Fall 2025

Young people today have no spokesmen. The day of the youth league and its ideology seems to be over. Today we have the club again, and the gang, and perhaps the family. It might even be wrong to say that …

According to UN statistics, the nations of the world are spending about $90 billion annually in preparation for the kind of thermonuclear war which would destroy civilization and perhaps mankind— this in a world where 70 per cent of its …

When the Roman Empire had grown old and tired it began to rely, for the defense of its ramparts, less and less on the prowess of its citizens; instead, it paid subsidia to its minor allies, and even tributum to …

Successful co-existence of capitalist countries with the Soviet bloc depends on the realization in the former that the non-totalitarian ecnonomic system has been put on the defensive. The rising standard of comfort and ease in rich capitalist countries and the …

One of the most significant political events of the 1950s was the movement of the African states, and in particular the Negro peoples of sub-Sahara Africa, toward independence. As the previous decade belonged to the liberation movements of Asia, so …

We have survived yet another crisis in France. I use the passive form feelingly. It shows how far we have come since May 13, 1958 [the date of the Gaullist coup] and indeed since long before then. To some of …

ONE OF THE MORE interesting political events of the past few months was passed over in virtual silence by the American press: the decision of Pierre Mendel-France, former premier of France, to join the Autonomous Socialist Party. For an appreciation …

No one has argued the omnipresence of the law of supply and demand more persuasively than businessmen themselves—spokesmen for the steel industry not excluded. It is therefore ironic that steel succeeded last summer in accomplishing what had been denied as …

Bedazzled by the way in which the American economy successfully handled three post-war recessions, many observers have concluded that prosperity is now normal and routine, built-in to the system. Not only has the economy become less susceptible, they say, to …

“The whole bourgeois world blown up by gunpowder, when the smoke disperses and reveals the ruins, will start again with different variations—another bourgeois world.” It was these words of Alexander Herzen that occurred to me when I recently finished reading …

There is a strong temptation to make the best of British Labor’s defeat. After all, the popular vote shows a Tory margin of only 1½ million votes out of 30 million and a careful breakdown indicates that, within many electoral …

THE JEWISH LABOR BUND, A PICTORIAL HISTOR. FARLAG UNSER TSAIT. 1958. The first picture in this book shows the house in Wilno where the Bund, the Jewish Socialist movement of Poland, held its secret founding convention in 1897. The last …

Puerto Ricans and Sentimentality Editors: I suppose if one were to total up the comments of Stanley Plastrik in his review of my book, Island in the City, [DISSENT, Spring 1959], the scales would be slightly more weighted on the …

The value of a socialist orientation to contemporary events is demonstrated by the most unlikely people. In the course of his mea culpa in Washington the head of the Columbia Broadcasting System set forth the framework for understanding the quiz …