100 (more or less) left-wing books
Here's a list of some good leftist books I've come across over the years. Click on the titles for the PDFs. It's a somewhat arbitrary...
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Wright's Writing
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Dec 9, 20184 min read
Brief notes on a classic historical work
[Old notes on David Montgomery’s great book Citizen Worker: The Experience of Workers in the United States with Democracy and the Free...
Dec 4, 20183 min read
Notes on Indian resistance to the Spanish empire
With regard to the period between the 1530s and 1640s, the great Marxian historian Steve Stern divides the economic system that prevailed...
Jul 22, 20182 min read
Marxism and Meadism
August, 2007.— Here’s one of the many parallels between Marxism and 'Meadism' [i.e., George Herbert Mead's system of thought]: “Human...
May 30, 20186 min read
The individual and history
Questions Raised by 9/11, and Their Answers [An old grad-school paper] Lawrence Wright’s book The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to...
May 28, 20185 min read
"Social Democracy Is the Best Form of Government"
[As an undergraduate at Wesleyan University I wrote hundreds of essays not all of which, I think, are worthless. Here's a short one on...
May 28, 20186 min read
Against idealism
[The following thoughts are from this book.] It’s funny that people often deprecate Marxian materialism as an explanation of society and...
Mar 31, 20188 min read
Progressivism, or "the Triumph of Conservatism"
Years ago I took some notes on Gabriel Kolko’s classic The Triumph of Conservatism: A Reinterpretation of American History 1900–1916...
Mar 23, 20181 min read
The Destruction of Reason
Just a quick note: I recently posted a long summary of and commentary on Georg Lukacs' masterpiece The Destruction of Reason, which has...
Mar 21, 20184 min read
Only Marxism can explain society
Marxism is right, and postmodernism is stupid. That's the thrust of a paper I've uploaded to academia.edu, which actually consists of...
Mar 21, 201812 min read
Notes on Marxism and empiricism
(Also see these notes.) Reading Maurice Cornforth’s Marxism and the Linguistic Philosophy (1965). A good book, not dogmatic or...
Mar 16, 20181 min read
The Origin of Capitalism
In history, few topics can be more relevant to our own world than the origin of capitalism. Ellen Meiksins Wood's book on that subject...
Nov 30, 20166 min read
On Susan Sontag
[Notes from 2008.] Reading Susan Sontag’s Against Interpretation, and Other Essays. It’s wonderful to think that the publication (in...
Nov 17, 20161 min read
A Marxist history of World War II
I recently read a book by Chris Bambery called The Second World War: A Marxist History (2014) and decided it was good enough to take...
Nov 8, 20164 min read
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...
Jun 21, 20164 min read
Notes on Theodor Adorno
[Old notes.] Reading Adorno: A Guide for the Perplexed, by Alex Thomson. I’m not very impressed with Adorno. Continental thinkers...
May 26, 20161 min read
Various notes and excerpts
Over the years I've taken copious notes on various topics of philosophy. In case anyone is interested, I'll link to several sets of such...
May 23, 20163 min read
Far-left, i.e., rational and open-minded
[Old notes from my journal.] A lot of mainstream people would criticize me for immersing myself in leftist scholarship and journalism,...
May 16, 20166 min read
More thoughts on the French Revolution
Marxism and the French Revolution.— Let’s grant that, as non-Marxists like to remind us, the French Revolution was precipitated more by...
Jan 24, 20162 min read
Glib thoughts on the fall of capitalism
The fulfillment of the [Marxian] prophecy.— As capital has become more mobile internationally since the 1970s (the era of globalization),...
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