neoliberalism | Wright's Writing

Jul 29, 20228 min read

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...

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...

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 11, 202035 min read

The history of tax increment financing in Chicago

Here's a very dry paper I wrote for a class in 2012. I thought I should know more about urban public policy, so I decided to research the...

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 5, 20205 min read

The commodification of education

David Noble's essay "Digital Diploma Mills," written in the 1990s, is a brilliant and still timely critique of the automation and...

May 28, 20185 min read

"Social Democracy Is the Best Form of Government"

[As an undergraduate at Wesleyan University I wrote hundreds of essays not all of which, I think, are worthless. Here's a short one on...

Jul 27, 201610 min read

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...

Jul 22, 20165 min read

The meatpacking industry; or, hell on earth

Here are some excerpts from a review article of a book I’m reading called Slaughterhouse (1997), by Gail Eisnitz: [....] The agony starts...

Jun 15, 20163 min read

"Sunbelt capitalism"

[Random journal notes.] Reading Elizabeth Tandy Shermer’s Sunbelt Capitalism: Phoenix and the Transformation of American Politics (2013)....

Jan 25, 20169 min read

The U.S. in Central America

Notes on a classic. (See also these notes.)— In Inevitable Revolutions: The United States in Central America (1993), Walter LaFeber...

Jan 24, 20162 min read

Glib thoughts on the fall of capitalism

The fulfillment of the [Marxian] prophecy.— As capital has become more mobile internationally since the 1970s (the era of globalization),...

Jan 12, 20166 min read

Fragments on bourgeois ideologists

On neoclassical economics.— Milton Friedman wrote a famous article in 1953 called “The Methodology of Positive Economics,” in which he...

Apr 8, 20157 min read

To see the Holocaust in a grain of sand

Part 2 of "Thoughts on the 70th anniversary of the end of the Holocaust." Part 1 is here.— While the industrialized murder of six million...

Apr 5, 20152 min read

Capitalist fratricide (i.e., neoliberalism)

The nation-state and capitalism were born as twins from the fertile, ancient womb of greed and power-hunger. They grew up together, were...

Oct 11, 20148 min read

Notes on the history of neoliberalism

Reading A Brief History of Neoliberalism (2005), by David Harvey. The inflation of the 1970s, as you may know, resulted largely from...

Sep 24, 20142 min read

A dying society

For-profit justice.— What’s going on in the prison-industrial complex is almost literally unbelievable. Just read Punishment for Sale:...