How to rebuild the left
[Published in Dissident Voice because no one else would publish it, since today's "leftists" aren't really leftists. Common sense is...
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Wright's Writing
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- Feb 3
- 21 min
The righteous outrage of Norman Finkelstein
[A book review published at Common Dreams.] As I was reading Norman Finkelstein’s new book, I’ll Burn That Bridge When I Get to It!:...
- Jan 31
- 55 min
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, 2022
- 22 min
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, 2022
- 3 min
A free copy of my book
In June I published the book version of my Ph.D. dissertation, bearing the ungainly title Popular Radicalism and the Unemployed in...
- Aug 31, 2022
- 19 min
"Race reductionism" threatens to doom the left
[This article was published at Sublation magazine.] The reparations debate is getting old. But it shows little sign of abating. Academic...
- Aug 9, 2022
- 13 min
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...
- Jul 29, 2022
- 8 min
Organized labor and the crisis of democracy
[This article was published at CommonDreams.org.] We live in a time when it’s become a boring cliché to say that democracy is under...
- May 29, 2022
- 8 min
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...
- Apr 8, 2022
- 9 min
On stupidity and the excesses of wokeness
One of the first laws of human existence, or at least of existence in class societies (determined by anti-human institutions that mold...
- Aug 22, 2021
- 16 min
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, 2021
- 49 min
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, 2021
- 12 min
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, 2021
- 74 min
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...
- 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...
- Sep 10, 2020
- 12 min
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, 2020
- 21 min
"Revolution in the Twenty-First Century: A Reconsideration of Marxism"
[An article from several months ago.] In the age of COVID-19, it’s even more obvious than it’s been for at least a couple of decades that...
- Sep 7, 2020
- 7 min
Old notes on "the foundations of Christianity"
Karl Kautsky’s book Foundations of Christianity: A Study in Christian Origins (1908) is quite good. Despite his flaws and mistakes (both...
- Sep 4, 2020
- 35 min
The Workers' Bill
Here's the last section of chapter 6 of my dissertation on the unemployed in Chicago during the Depression. The previous two sections are...
- Sep 3, 2020
- 54 min
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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