(From my website.) Chris Wright has a Ph.D. in U.S. labor history and a couple of Master's degrees, in history and philosophy. He prefers non-academic writing, however, and has published in New Politics, Truthout, CounterPunch, openDemocracy, ROAR Magazine, Dissident .... more
(From my website.) Chris Wright has a Ph.D. in U.S. labor history and a couple of Master's degrees, in history and philosophy. He prefers non-academic writing, however, and has published in New Politics, Truthout, CounterPunch, openDemocracy, ROAR Magazine, Dissident Voice, Left Curve, Philosophy Now, Main Street Rag, Adelaide Literary Magazine, Peace Magazine, the Chaffey Review, etc. He's had a fairly conventional middle-class academic's life, though his interests, cultural tastes, and ideas are rather unconventional even for that odd category of human being "the academic." More interesting than his bio is (hopefully) his writing, which somewhat defies labels (aside from far-left). Over-ambitiously, he hopes to write a series of books that, so to speak, "sums up" and comments on the great--and not-so-great--traditions of the millennia-old Human Civilization that can be expected to implode in the next century (given catastrophic climate change, global economic stagnation/crisis, extreme overpopulation, and possible nuclear holocaust). His first and third books, influenced by the form of Nietzsche but the content of Marx, are installments in this project. His second, Worker Cooperatives and Revolution: History and Possibilities in the United States, has more to do with another of his goals, namely to contribute to the undermining of corporate capitalism and the construction of a more humane alternative. (He revises Marxism to show how this may happen gradually in the coming century or two, based not on the so-called "dictatorship of the proletariat"--an un-Marxian fantasy, despite Marx himself--but primarily on movements of grassroots economic and political "radical reforms." E.g., public banking, cooperatives of all types, participatory budgeting, municipal enterprise, and of course explicit political resistance as well. The work of Gar Alperovitz is relevant.) He thinks that intellectuals "have a moral obligation to serve progressive political struggles, being the beneficiaries of other people’s 'surplus labor,' of an exploitative economic system that perpetuates poverty and disfranchisement among the large majority of the world population." (From Notes of an Underground Humanist.) In other words, people who have extraordinary privileges, which are made possible by other people's lack of privileges, are morally obligated to fight against power on behalf of the powerless. –Such ideas might sound like self-righteous progressive tripe, but, nevertheless, they're true. The world could use a good dose of morality.
Wright finds it odd that people don't appreciate this obvious truth: humanity is approaching the climax of history, and it's past time to get serious. It's past time to expose all the conformist institutional personality-destruction for what it is, and the capitalist profit-mongering, and the semi-Holocaustic bureaucratic murder of the "unpeople" everywhere, and the totalitarian kitschifying of culture (old news by now), and the brutal late-capitalist atomizing of humanity that is making possible our headlong march into collective semi-oblivion. It's certainly time to renew the labor movement in the U.S.--to put the "movement" back in the movement; luckily there has been progress in that direction, from Occupy Wall Street to the Chicago Teachers Union strike in 2012 to the Fight for $15. But aside from these social interests, Wright continues to have a more solipsistic interest in philosophy, psychology, history-almost-for-its-own-sake, classical music, and other such "intellectual" pursuits, an interest reflected in his writing. He's impatient with some of the dogmas of contemporary feminism, and of all postmodernism. He explains why in his books. –In short, if he weren't afraid of the pretentiousness of the label and of its association with the late unlamented Christopher Hitchens, he might call himself a "contrarian."
Chris Wright's Projects
"There's a time when the operation of the Machine becomes so odious, makes you so si... more
This book touches on most of the important questions that arise in life. Somewhat in the manner o... more
Since the financial crisis of 2008 and the global popular protests of 2011, more people have begu... more