This special issue of Dissent devotes itself entirely to Africa today. In the past three years the world has altered fundamentally, and virtually everywhere across Africa there is a dialectic of crisis and change at work. Old regimes and ideas …
All American ethnic groups—Irish, Jews, Italians, Poles, blacks, and so on—have struggled in a rather schizophrenic way with their self-image or identity. Any group’s ethnic identity within American society is carved out of a delicate, tension-laced mixture of its origin …
The collective taxi had just passed the square, white Social Security Administration building. One of the two young men next to me asked his friend, “Do you know how much the director there earns? Five hundred thousand zaires (about $7,500 …
Both these statements are true, and yet there is a terrible irony in them. The Dinka woman, driven from her home by the savage raids of Sudanese Arab militiamen, was, that very same month, entitled to vote in the first …
In Africa, as elsewhere, the debacle of socialist thought can be attributed to intellectual as well as circumstantial causes. During the colonial era, and for some years thereafter, socialist intellectuals in Africa had routinely identified capitalism as a barrier to …
All African wisdom is to be found in oral culture—in words, speech, symbols, and rhythm. So the highest form of artistic expression is storytelling: not merely the narrative as such, but the whole scene of storyteller and audience, with pauses …
The idea of a market-based form of socialism was first given serious attention in the 1920s, when it was promoted by moderates within the socialist movement as an alternative to the marketless form of socialism identified with Marx’s vision of …
This is a moment for questions. Probably the ones we ask ourselves are not very different from those our readers would ask. So here’s an effort by one Dissent editor to provide, not exhaustive or definitive, but brief and provisional …
Moshe Lewin is one of the leading scholars of Soviet history in the United States, currently professor of history at the University of Pennsylvania. His books include The Gorbachev Phenomenon, Lenin’s Last Struggle, Russian Peasants and Soviet Power, and The …
There is a nascent women’s movement in Eastern Europe, different from that in the West. Where the women’s movement in the West was built in a milieu of relative economic plenty, feminism in the East is being built in a …
When Ron Carey learned that he had been elected Teamsters union (IBT) president, his first words, addressed to the old-guard officials who were using the union’s treasury as their private money market fund, were: “The party’s over.” An unstated message, …
The problems of the American health care system have been with us a long time. In 1948 Harry Truman fought for National Health Insurance (NHI); in the 1950s and 1960s political efforts concentrated on Medicare, yet even that was viewed …
All over the world today, but most interestingly and frighteningly in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union, men and women are reasserting their local and particularist, their ethnic, religious, and national identities. The tribes have returned, and the drama of …
Gertrude Ezorsky presents a powerfully reasoned argument in favor of raising out of misery that part of the American population that has been relegated to the most miserable jobs and deprived of civil rights and humane treatment. The book starts …
John Diggins has written an irritating but provocative book. First, the annoyances: He calls the work a history of the left in the United States but slights everyone but intellectuals. He says almost nothing about the labor movement, but devotes …
