In response to a segment on the homeless, a TV anchorperson recently quipped, “Well, that’s the price of progress!” Those who had tuned in to this Reaganite one-liner (an ideological relative to the old Stalinist quip, “You can’t make an …
Based on impressions gathered from the media in the course of the past year, the canyons of Lower Manhattan, in the vicinity of the Wall Street Corral, have been reverberating with the sounds of shoot-outs as a puzzled public tries …
The United States is the wealthiest nation in the history of the world: Were we to divide today’s Gross National Product equally among families of four, each would have roughly $65,000. Self-evidently, a much more equitable distribution of resources than …
In the Reaganite war for “privatization” of American society, the latest target is education. A bill before Congress puts forward a voucher proposal called TEACH, The Equity and Choice Act of 1985. This bill comes out of difficulties in pushing …
Few things hold us like home. The current celebration of traditional family values expresses a need for refuge, pleasure, and acceptance that is as impossible to forgo as it is difficult to satisfy. If nostalgia for the past is largely …
In the United States, the relationship between socialists—often economic and cultural outsiders—and a more “American” working class has generally been problematic. For much of this century, however, Britain has provided an alluring counterexample. The British Labour party seemed to have …
Anyone who returns to Nicaragua after a two-year absence—as I recently did—must be struck by a marked deterioration in every facet of life in that country. Two years ago, despite the increasing cost of fighting a war on both borders, …
In a celebrated passage of “The Economic Ethic of World Religions,” Max Weber remarked that often, “like switchmen,” the “world images” created by ideas have “determined the tracks along which action has been pushed by the dynamic of interest.” In …
In a poem called “Fall 1961,” Robert Lowell wrote: All autumn, the chafe and jar of nuclear war; we have talked our extinction to death. These words, provoked by a Berlin crisis, suggest that it is possible to kill a …
John Dunn’s peculiar book purports to address two problems. The first is how to explain the attraction of socialism in advanced capitalist nations and the second whether socialism is “still a rational and civilizing form of political enterprise in these …
Just down the hall from a door marked “20th Century Fox,” on the third floor of a nondescript office building on the edge of downtown Washington, D.C., are the offices of the National Endowment for Democracy (NED). Controversy has regularly …
The dramatis personae in Joanne Barkan’s analysis of the contemporary Italian workers’ movement possess great subtlety and substance. There is a Communist party (PCI) that, even reluctant observers admit, has been unusually lucid in the face of social and political …
The intellectual is a modern phenomenon. I do not mean that there was no intellectual work before the modern era; rather, in other times intellectual work was not undertaken so self-consciously or as a task justifying one’s existence. Now it …
Neither liar nor squealer, Jonathan Rieder is something perhaps equally problematic in this book: an ethnographer with an argument, reaching for readers politically engaged. “Any coalition that fails to understand the grievances that collected in places like Canarsie all across …
The Workers’ Defense Committee represented not only a specific idea of social action but also a certain style of action, which was refined gradually over the course of several years… Above all, KOR meant social and not political activity; this …
