This issue of DISSENT discusses the present condition of the American unions. There are general articles on new problems facing the labor movement and studies of individual unions focused on particular problems: democracy in the steel union, racketeering in longshore, …
I want to discuss a mistaken policy of certain theater craft unions, and suggest a remedy. The matter has an importance in itself, because in recent years there has been a growth in new theater “off Broadway” that may, if …
No one can work his way through Das Kapital without etching on his mind forever the knowledge that profit must come from loss —the lost energy of one human being paying for the comfort of another; if the process has …
What Shakespeare says in Twelfth Night about greatness in men one could also say about that mysterious something in books that makes them bestsellers: Some are born with it, some achieve it, and some have it thrust upon them. An …
The Political Atmosphere Editors: Irving Howe asks the question, “a new political atmosphere in America?” in the Winter 1959 DISSENT. The responses of the other editors (save perhaps Plastrik) are not encouraging. Mailer didn’t vote, Rosenberg “could care less but …
Professor Alex Inkeles told a group at the University of Michigan that the more often you laugh the higher you are likely to be on the social scale. “Contrary to popular belief,” he said in a lecture, “the lower you …
THE LATE Alvan T. Fuller, businessman and twice Governor of Massachusetts, collected paintings. It is told that in his lifetime Fuller was a very generous man. Earlier this year some fifty of his best pictures hung in a memorial exhibit …
ISLAND IN THE CITY, by Dan Wakefield. Houghton Mifflin Dan Wakefield has written a fine human document about the 600,000 Puerto Ricans in New York City. It is a little on the sentimental side (perhaps in reaction to those who …
THE TRADITION OF THE NEW, by Harold Rosenberg. Horizon, 1959. By a quietly satisfactory law of nature, the brightest people write the best books, if you can get a book out of them. Now a publisher has had the good …
Men and women carry beneath the burden of their impotence a spark of life, however buried, that flares at the sight of the Stranger. And in this blind light they see his strangeness as the mark of a terrifying freedom. …
Dear Irving: No doubt there are others, but I have seen only three “negative” U. S. reviews of my essay, The Causes of World War Three. In the Wall Street Journal, William H. Chamberlain wrote—as expected; in the N. Y. …
I would like to suggest that what most characterizes Leon Trostky, and the revolutionary generation he symbolizes, are: 1) the dominance of ideas; 2) the need and willingness to act on them; and 3) the fanatic belief in ideological purity. …
if some of the more extravagant reviews of Bertrand de Jouvenel’s Sovereignty are to be believed, this book is nothing less than a classic. The London Times Literary Supplement proclaimed it “a remarkable achievement . . . a great work …
A major legend of Soviet ideology has it that the rule over production in the USSR is qualitatively different from that of private capitalism. In Factory and Manager in the U.S.S.R., Professor Joseph Berliner of Syracuse University has written a …
