In April 1940 the Paris-based Russian Menshevik journal, Sotsialisticheskii Vestnik (SV), published an article by the famous Austrian Marxist Rudolf Hilferding entitled “State Capitalism or Totalitarian State Economy?” Hilferding argued that the Soviet Union should be understood as the harbinger …
Occasionally, a book is published or a film released that leads one to realize that the old verities no longer hold. Heimat is such a work. A fifteen-and-one-half-hour film written and directed by Edgar Reitz for German television, Heimat (which …
The October 1986 issue of the neoconservative magazine the New Criterion carried an article, “Spain and the Intellectuals,” by Ronald Radosh, a member of the Dissent editorial board. All of us at Dissent speak and write as individuals; there is …
Last year, Canada’s New Democratic Party (NDP) celebrated its twenty-fifth birthday. Given the odds against democratic socialist parties in the North American climate, the NDP’s survival is no mean feat. The NDP is not a splinter. Although most Canadians still …
All available signs indicate that Jesse Jackson will again run for the presidency in 1988. A prominent feature of his second candidacy will probably be implicit or explicit threats to bolt the Democratic party and run as an independent in …
When Francois Mitterrand came to power in 1981, he promised a “rupture with capitalism.” If his policies of the first year were not the clean break with the past they were supposed to be, they were an audaciously consistent and …
Walk north on a balmy evening from Lincoln Center in Manhattan along Columbus Avenue for fifteen or twenty blocks and treat yourself to a vision of youth ala mode. No costume is outré when clothes are expected to make statements …
For the last two hundred years, with the exception of a brief interval between the two World Wars, Poland has been either partitioned, occupied, or governed by proxy. Squeezed between Russia and Germany, Poles took nourishment and continuity as a …
Though the headlines may tell another story, to anyone living in Vienna the most remarkable thing about Europe after Chernobyl is how most remarkably like Europe before Chernobyl it is. In the direct aftermath of the accident, Austria did join …
The following remarks were delivered at the Socialist Scholars Conference in New York City in April 1986, at the panel on Israel and the U.S. Left.” The participants were Noam Chomsky, Ellen Willis of the Village Voice, and myself.—P.B. The …
The Klondike Gold Rush of 1898 began a pattern of uneven economic development that continues nearly a century later in the Yukon, that vast, mountainous territory in the northwest corner of Canada. The discovery of an untapped resource creates fabulous …
Virtually every column I’ve read on New York City’s unfolding municipal corruption scandals seeks salvation in greater citizen vigilance and participation in public life. A prosecutor warns that only an aroused electorate can wrest reform from foot-dragging politicians. A senator …
Lasch argues that the values of tradition, family, and personal responsibility find their defenders today among conservatives, not among the left. But American conservatism has a fatal flaw: it fails to see that it is not some liberal “new class” …
The Reykjavik summit may have been a failure— as the demeanor of its participants clearly indicated when it was over; or, it may have been a tremendous success—after the participants reconsidered their Icelandic labors twenty-four hours later, both here and …
For individuals of a certain age and experience, Elizabeth Durbin’s sympathetic but clear-headed exploration of the British Labour party’s attempt in the 1930s to define a program at once intellectually coherent and politically appealing recalls their own groping for a …
