marxism | Wright's Writing

Oct 16
25 min

Postliberalism: a dangerous “new” conservatism

[This article was published in The Philosophical Salon.] In Wilhelm von Humboldt’s book The Limits of State Action (1792), one of the...

Sep 8
8 min

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...

Sep 6
8 min

Nikole Hannah-Jones, Frederick Douglass, and the Left

[Published at Dissident Voice and other places.] Twitter conversations with public intellectuals are rarely worthy of note, but a recent...

May 18
9 min

Love of freedom defines the political left, not the right

[This article was published at Sublation and other venues.] Political discourse in the United States consists largely of lies and...

May 2
9 min

What “security threat” does China pose?

[This article was published at Common Dreams.] Everyone who abhors war, detests imperialism, and favors cooperation between nations on...

Feb 25
7 min

How to rebuild the left

[Published in Dissident Voice.] One might as well state the matter clearly: given the realities of global warming, rampant environmental...

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
2 min

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 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...