Notwithstanding the vigorous economic upswing that began early in 1983 and continues at this writing, if at a slower pace, the American labor movement remains on the defensive. Its wage settlements have shrunk—in 1984, major collective bargaining contracts provided the …
For over a year, I’d been looking for Danilo Dolci. I’d searched all over Italy. I’d pored through major publications where news and photos of him used to appear. And I’d tried to get to know the people who worked …
LONDON — It was never just a strike, but a confrontation between two Britains: the Labour and union strongholds of the decaying industrial north and of the increasingly postindustrial south, which provided Mrs. Thatcher with her electoral majority. In symbolic …
Lionel Abel is a witty and cultivated man who has participated in or observed at close hand many of the past four decades’ important art movements and intellectual currents. His political involvement also goes back a long way: he was …
When Teddy Kennedy was asked what he thought of the Democratic neoliberals, he is said to have responded: “We don’t need two Republican parties.” There is a good deal of substance to Kennedy’s quip. Many of the neoliberals, including two …
In mid-March the Washington Post Magazine featured an article by Peter Collier and David Horowitz, best known nowadays for their encomium to Camelot, a bestseller called The Kennedys: An American Drama, wherein they lovingly explore every weakness of that villainous …
In mid-March the Washington Post Magazine featured an article by Peter Collier and David Horowitz, best known nowadays for their encomium to Camelot, a bestseller called The Kennedys: An American Drama, wherein they lovingly explore every weakness of that villainous …
It is no longer clear whether winning or losing elections is the bigger disaster facing socialists. The British Labour party lost to Margaret Thatcher, Francois Mitterrand’s French Socialist party won unprecedented power, and neither is in especially good shape. When …
Bitburg, Germany, 1945; Managua, Nicaragua, 1985. The two appear to be so far apart that no occurrence could possibly bring them together. But in March and April, 1985, Ronald Reagan asked himself a question, Whom shall I honor? And his …
Jean Bethke Elshtain’s essay “Politics and the Battered Woman” [Dissent, Winter 1985] not only seriously misrepresents my book Women and Male Violence: The Visions and Struggles of the Battered Women’s Movement, but it is a good example of an all …
One evening in March 1983, after giving her three-year-old daughter a birthday party, a New Bedford, Massachusetts woman left her two children with their father and walked to a neighborhood bar to buy cigarettes. According to her story, she bought …
They had a merry Christmas in Johnstown, Pennsylvania. For the first time in three years, the holiday passed without a steel mill being shut down. The unemployment rate was about 14 percent, nearly double the national average but well below …
“Modern capitalism,” wrote John Maynard Keynes, “is absolutely irreligious, without internal union, without much public spirit, often, though not always, a mere congeries of possessors and pursuers.” Over 60 years ago, R. H. Tawney, who cited those lines from the …
The long-legged, high-kicking beauties in Mel Brooks’s The Producers look like any other chorus line of dancers but for a single exception: they are suited out in the black uniforms of the SS. The dance they perform, backed by a …
When the Selma crisis began, 20 years ago this spring, the country was ready for it. Before Selma there had been the Woolworth sit-ins, the freedom rides, and in 1964 the Mississippi Summer Project. By the time Selma began, the …
