I t helps to know something of the history of Russia under Stalin’s despotism to appreciate this novel fully. Reading it is an unforgettable introduction to that history—desperate men and women trying to preserve their faith in socialism as the …
A merica has an orgy of emotional reckoning still to come over its involvement in Vietnam. The eight or so years we spent tearing that country to pieces wrought commensurate destruction to our own shared cultural and emotional life. When …
The 1970s have a bad name—the “me decade,” a narcissistic time in which authority declined. The decade’s bleakness stands in contrast to the ’60s when the Movement and the New Left seemed to promise the dawn of a new day …
In his article, “Human Capital and Economic Policy” (Dissent, Summer 1983), Robert B. Reich offers a critique of current corporate and government programs for improving the skills of the American work force. He describes some of the impediments to the …
This article is one in a group of six that will appear in a volume entitled Alternatives: Proposals From the Democratic Left, edited by Irving Howe, © 1984 by the Foundation for the Study of Independent Social Ideas, Inc., and …
There is a political sensibility—it can be found in the pages of The Nation, though elsewhere too—that might roughly be called “the troubles and confusions of the children of Stalinism.” Children literally, children figuratively. The writers who cultivate this sensibility …
VVhen the War on Poverty began 20 years ago, housing was one of the major battlefields. The concern then was with the reality of slums in the midst of affluence. For middle-class Americans, it was a time of economic growth …
Although political theorists who favor worker participation have often emphasized its potentialities for democratic character and its beneficial effects on democracy in the government of the state, a stronger justification, with a more Kantian flavor, seems to me to rest …
Theodore Draper contends that his title, though apparently an oxymoron, is meant to indicate the intermediate status of his essays between journalism, which deals with immediate events, and traditional history, which waits to assess them until they have indisputably acquired …
Andre Brink is a leading South African writer, one of the courageous group that has spoken out against racial injustice. The author of such novels as Looking on Darkness, A Dry White Season, and A Chain of Voices, he has …
The changes in the Soviet leadership have been of great interest not only because they represent shifts of emphasis in the U.S.S.R.’s foreign and domestic policies. Considerable attention has also been focused on the relations between the authorities and the …
There’s a Newspeak definition of “special interests.” In Reaganite language, the 97 percent of the American people whose income is less than $50,000 a year are the “special interests.” They menace the administration of the country by Adam Smith’s invisible …
Stanislaw Barahczak, poet and essayist, was born in 1946 in Poznan, Poland. He studied at Adam Mickieivicz University in Poznan and received a doctorate in Polish literature in 1973. He was one of the cofounders of KOR in 1976 and …
France’s Socialist government is in deep trouble. There has been no real amelioration of economic conditions during the current year; in fact, things seem to have deteriorated further. The rate of inflation will come to roughly 9 percent this year …
When Pope John Paul II visited the Brazilian city of Manaus in July 1980, there was a slight but significant change in protocol at the last minute. Members of an Amazonian tribe had been scheduled to perform their dances for …
