There is no such thing as a spontaneous strike, protest, or any other kind of social irruption. Spontaneity is just another word for ignorance on the part of those in power who are the object of subaltern scorn and protest.
Here is one more thing in which Israel is imitating America: neocon tactics. American neocons think that American universities are overwhelmingly liberal, and so they have created alternatives in the form of think tanks designed to foster conservative thought. This, …
News organizations must be held accountable for the impact their use of “illegal” has not only on individual readers, but also on communities and on any chance of future congressional action.
While Hobsbawm will be remembered as a historian of singular gifts, his writings already seem less a harbinger of the shape of things to come than sterling examples of an older kind of scholarship at its best.
Eugene D. Genovese, one of the foremost left-wing scholars of his time, has died. A teenage member of the Communist Party kicked out for “having zigged when I was supposed to zag,” he gained national notoriety in 1965 for welcoming “the impending Viet Cong victory” at a Rutgers teach-in.
By echoing a creed that failed the nation at the end of the nineteenth century, the conservatives who rule the GOP make it almost impossible to have a serious debate about how to solve our problems in the early twenty-first.
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An earlier version of this ran at openDemocracy last week, before tens of thousands marched in Benghazi to demand the dissolution of Islamist militias—a demand soon supported by the Libyan government. The plot line could have leapt from the baroque …
Author’s note (added 9/25): Over the past few years, I have been an intermittent participant in local Brooklyn politics through New Kings Democrats and Prospect Heights Democrats for Reform, political organizations that hope to change the character of Brooklyn politics …
Last month, tens of thousands of undocumented young people from around the country inaugurated the Obama administration’s deferred action policy by applying en masse to live and work in the United States for a renewable two-year term. Among the applicants …
Thai Jones, clearly discomforted by what my book is—essentially an ideological genealogy of a particular strain of revolutionary anarchism that flared into popularity in the 1880s and died in America with the explosion of the Haymarket bomb—employs the age-old dodge …
Horst Brand, a longtime editor and contributing editor of Dissent, died on August 25. At the time of his death, he was at work on what would have been his fifty-seventh article for Dissent. His first article appeared in our …
Last Wednesday, the CUNY Graduate Center hosted a debate between author and journalist Chris Hedges and B. Traven of CrimethInc. Ex-Workers Collective on violence and “diversity of tactics” in Occupy and other social movements. The debate, moderated by CUNY sociology …
Yes, schoolchildren in Chicago are victims, but not of their teachers. They are victims of a nationwide education “reform” movement geared to undermine teachers’ unions and shift public resources into private hands; they are victims of wave after wave of …
Walking the green strip of Woldenberg Park in New Orleans recently, I wasn’t surprised to encounter a Holocaust memorial, but was surprised by how little it elicited in me. The memorial’s trope of “Never Again,” its praise of cultural harmony, …
