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.
Why has the price tag of an American college degree skyrocketed (500 percent in the public sector since 1985) in recent decades?
We have reached the point where the satisfaction of material human needs no longer requires that every adult on the planet work a forty-hour week. The jobs are not coming back.
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.
“You know those mothers who lift one-ton trucks off their babies?” says Jamie Fitzpatrick, a working-class mom (played Maggie Gyllenhall), in a confrontation with a corrupt union rep in Daniel Barnz’s edu-drama, Won’t Back Down. “They’re nothing compared to me.” …
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 …
The storied Sit-Down Strike in Flint, Michigan has a special significance for today. Led in large part by left-wingers—Communist, Socialist, and Trotskyist alike—it was, more important, the most dramatic part of a movement that swept across the nation. Not so …
The following is an exchange between Tim Barker, assistant editor at Dissent, and James Livingston, professor of history at Rutgers University and author, most recently, of Against Thrift: Why Consumer Culture is Good for the Economy, the Environment, and Your …
Update (9/10): read Bill Barclay’s background on the strike here. Update (9/12): watch Dissent contributor and editorial board member Joanne Barkan discuss the strike on Al Jazeera English. After unsuccessful negotiations between Chicago Public Schools and the Chicago Teachers Union, …
The only common immigration policy that EU states have is fear.
