Online Articles - Dissent Magazine

Universities and the Urban Growth Machine

Andrew Ross ▪ October 4, 2012

Why has the price tag of an American college degree skyrocketed (500 percent in the public sector since 1985) in recent decades?

Certain Problems Need Socialist Solutions

Maria Svart ▪ October 3, 2012

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.

“Empowerment” Against Democracy: Tinseltown and the Teachers’ Unions

Liza Featherstone ▪ September 26, 2012

“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.” …

The Flint Sit-Down Strike in Comics

Ethan Heitner, ed. Paul Buhle ▪ September 17, 2012

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 …

Has the Left Won? An Exchange Between Tim Barker and James Livingston

Tim Barker and James Livingston ▪ September 11, 2012

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 …

Chicago Teachers on Strike

Editors ▪ September 10, 2012

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, …

Relitigating the Haymarket Trial

Thai Jones ▪ September 7, 2012

The Haymarket Conspiracy: Transatlantic Anarchist Networks by Timothy Messer-Kruse University of Illinois Press, 2012, 256 pp. An impassive consideration of the Haymarket Affair might run as follows: On the evening of May 4, 1886, following several days of violent protests …