They stroll the narrow, shabby streets, chat at the corners, lean against the peeling pillars of the town saloon, the St. Michael Hotel & Restaurant, and they look more like movie actors than real human beings, because something is wrong. …
Basic changes are taking place in the American economy and the American labor movement. They signify a crisis of historic proportions. Among these changes I would include automation, the wider application of electronics to industry, the use of computers for …
Pinned on the basement walls of a temporary union headquarters during New York’s hospital strike last spring was a two-page, full color advertisement torn from Life magazine. It showed a gentleman of the New Leisure stretched in a hammock, drinking …
Rimmed off from the rest of the city by a steel-ribbed highway and a wall of bulkhead sheds is the New York waterfront, an atavistic world more redolent of the brawling money-grubbing of the nineteenth century than the smooth-mannered business …
Not long ago in Washington someone wanted to know how many union staff people worked in the city and whether an accurate estimate could be made of the number of Jews with union staff jobs in the community. The first …
It was all very odd, even eerie, as if by some trick one of my youthful political fantasies had come true in a perverted form. There I sat, in a union hall jammed with cheering truck drivers, listening to their …
There has been much talk in recent years about Big Labor, some of it warranted and some of it malicious; but almost no one has paid any attention to the scores of small unions which, quietly and persistently, continue to …
About the steel workers’ union only one thing can be said with assurance: no ready-made formula will take us far on the road to understanding. Here is an important section of the classical “proletariat”; yet in consciousness, initiative and militancy …
DEMOCRACY AND THE CHALLENGE OF POWER, by David Spitz. Columbia University Press, 1958. “Power” seems to have a peculiar fascination for the modern mind, in part, perhaps, because men feel en. trapped by the superordinate-subordinate relations which become more ubiquitous …
DESEGREGATION: RESISTANCE AND READINESS, by Melvin Tumin. Princeton University Press, 1958. This book reports the results of an investigation conducted by Professor Melvin Tumin and his assistants into the attitudes of white people in Guilford County, North Carolina, toward the …
MILLS VS. HOWE Editors: Commenting on C. W. Mills’ “Causes of World War III” in the Spring DisSENT, Irving Howe charges Mills with “a relentless thrust of assertion” and “analytic carelessness and moral disequilibrium.” It seems to me that in …
No one can work his way through Das Kapital without etching on his mind forever the knowledge that profit must come from loss —the lost energy of one human being paying for the comfort of another; if the process has …
The verb, to co-exist, only has plural forms: we co-exist. Moreover, its voices are passive or reflexive: I suffer your co-existence with me. The relationship so described is neither war nor peace; but it implies a tacit understanding that two …
The rhetoric of equality is a staple of American speech; we devoutly abstain, however, from planning the practice of equality. The amazingly rapid expansion of American education in the past fifty years is indeed an occasion for pride: it is …
