Classical music vs. mediocrity
On one side is the mediocrity of all functionaries. All bureaucrats. There’s no point in my writing about bureaucrats in the ordinary...
top of page
Wright's Writing
Search
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...
Jun 13, 202230 min read
Origins of the European state system
Reading Charles Tilly’s classic Coercion, Capital, and European States, AD 990–1992 (1992). Taking notes on it for myself, but also for...
Jun 4, 202212 min read
America's use of the atomic bomb on Japan
A long time ago I posted some thoughts on America's use of the atomic bomb at the end of World War II. I happen to be reading parts of...
Jun 1, 202224 min read
Critical thoughts on feminism and social constructionism
On various pages of this website and blog I've criticized some of the dogmas of feminism, for instance the social constructionist dogmas...
May 29, 20228 min read
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, 20229 min read
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...
Oct 10, 20219 min read
Resisting fascism (a book review)
[This review was published at H-Socialisms.] The elevation of Donald Trump onto the national political stage in 2016 provoked a heated...
Sep 8, 202111 min read
Excerpts from "Battle Cry of Freedom"
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...
Sep 1, 20214 min read
The "paradox" of American freedom and slavery
[Old student notes on the early United States.] Quoting Edmund Morgan, in his famous 1972 article “Slavery and Freedom: The American...
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...
Jul 10, 202115 min read
Against liberal "pluralism"
In the time of Trumpism, Michael Paul Rogin’s great book The Intellectuals and McCarthy: The Radical Specter (1967) shouldn’t be as...
Jul 9, 20219 min read
The truth about gender
Some months ago I saw Richard Dawkins recommend on Twitter a new book called The End of Gender: Debunking the Myths about Sex and...
Jun 26, 202149 min read
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, 202113 min read
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 15, 202111 min read
On humans' language faculty
You may have heard of the “talking gorilla” Koko. I remember as a child reading about this fascinating creature that had been trained to...
Jun 11, 202174 min read
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, 202122 min read
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...
Jun 6, 202120 min read
Reflecting on life at 40
…They accuse me -- Me -- the present writer of The present poem -- of -- I know not what -- A tendency to under-rate and scoff At human...
Jun 6, 20218 min read
Closed borders and democratic theory
You may have noticed that the question of immigration is on people’s minds lately (as it has been, almost without interruption, since the...
bottom of page