Wright's Writing

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

Last summer I published the book version of my Ph.D. dissertation, bearing the ungainly title Popular Radicalism and the Unemployed in...

Reading Charles Tilly’s classic Coercion, Capital, and European States, AD 990–1992 (1992). Taking notes on it for myself, but also for...

In an effort to escape the dreary drumbeat of daily news, I'm reading James McPherson's mammoth Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era...

[Old student notes on the early United States.] Quoting Edmund Morgan, in his famous 1972 article “Slavery and Freedom: The American...

The good folks at DSA (of which I'm a proud member) were kind enough to publish the following article recently in their online...

In case anyone is interested in the history of the Great Depression, particularly in Chicago, here's an excerpt from a chapter of my...

Here are some notes on an unjustly neglected book by the great Marxist David F. Noble (social historian of technology) called Progress...

Another excessively long blog post. I recently published a long article ("Marxism and the Solidarity Economy: Toward a New Theory of...

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...

Sometimes as I read books I like to simultaneously summarize them, to facilitate the intellectual digestion. And also to post my notes...

These are interesting times. We have the "privilege" to be living in the era when centuries of capitalist evolution are approaching their...

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...

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...

I just finished reading Steve Fraser's masterful The Age of Acquiescence (2014), which compares the popular responses to America's two...

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

Here's the last section of chapter 6 of my dissertation on the unemployed in Chicago during the Depression. The previous two sections are...

The last chapter of my dissertation on the unemployed in Chicago during the Great Depression is, I think, more interesting than the...

Here's the sequel to this post, from the last chapter of my Ph.D. thesis. It's just an excerpt. The main point of it is to argue against...

I'm kind of a "vulgar Marxist." In this respect, I suppose I'm a lot like people in the American ruling class, except that their values...