"Journal of a Dissenter," 1996-2024
Probably unwisely, I've posted my lifelong "intellectual journal" online, here . It's a very long document that no one could or would...
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Oct 16, 202325 min read
Postliberalism: a dangerous “new” conservatism
[This article was published in The Philosophical Salon.] In Wilhelm von Humboldt’s book The Limits of State Action (1792), one of the...
Sep 8, 20238 min read
Postliberals against the common good
[Published at Common Dreams.] “The Republican Party is the most dangerous organization in human history,” says Noam Chomsky. It seems...
Sep 6, 20238 min read
Nikole Hannah-Jones, Frederick Douglass, and the Left
[Published at Dissident Voice and other places.] Twitter conversations with public intellectuals are rarely worthy of note, but a recent...
May 18, 20239 min read
Love of freedom defines the political left, not the right
[This article was published at Sublation and other venues.] Political discourse in the United States consists largely of lies and...
May 2, 20239 min read
What “security threat” does China pose?
[This article was published at Common Dreams.] Everyone who abhors war, detests imperialism, and favors cooperation between nations on...
Feb 25, 20237 min read
How to rebuild the left
[Published in Dissident Voice.] One might as well state the matter clearly: given the realities of global warming, rampant environmental...
Feb 3, 202321 min read
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!:...
Jan 31, 202355 min read
The Book of Joe: A Satire of Capitalist Society
Here's an insanely long post. It's actually a "literary experiment" I wrote almost twenty years ago (as the following preface says, which...
Nov 4, 202222 min read
Only class struggle can save the left
[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...
Sep 25, 20222 min read
A free copy of my book
Last summer I published the book version of my Ph.D. dissertation, bearing the ungainly title Popular Radicalism and the Unemployed in...
Aug 31, 202219 min read
"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...
Aug 9, 202213 min read
The myth of the "moderate" American
[This article was published at Compact magazine.] In the United States there exists today, and has existed since at least the 1950s, a...
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...
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...
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...
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 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...
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