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!:...
- 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...
- 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...
- 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 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...
- Apr 19, 2021
- 14 min
Review of "The Young Lords," by Johanna Fernández
[This academic review was posted at H-Net.] Johanna Fernández’s The Young Lords: A Radical History could hardly have been published at a...
- 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...
- Jul 19, 2019
- 3 min
Thoughts on planning vs. the market
Been reading The People's Republic of Walmart: How the World's Biggest Corporations Are Laying the Foundation for Socialism. It's a good...
- Nov 8, 2016
- 4 min
Skeptical thoughts on the Russian Revolution
[From an email.] …Of course it's true that every event in history depends on contingencies. [I had said the Russian Revolution depended...
- May 6, 2016
- 3 min
On the French Revolution
It’s interesting that the French Revolution’s liberalism in some ways helped make possible its illiberalism, its nationalism and...
- Jan 29, 2016
- 13 min
Intellectual origins of American radicalism
Staughton Lynd's Intellectual Origins of American Radicalism (1968) is a fantastic exploration of the ideological offshoots and effects...
- Feb 15, 2015
- 2 min
Christianity updated
One of the many ironies about contemporary Christians is that they tend to be supportive of capitalism. This isn’t surprising: from the...
- Feb 11, 2015
- 2 min
Capitalism, socialism, and planning
Ideological hacks like Friedrich Hayek and his contemporary disciples pretend that the difference between capitalism and socialism is...
- Oct 29, 2014
- 4 min
Socialism and communism
[Excerpt from a book.] The awesome power of business propaganda is revealed in the fact that most Americans scorn the idea of socialism,...
- Oct 16, 2014
- 5 min
Correcting Marx's theory of revolution
From an academic paper. (See my book on worker cooperatives, where this is all fleshed out in much more detail.)-- The Food Wars (2009),...
- Oct 3, 2014
- 2 min
Thoughts on socialist revolution
In retrospect it’s obvious that something like socialism couldn’t have happened until the nation-state system had disintegrated (which...
- Sep 27, 2014
- 3 min
Radical human nature
The power of indoctrination is shown by the fact that most people don’t consider themselves radical leftists, socialists, or anarchists....
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