The first oddity about Kenneth Lynn’s book of once-published pieces is its title. True, the locomotive on the dust jacket gives away what kind of line is an air-line, but who would have guessed that this particular railroad passed through …
Information comes second-hand, and it varies as to details. Fifty or more members of the Trotskyist Socialist Workers’ party have been expelled, most of them old-timers. Apparently there were many differences, but what seems to have precipitated the expulsions is …
Anatoly Marchenko is one of the most extraordinary individuals to have emerged in Soviet society. Both his parents ate illiterate railroad workers, and Marchenko himself, who was born in 1938, has only an eighth-grade education. But after spending six years …
A new cant phrase—”special interest”—has entered our political language. Politicians gravely declare themselves against it; television commentators toss the phrase about as if its meaning were transparent; and in this moment of spiritless conservatism there seems to be general agreement that the …
On March 10, 1983, Jerusalem police prevented four armed men from ascending the Temple Mount, the site where the Temple stood, sacred to Jews and Muslims. The four men, yeshivah students, had intended to perform a Passover sacrifice there. The …
Placing Central American struggles on the line of East-West conflict is not simply a compass error, to be corrected by a truer North-South heading. It is a basic mistake. It means to ignore the simultaneous ferment of three processes that have …
Political parties,” Gary Hart told the Alabama Legislature during the primary season, “must free themselves from the grasp of the special interests and once again address the country’s national interests.” There is no doubt that he struck a sympathetic chord …
A principal feature of recent neoconservative thought has been the scapegoating of democracy for a host of political and economic ills—from declining governmental competence to budget deficits and inflation. Our political system, the argument goes, has become “overloaded” by demands …
The nuclear weapons debate reminds us once again of how well-intentioned scientific advances may grant human beings such vast powers that they endanger our fundamental political and social values. The specter of such power has haunted the development of recombinant …
Last year, in May, I had occasion to revisit Warsaw, where I had stopped in 1974 on my way back from the Soviet Union. Detente, in 1974, was at its height, yet, when I reached Warsaw after a month in …
Eddie N. Williams, president of the Joint Center for Political Studies, a “think tank” dealing with special concerns of black America, speaks of a “growing passion for politics never before witnessed in the black community on a national scale.” Black leaders …
The Central American countries won their independence in 1821 as a by-product of the Spanish defeat in Mexico. All were part of a loose Central American federation, which fell apart in 1838 because of regional and ideological conflicts between anticlerical, …
n The Engineers and the Price System, Thorstein Veblen defined “sabotage” as “the conscientious withdrawal of efficiency” from productive activity. He then enlarged its meaning from signifying spiteful and covert destruction to embracing all restrictive practices—of firms as well as …
Editors: Richard Appelbaum, Peter Dreier, and Michael Harrington (“A Faded Dream: Housing in America,” Dissent, Winter 1984) rightly argue that the free market cannot solve America’s housing problem, but their proposed solutions neglect an important consideration: most Americans don’t want …
They are recidivist criminals, juvenile muggers,heroin addicts, adult winos in stumbling bottle gangs, welfare-dependent mothers of teen-age welfare mothers, homeless ex-mental patients, prostitutes and their pimps. Marx would have counted them among the lumpen proletariat, a class of dropouts from …
