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Apr 176 min read
Thoughts on the Gaza genocide, the worst crime of the 21st century (so far)
My journal helps keep me sane. From January to March I've occasionally jotted down thoughts on the horrors occurring every day in Gaza,...
Sep 8, 20238 min read
Postliberals against the common good
[Published at Common Dreams.] “The Republican Party is the most dangerous organization in human history,” says Noam Chomsky. It seems...
Mar 11, 202326 min read
Dusk in Vietnam
[This is a short story I wrote twenty years ago after visiting Vietnam for a couple of weeks. It starts with a dream and ends with...
Jan 31, 202355 min read
The Book of Joe: A Satire of Capitalist Society
Here's an insanely long post. It's actually a "literary experiment" I wrote almost twenty years ago (as the following preface says, which...
Nov 4, 202222 min read
Only class struggle can save the left
[This article was published at Sublation.] A striking paradox of the history of the left is that it is full of self-defeat. From the...
Sep 25, 20222 min read
A free copy of my book
Last summer I published the book version of my Ph.D. dissertation, bearing the ungainly title Popular Radicalism and the Unemployed in...
Aug 9, 202213 min read
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...
Jun 13, 202230 min read
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...
May 29, 20228 min read
Vivek Chibber's defense of materialism
[This is a review published at H-Socialisms.] Vivek Chibber. The Class Matrix: Social Theory after the Cultural Turn. Harvard University...
Sep 8, 202111 min read
Excerpts 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 min read
The "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 min read
Eleven Theses on Socialist Revolution
The 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 min read
On the inhumanity of Illinois's government in the 1930s
In 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, 202113 min read
The secret history of automation
Here are some notes on an unjustly neglected book by the great Marxist David F. Noble (social historian of technology) called Progress...
Jun 11, 202174 min read
Marxism and the solidarity economy
Another excessively long blog post. I recently published a long article ("Marxism and the Solidarity Economy: Toward a New Theory of...
Apr 5, 202130 min read
The rise of right-wing libertarianism since the 1950s
Sometimes as I read books I like to simultaneously summarize them, to facilitate the intellectual digestion. And also to post my notes...
Sep 24, 20204 min read
A despairing rant
These are interesting times. We have the "privilege" to be living in the era when centuries of capitalist evolution are approaching their...
Sep 10, 202012 min read
DuBois'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 min read
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 3, 202054 min read
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...
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