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...
Wright's Writing
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- 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...
- Apr 5, 2021
- 30 min
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, 2020
- 35 min
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, 2020
- 22 min
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, 2020
- 5 min
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, 2018
- 5 min
"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, 2016
- 10 min
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, 2016
- 5 min
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, 2016
- 3 min
"Sunbelt capitalism"
[Random journal notes.] Reading Elizabeth Tandy Shermer’s Sunbelt Capitalism: Phoenix and the Transformation of American Politics (2013)....
- Jan 25, 2016
- 9 min
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, 2016
- 2 min
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, 2016
- 6 min
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, 2015
- 7 min
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, 2015
- 2 min
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, 2014
- 8 min
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, 2014
- 2 min
A dying society
For-profit justice.— What’s going on in the prison-industrial complex is almost literally unbelievable. Just read Punishment for Sale:...