Larry Patriquin

@larrypatriquin

NEW book—Democracy and Social Rights: A Path Toward Equality? (Routledge, June 2025). Just starting work on a book about the failure of so-called liberal democracy. Hope to publish it in late 2028.

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Larry Patriquin@larrypatriquin· 12d

Get someone to build them for you to your specifications. The shelves on mine are 12" high (excluding the wood itself) and 8" deep. Those measurements work perfectly.

Larry Patriquin@larrypatriquin· 13d

A cartoon shows two women sitting on lawn chairs in a book-lined room. One says to the other, "He got the furniture, but I got the books."

Larry Patriquin@larrypatriquin· Jul 10

Ipsos Poll: Which of the following would you prefer to win the by-election in Clacton? Count Binface, 33%; Nigel Farage, 21%; neither, 32%; don't know, 13%.

Larry Patriquin@larrypatriquin· Jul 1

Democratic House District 1 Results: M. Kiros, 67,959, 51.3%; D. DeGette,
55,179, 41.7%.

Larry Patriquin@larrypatriquin· Jun 17

Cartoon. As a woman pours a glass of wine for herself, a man on a couch says, "I knew something was fishy when the email talked about how great my book was."

Larry Patriquin@larrypatriquin· Jun 10

The Associated Press calls it for Graham Platner.

Graham Platner wins the 2026 Maine Democratic primary with 75% of the vote.

Larry Patriquin@larrypatriquin· Jun 8

Karl Polanyi, The Great Transformation, p. 88, referring to the Industrial Revolution, when he could just as well have been referring to artificial intelligence.

The cover of Karl Polanyi's book The Great Transformation, Penguin 2024 edition.

Larry Patriquin@larrypatriquin· May 13

Here's Ralph Miliband, writing in 1969, accurately laying out where politics was "likely to move." He could do so not because he was a soothsayer, but because he was a Marxist who understood the roots of class struggle and the state's involvement in those struggles.

Indeed the largest of all questions about Western-type regimes is how long their 'bourgeois-democratic' framework is likely to remain compatible with the needs and purposes of advanced capitalism; whether its economic, social and political contradictions are of such a kind as to render unworkable the political

order with which it has, in general, hitherto been able to accommodate itself.

This was the question which was asked, with anxious insistence, about capitalist regimes in the late twenties and thirties, when Fascism and Nazism appeared to many people on the Left, and not only on the Left, to foreshadow the direction in which 'liberal capitalism' in many countries other than Italy and Germany was likely to travel. That question was, in subsequent decades, buried deep beneath the celebration of Western democracy, the free world, the welfare state, the affluent society, the end of ideology and pluralistic equilibrium. To have posed it again even a few years ago would have appeared ludicrous or perverse but at any rate distinctly obsolete. Whatever might be said about the economic, social and political deficiencies of Western capitalism (and the tendency was in any case to sing its praises, or rather the praises of "post-capitalist' society, at least its 'democratic and 'liberal' foundations were held to be secure and beyond challenge, save of course for the threat posed to them from the Left.

In the recent past, however, that old question has again come to the surface, and been posed with growing frequency, again by no means exclusively on the Left. Nor is this surprising, given the tendencies which advanced capitalism and the political system associated with it have increasingly exhibited. The point is not that 'bourgeois democracy' is imminently likely to move towards old-style Fascism. It is rather that advanced capitalist societies are subject to strains more acute than for a long time past, and that their inability to resolve these strains makes their evolution towards more or less pronounced forms of conservative authoritarianism more rather than less likely.

Larry Patriquin@larrypatriquin· May 12

Young Palestinian women read in the destroyed conference hall at the Islamic University in Gaza City, on March 26, 2025. Photo by Majdi Fathi/NurPhoto via Getty Images

Larry Patriquin@larrypatriquin· Apr 22

The annual White House Correspondents Association Dinner ...

Larry Patriquin@larrypatriquin· Mar 30

I made my pilgrimage from Canada almost 36 years ago, just before I started my PhD.

Larry Patriquin@larrypatriquin· Mar 25

Ellen Meiksins Wood, writing in 1986, predicting the demise of the UK Labour Party in the mid-2020s. 🤔 The Retreat from Class: A New 'True' Socialism, p. 192. @versobooks.bsky.social

Larry Patriquin@larrypatriquin· Mar 23

We love 'em in 🇨🇦. 20 beavers = 1 loon!

Larry Patriquin@larrypatriquin· Mar 20

It's been almost 100 years now since Antonio Gramsci predicted the rise of Nigel Farage.

Larry Patriquin@larrypatriquin· Mar 19

One more astonishing aberrant spectacle is added to the phantasmagoria of our time. It is a bad time for the rational mind to live: for a rational mind in the Marxist tradition it is a time that cannot be endured. -- E.P. Thompson, The Poverty of Theory: Or an Orrery of Errors (1978)

Larry Patriquin@larrypatriquin· Mar 15

Larry Patriquin@larrypatriquin· Mar 2

Mark Carney to Donald "Spike" Trump:

Larry Patriquin@larrypatriquin· Feb 19

WTF is with some of these shipping fees I'm seeing on Abebooks? Does it really cost $89 to mail a book from the 🇺🇸 to 🇨🇦? Along with Abe sellers' crazy book prices (often more expensive than for new books), it's now unaffordable to buy secondhand books online.

Larry Patriquin@larrypatriquin· Feb 6

I don't know but I'm sure it has *nothing* to do with capitalism.

Larry Patriquin@larrypatriquin· Feb 3

Larry Patriquin@larrypatriquin· Jan 12

keep breathin'

Larry Patriquin@larrypatriquin· Jan 3

The fact that the Oxford English Dictionary is not an open-access gift to the world is just one of the many, many reasons why capitalism sucks.

Larry Patriquin@larrypatriquin· Dec 28

Larry Patriquin@larrypatriquin· Dec 19

Indeed.

Larry Patriquin@larrypatriquin· Dec 12

Now *this* is how you write an abstract. By @jonathanhopkin.bsky.social and @benrosamond1.bsky.social, New Political Economy 23, no. 6 (2018): 641-55.

Larry Patriquin@larrypatriquin· Dec 12

I also purchased in the end-of-year sale from @versobooks.bsky.social this 1,116 page beast! (It was originally published as three volumes in the early 1970s, edited by David Fernbach.)

Larry Patriquin@larrypatriquin· Dec 12

Took advantage of @versobooks.bsky.social's end of year sale (50% off when you order 5+ books!). Bought books by G. Eley, A. Hanieh, A. Malm, @itsmccarthy.bsky.social, J. W. Moore, M. Neocleous, D. Sassoon, @leninology.bsky.social & @alfatau.bsky.social. 🎅 🤶 🎄 ☃️

Larry Patriquin@larrypatriquin· Nov 29

Hey .... Is there a hidden camera in my office??

Larry Patriquin@larrypatriquin· Nov 20

There's nuthin' like the transition to capitalism to get the Visa card shimmying, @haymarketbooks.org (I think I got these for 40% off, though the sale seems to have ended. Perhaps there is a Holiday sale coming soon?)

Larry Patriquin@larrypatriquin· Nov 20

Karl Marx, Capital, Vol. 1, p. 705 (on bourgeois political economy and little traveling salesmen). ... last excerpt!