Oct 10, 20219 minResisting fascism (a book review)[This review was published at H-Socialisms.] The elevation of Donald Trump onto the national political stage in 2016 provoked a heated...
Jul 10, 202115 minAgainst liberal "pluralism"In the time of Trumpism, Michael Paul Rogin’s great book The Intellectuals and McCarthy: The Radical Specter (1967) shouldn’t be as...
Sep 24, 20204 minA despairing rantThese are interesting times. We have the "privilege" to be living in the era when centuries of capitalist evolution are approaching their...
Aug 5, 20206 minThoughts on classical fascism[Student notes from ten years ago.] Reading Robert A. Brady’s classic Business as a System of Power (1943), which influenced Chomsky....
Jul 25, 20188 minGrad-school notes on Populism and ProgressivismIn The Populist Vision, Charles Postel argues persuasively that Populism, the greatest popular movement in American history, should not...
Mar 23, 20181 minThe Destruction of ReasonJust a quick note: I recently posted a long summary of and commentary on Georg Lukacs' masterpiece The Destruction of Reason, which has...
Nov 17, 20161 minA Marxist history of World War III recently read a book by Chris Bambery called The Second World War: A Marxist History (2014) and decided it was good enough to take...
Jul 27, 201610 minClimate change, capitalism, and state violenceIn an age when the State is daily demonstrating its willingness, or rather its extraordinary eagerness, to brutally repress dissent and...
May 31, 20161 minRandom notes on Hannah Arendt, Max Weber, economics, and traditional ChinaYears ago I read and took some notes on various works by Hannah Arendt. In particular her classic Origins of Totalitarianism. It's a...
Sep 25, 20154 minOn "The Reactionary Mind"Reading The Reactionary Mind: Conservatism from Edmund Burke to Sarah Palin (2011), by Corey Robin. An elegant and erudite elaboration of...
Aug 14, 20153 minOn late-19th-century decadence and its aftermathWhat is the significance of the fact that in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries certain (semi-fascist) sections of the...
Aug 5, 20152 minBureaucratic fanaticismIt might seem wrong to maintain, as I have in many writings, that the modern predominance of bureaucratic social structures and their...