The Cold War is demonstrating greater longevity as an idea than as a political fact. Despite radical changes in the landscape of international politics, it remains a seductively comfortable concept that dominates both learned and popular discourse. The belief persists …
Though it is little more than a year since Soul on Ice was published, Eldridge Cleaver has been assimilated so rapidly by popularizers and professional reviewers that it is almost impossible to grasp the book in its original meaning. By emphasizing …
The root metaphor controlling Lewis Feuer’s vision of the student world is the primal band of brothers falling on the father with bared teeth and drawn knives. “Generational conflict” is the war between students, driven by primitive emotions, and a generation …
Communism, Djilas tells us, is not a religion. It is a movement concerned with ideology and power. Religion is something more basic, the perennial, stubborn faith in “an insubstantial and ageless justice” that keeps man from becoming a determinate link …
In California, where agriculture has an occupational disease rate 50 percent higher than any other industry, people have known for some time that farm workers are endangered by pesticides. Since 1954 the number of doctors’ reports involving pesticides and agricultural …
According to Marxism, the state is a tool of the ruling class. The state, writes Engels in his Origin of the Family, is usually an agency of the strongest class, which controls the economy and therefore wins political hegemony. In …
Not since the early days of 1946, before the Cold War became a reality, has the climate for controlling the nuclear arms race been so propitious. Both the United States and the Soviet Union talk (but do not yet act) as …
Twenty-seven young soldiers have been standing trial for “mutiny” allegedly committed in the Presidio, an army installation in San Francisco. The issues raised by this trial extend far beyond the immediate events. The Presidio, headquarters of the U.S. Sixth Army, …
Not only has President Nixon failed to tackle any major problem, he has not even defined one. As Max Frankel has written: By this stage in their administrations John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson were forging new designs for European …
Nearly 40,000 West Virginia soft-coal miners returned to their jobs March 4 after conducting a political general strike in support of a state bill to make “Black Lung” a compensable ailment under the state’s workmen’s compensation system. The walkout began …
I wholeheartedly concur with Barry Bluestone’s position in “The Poor Who Have Jobs” (DISSENT, September-October 1968) that the currently popular proposals to adapt the poor to our modern industrialized economy through programs of manpower training and development are totally inadequate as …
The following appeared in a leaflet distributed by Students for a Democratic Society at New York University the day after it broke up a meeting at which James Reston was scheduled to speak, as well as another meeting at which …
One of the most arresting aspects of the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution has been the confrontation between Mao Tse-tung (or the Maoist group) and the Chinese Communist party. There is, to be sure, an area of vagueness and uncertainty concerning this …
The June War and the continuing Middle East tensions have not produced the same effect in Beirut as they have in Cairo or Amman. In Beirut there is the accustomed freedom of speech, one of that city’s singular virtues. There …
Lowenthal: We face here a worldwide problem, an apparent breakdown of communication between the generations. A significant part of the younger generation seems not to accept the beliefs, values, and institutions that have been handed down to them. This degree …
Socialist thought provides us with an imaginative and moral horizon.
For insights and analysis from the longest-running democratic socialist magazine in the United States, sign up for our newsletter:
