Can we speak of a historical phenomenon called Stalinism? One is tempted to a brusque riposte: the answer is self-evident to millions of its victims. But this would avoid the issue raised by the question, which is whether the Stalinshchina …
The crisis in Algeria is still evolving as I write, but one thing is already clear: the army’s suppression of democracy in the name of democracy has posed the gravest dilemma for the human rights movement in the Arab world …
September 14. The children are especially studious the first week. It’s even true of us teachers. We look more professional in September. We imagine every fall that this time we’re going to get it right. We start off with fresh …
In July of last year, I received a phone call from a television producer who was interested in doing a program on the idea of an American monument to Desert Storm. Somewhere in Washington somebody was thinking of commissioning just …
Harlot’s Ghost opens on a fog-ridden winter night in Maine, 1983, when the narrator, a CIA operative and Yale graduate named Herrick (Harry) Hubbard, is with fear in his heart driving along perilously icy roads to his mystery-shrouded home on …
I must first apologize for the title of this essay. I am not interested in the crisis of Marxism but in the crisis of politics—I mean, emancipatory politics. What must be called not the “crisis” but the wholesale collapse of …
Earl is a small, quiet town in the old sharecropping country of eastern Arkansas. But on October 25, 1991, a noisy drama was taking place in the parking lot of Earl Industries, the town’s leading employer. Staging a grim parody …
At a recent educational conference of the Machinists union (IAM), I asked several groups of local officers and staff how many of their locals were involved in “employee involvement” (EI) or “labor-management cooperation” (LMC) programs. An overwhelming majority said they …
“Rix” (as he was known to his friends) died this past August in Berlin after a prolonged illness. An early and frequent contributor to Dissent, he was social democracy’s major theorist in postwar Germany, an acknowledged authority on international communism, …
Most Americans think that federal housing assistance is a poor people’s program. In fact, fewer than one-fifth of all low-income Americans receive federal housing subsidies. In contrast, more than three-quarters of wealthy Americans—some with two expensive homes—get housing aid from …
Why is there no labor-based radical political party in the United States? There are two main problems. First, organized labor has always been too weak and too self-involved to be the basis of a new party, which could only succeed …
PATCO, Hormel, Greyhound, Eastern, Nordstrom, Equitable: the list goes on and on. Organized labor has suffered its worst decade since the 1920s, as intense employer opposition, encouraged and supported by conservative national administrations, left the labor movement reeling, its membership …
Whatever the outcome of the continuing debate over the Western tradition on college campuses, multiculturalism appears to have won an impressive victory in the public schools around the country. The list of urban school districts with programs in place or …
Hunger kills millions more people each year than wars or political repression. By a rough estimate, the current toll of hunger-related deaths equals several hundred jumbo jets crashing each day with no survivors. Yet, apart from concern about recurrent famines, …
The fall of the communist regimes of Eastern Europe and the rapid disintegration of the Soviet Union raise the question of whether conclusions may now be drawn in the historic argument over the nature of the capitalist system. Has the …
