Winter 2024

We are soon going to be asked: whom will you vote for in November? Given the quadrennial pressure to face utter disaster with reaction or coddle the future with facsimile liberalism, I would like to record my opinion early: the …

Khrushchev is reported to have remarked that Dr. Zhivago might have been published in the Soviet Union if only a few hundred words had been eliminated. The fact is, of course, that it was not published; but it might be …

By now there is a whole repertoire of responses to the quiz fix. One hears a muffled mea cu/pa from the fixed and the fixers; some simulate indignation or cry on cue, while others demonstrate their know-how more creatively. One …

The value of a socialist orientation to contemporary events is demonstrated by the most unlikely people. In the course of his mea culpa in Washington the head of the Columbia Broadcasting System set forth the framework for understanding the quiz …

One wet October morning the telephone at the foreman’s desk rang. It was a call from the chairman of the shop committee. “I’m putting you in my place as committeeman,” he said. “Why?” “Because,” he answered, “I’ve been fired. 1 …

AT THIS WRITING thirty South African men and women are again on trial for their lives because they dared publicly oppose the Nationalist Government’s harsh apartheid program of total segregation of the “Bantu” population (total except for daily work, for …

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 …

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 …

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 …

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 …

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 …

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 …

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 …

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 …

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 …