Wright's Writing

My journal helps keep me sane. From January to March I've occasionally jotted down thoughts on the horrors occurring every day in Gaza,...

[Published at Common Dreams.] “The Republican Party is the most dangerous organization in human history,” says Noam Chomsky. It seems...

[This is a short story I wrote twenty years ago after visiting Vietnam for a couple of weeks. It starts with a dream and ends with...

Here's an insanely long post. It's actually a "literary experiment" I wrote almost twenty years ago (as the following preface says, which...

[This article was published at Sublation.] A striking paradox of the history of the left is that it is full of self-defeat. From the...

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

[This article was published at Compact magazine.] In the United States there exists today, and has existed since at least the 1950s, a...

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

[This is a review published at H-Socialisms.] Vivek Chibber. The Class Matrix: Social Theory after the Cultural Turn. Harvard University...

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...

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...

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...

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