Partial Readings: Degrees of Revolution

Partial Readings: Degrees of Revolution

Partial Readings: Degrees of Revolution

The School-to-Prison Pipeline: Zimbabwe
Scott McLemee writes on the fate of six Zimbabwean activists who have been imprisoned and tortured for holding an educational event about the recent uprisings. ?I do not know this for certain,? writes McLemee, ?but it seems likely that they also may have incited people to commit acts of reading.?

Read the column here, and sign a petition for the prisoners? release here.

Gender(ed) Revolution
Amid the tumultuous uprisings across North Africa and the Middle East, will women seize greater rights and power? What role are they playing on the ground? Women?s eNews is providing comprehensive coverage of ?Arab Women in Revolution? through an ongoing series:

Political and economic participation, access to health and education, non-discriminatory family and citizenship laws, protection against gender-based violence, freedom of expression, room for religious views that run the gamut of the secular to strict practice, safety from state violence and arbitrary detentions. The list of issues is long, but we know the women working to resolve them are strong.

Days of (Intellectual) Rage
?There are so many things wrong with the Libyan intervention that it is hard to know where to begin.?
? Michael Walzer, Dissent

?Four days ago, a cruel dictator appeared to be on the verge of initiating a bloodbath in one of the last free zones of his country. Today, the free zone he was threatening to attack remains free?Without Western intervention?that is, without Obama?s decision to finally do the right thing?there is little doubt that the situation would have been worse.?
? The Editors, The New Republic

?On balance I am in favour of the current intervention in Libya?I think that the UN resolution authorizing it puts the protection of civilians at the centre of its mandate and sends a clear signal to governments of the world that they cannot massacre their own people with impunity.?
? Conor Foley, Crooked Timber

?This war?let us call it by its right name, for once?will be remembered to a considerable extent as a war made by intellectuals, and cheered on by intellectuals.?
? David Rieff, The New Republic

***

And in local news…

Radio Stars
Who needs Twitter? Dissent writers take to the airwaves:

– Earlier this month, the European Parliament passed a financial speculation tax. Dissent author Bill Barclay gave the case for a financial transaction tax in the Summer 2010 issue of Dissent, and more recently with Castle Rock Radio’s Tim Danahey

– Nelson Lichtenstein goes on NPR’s “On the Media” to discuss the labor movement’s image problem.

You Have Nothing to Lose But Your Unions, Pensions, Decent Salaries, Benefits…
In Dissent?s forthcoming spring issue, Joseph A. McCartin takes on the scapegoating of public sector unions. This month, he gave a rousing speech to the AFL-CIO, reminding union organizers that ?in the long life of this movement, there has never come a great breakthrough that was predicted; the windows of opportunity that have led to great bursts of growth for this movement have been narrow, and they have not stayed open for too long.? In his speech, McCartin offered a vignette of humble labor organizing first gathering steam:

…[R]emember that a century ago John L. Lewis was wandering in frustration through largely non-union Pennsylvania, working as an organizer for the AFL; Sidney Hillman, an immigrant with heavily accented English, was laboring in Chicago?s needle trades by day and just beginning to learn his way around Chicago?s reform community through what could be called the premier workers? center of his time, Chicago?s Hull House. There was nothing that foreordained that Lewis and Hillman would help build organized labor into a force that helped remake our democracy. But they did. Now labor must find a way to do it again. It?s time for your movement to find its clear, sure, 21st Century voice. Time for you to find your own way of talking about what Hillman, Lewis, and their colleagues once called industrial democracy. It is time for you to organize.

When Barbara Met Larry
He was a visionary rebel against Abstract Expressionism, a lone adventurer into the realm of pop art, and “one of the most brainy artists of his generation.” She took off to Paris after high school, and during the 1950s wrote for a Spanish underground magazine and saw the last Spanish anarchists die in Paris before returning to New York to write her first novel.

Where did controversial artist Larry Rivers and pioneering writer Barbara Probst Solomon first glimpse one another? At a Dissent-inspired happening, of course! Over at HuffPo, Solomon has chronicled the adventure of knowing Rivers.

In 1993 Dissent published this Larry Rivers portrait of magazine founder Irving Howe.