When the recession came to Michigan, it did not create a sudden crisis as much as bring to a climax socio-economic trends that had been gathering for some years. In 1958 unemployment in Michigan reached a peak of 460,000 or …
In recent years there has arisen a sophistication which understands that the abolition of private property alone will not guarantee the end of exploitation. The problem has been posed as: how does one check bureaucracy. The problem is a real …
Traditionally Marxism has claimed to be a carrier of progress beyond the attainment of capitalism. The argument ran: Capitalism, having reached its summit, is weighed down with internal contradictions. At this point, the proletariat, matured by long apprenticeship in capitalist …
The rhetoric of equality is a staple of American speech; we devoutly abstain, however, from planning the practice of equality. The amazingly rapid expansion of American education in the past fifty years is indeed an occasion for pride: it is …
The verb, to co-exist, only has plural forms: we co-exist. Moreover, its voices are passive or reflexive: I suffer your co-existence with me. The relationship so described is neither war nor peace; but it implies a tacit understanding that two …
The Kremlin’s actions are impelled not by an ideology but by an objective: to extend the area of its control and to maximize the degree to which it can manipulate and disintegrate those parts of the world not yet under …
This important book provides detailed information about a form of community that few people still experience at first hand— the rural village. Those of us who live in cities are thus given an opportunity to check our conceptions of rural …
THE HIDDEN and unhidden persuaders of Madison Avenue have regularly presented the American Male with his very own products, untainted by a speck of effeminacy. He-men eat Wheaties, smoke cigarettes, bathe with soaps and douse themselves with deodorants, all of …
Hannah Arendt’s Reflections Editors: In the Winter 1959 issue of DISSENT, Miss Hannah Arendt quotes in the preliminary statement to her article, “Reflections on Little Rock,” some remarks I made about Negroes being less interested in abolishing laws against miscegenation …
MY FIRST CONTACT with Dostoevsky’s novels was rather belated, I am ashamed to say. It came only when I was twenty-two. And what is more, it was in a sense imposed on me by circumstances. The conditions of my undertaking …
THE BROKEN MIRROR, A COLLECTION OF WRITINGS FROM CONTEMPORARY POLAND, Ed. by Pawel Mayewski; Introduction by Lionel Trilling. Random House. New York, 1958. This competent translation of some of the writings of the younger Polish intellectuals in the forefront of …
TROTSKY’S DIARY IN Exile: 1935. Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Mass. 1958 The general habit of considering Stalinism and present-day Communism as identical with, or at least as a continuation of revolutionary Marxism, has also led to an increasing misunderstanding of …
Let me begin by placing on the record my opinion that Mills has written a sound, brilliant and most timely political tract. In using the latter term I do not mean to put it into a minor category but to …
A soft, round face with a dull and banal expression; a mouth out of which come resounding but hollow words. Haven’t I already come across him on some subway platform or in his home town of Arras? No, I must …
May I add a word to the discussion begun in the last DISSENT on the political climate in America? Essentially, the 1958 vote continued a trend that began after the Korean War in the summer of 1953. The Polish and …
