On Workers and Intellectuals The working class is a social presence; the proletariat, a historical potential. No one can question the place of the workers in the industrialized countries: their politics, their role in the work process, their ways of …
Solzhenitsyn, by George Lukacs. Translated by William David Graf. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press. 88 pages. For most of his life Georg Lukacs, the intellectual heresiarch of Communism, was unable to write freely. During the years he spent under Stalin in Russia …
Clearly there is a mounting conviction among large numbers of Americans that major social and political changes are needed. The publication of the Pentagon Papers is certain to reinforce this conviction. A variety of polls testify people feel the country has …
Social Crisis, Crisis of Civilization, or Both? We must get it out of our heads that this is a doomed time, that we are waiting for the end, and the rest of it, mere junk from fashionable magazines. —Saul Bellow, …
The case of Heberto Padilla is of great importance, first as a reflection of the increasing Stalinization of the Castro regime, and second as a test of the responses that are elicited among what, I suppose, must be called the …
ON THE WHOLE DISSENT BOARD there is not one general. Not even a colonel. The most we can show are a few ex-sergeants, World War II vintage, who never achieved fame as military strategists. So we just don’t know whether …
It’s as if the American people (assuming for the moment so large an abstraction) had said: We trust neither party completely, we are nervous and dismayed about the state of the country, we are not inclined, certainly not yet, to …
The death of Richard Hofstadter has been felt as a tragic loss, a harsh personal blow, not only by those who had been close to him but by colleagues, students, readers throughout the country. He was a brilliant historian. He …
August 3, 1970 This article was written before negotiations for a temporary cease-fire in the Middle East were concluded. Naturally I hope that this temporary cease-fire will become a permanent one, and that in turn will lead to a peace …
The situation in the United States is too serious for mere indulgence in pessimism. Whoever reads these lines will, I assume, have shared our feelings of anger and intense dismay over the Nixon policy in Cambodia and the killings at …
I should like to open a political discussion about a problem that seems unprecedented, especially in France and Italy. In both countries there are mass Communist parties, allied with the Moscow wing of Communism. These are perhaps the largest, certainly …
The following letter, in condensed version, was sent to the New York Times by the editor of Dissent: TO THE EDITOR: It is hard to speak of the Chicago trial with anything but bitterness. What occurred there was not merely …
There is an essential shoddiness in Richard Nixon’s politics that shines out, like fool’s gold, from every word he speaks and every step he takes. In domestic policy (Southern school desegregation, tax “reform,” Supreme Court appointments, etc.) this is clear …
The social roots of the New York writers are not hard to trace. With a few delightful exceptions—a tendril from Yale, a vine from Seattle—they stem from the world of the immigrant Jews, either workers or petty bourgeois.1 They come …
This is a good time to remember what we owe the students. Owe, not to one or another group and certainly not to the “actions” of last year, but to the fresh and undogmatic young people who in 1963-64 began …
