but I have to...
- Aug 29, 2020
- 3 min
"Government in the Future"
[From 2008.] Reading Chomsky’s pamphlet Government in the Future, which sets out to answer the question “What is the role of the state in...
- Aug 24, 2020
- 25 min
Why I am not a Leninist (nor an anarchist)
Years later, I still reproach myself for self-publishing my book on cooperatives, because that ensured it would have a limited...
- 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...
- Jun 12, 2020
- 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...
- 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...
- Mar 11, 2018
- 9 min
Collectivism
[Excerpts from this book.] Collectivism comes in both noble and evil forms. In the former, the principle of the individual is paramount;...
- Jul 27, 2016
- 10 min
Climate change, capitalism, and state violence
In an age when the State is daily demonstrating its willingness, or rather its extraordinary eagerness, to brutally repress dissent and...
- Jan 29, 2016
- 13 min
Intellectual origins of American radicalism
Staughton Lynd's Intellectual Origins of American Radicalism (1968) is a fantastic exploration of the ideological offshoots and effects...
- Jan 5, 2016
- 3 min
"The Pedagogy of the Oppressed"
[Notes from my journal.] I'm reading Paulo Freire’s famous little book The Pedagogy of the Oppressed (1970), which is apparently...
- Sep 30, 2015
- 3 min
Notes on anarchism
[Notes from my journal. See also this post.] Reading parts of a collection of essays published in 1978 called Anarchism, edited by J....
- 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...
- Sep 13, 2015
- 4 min
Saving Marxism from Lenin
[This is an excerpt from Notes of an Underground Humanist.] You should read Peter Kropotkin’s essay “The State: Its Historic Role.”...
- Apr 11, 2015
- 5 min
The fraudulence of status
[The following is an excerpt from this book.] In order to determine someone’s intellectual or artistic integrity and acuity, a simple...
- Sep 27, 2014
- 3 min
Radical human nature
The power of indoctrination is shown by the fact that most people don’t consider themselves radical leftists, socialists, or anarchists....
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