Fall 2024

Eddie N. Williams, president of the Joint Center for Political Studies, a “think tank” dealing with special concerns of black America, speaks of a “growing passion for politics never before witnessed in the black community on a national scale.” Black leaders …

The Central American countries won their independence in 1821 as a by-product of the Spanish defeat in Mexico. All were part of a loose Central American federation, which fell apart in 1838 because of regional and ideological conflicts between anticlerical, …

n The Engineers and the Price System, Thorstein Veblen defined “sabotage” as “the conscientious withdrawal of efficiency” from productive activity. He then enlarged its meaning from signifying spiteful and covert destruction to embracing all restrictive practices—of firms as well as …

Editors: Richard Appelbaum, Peter Dreier, and Michael Harrington (“A Faded Dream: Housing in America,” Dissent, Winter 1984) rightly argue that the free market cannot solve America’s housing problem, but their proposed solutions neglect an important consideration: most Americans don’t want …

They are recidivist criminals, juvenile muggers,heroin addicts, adult winos in stumbling bottle gangs, welfare-dependent mothers of teen-age welfare mothers, homeless ex-mental patients, prostitutes and their pimps. Marx would have counted them among the lumpen proletariat, a class of dropouts from …

The demand that public spending should be kept high and frequently increased has long been one of the hallmarks of political movements of the left in virtually all industrial societies. It provides one of the very few points of consensus …

In July 1983 Marty Manley, one of a number of able young staffers laid off by the decimated International Association of Machinists, traveled to Washington to meet with Paul Jensen, labor liaison of the Mondale campaign. Manley had come to …

West Germany’s Green party is so little understood that we suspect it can’t be elucidated by traditional political categories. The standard view is that the Greens are a single issue, middle-class, left-leaning youth movement— a temporary irritant for the more …

The first oddity about Kenneth Lynn’s book of once-published pieces is its title. True, the locomotive on the dust jacket gives away what kind of line is an air-line, but who would have guessed that this particular railroad passed through …

Of definitions of intellectuals there is no end. One major approach places intellectuals according to their social position or occupational role; this has at least the value of reducing our tendency to excessive pride, for it analyzes us in terms …

In the Winter 1984 Dissent, Mr. Gordon Beadle has what I take to be a definitive refutation of the effort made by some neoconservative writers, notably Norman Podhoretz, to “kidnap” George Orwell for their side. Mr. Beadle shows with precise …

Despite the widespread misperception that women are achieving economic equality, their economic status has deteriorated sharply since the late 1960s. Today women—and children—are the primary beneficiaries of social welfare programs for the poor. Between the mid-’60s and mid-’70s, the number …

The Catholic bishops hadn’t even produced any part of a first draft of their pastoral letter on “Catholic Social Teaching and the U.S. Economy,” when Business Week and Fortunestarted whimpering. Business Week (12/19/83) quoted such authorities as Van P. Smith, …

“Now what I want is, Facts. Teach the boys and girls nothing but Facts. Facts alone are wanted in life. Plant nothing else, and root out everything else…Thomas Gradgrind, sir. A man of realities.” So Charles Dickens began his novel …