The collapse of the Soviet Communist regime in 1991 is widely explained as the failure of a utopian experiment. In reality communism ceased to be much of an experiment within months after the October Revolution. The true failed utopian experiment …
First Amendment freedoms are inevitably invoked by provocateurs and dissenters seeking to change or complain about the status quo, so it’s not surprising that anti-abortion protesters have discovered free speech. After abortion was legalized and normalized in the early 1970s, …
One Hundred Years of Socialism: The West European Left In the Twentieth Century by Donald Sassoon The New Press, 1997, 965 pp., $22 The literature on communism, the Russian Revolution, and the Soviet Union fills libraries. It is the stuff …
Stanley Aronowitz, Herman Benson, and Gordon Haskell adopt an essentially similar approach in disapproving of my article on union democracy. It’s an old, if not particularly venerable one, which runs as follows: “If you don’t like the message, shoot the …
There has been much talk in Dissent‘s pages and elsewhere of the need to develop strong new transnational institutions of labor and civil society that could counterbalance the power of global corporations. But in the face of serious linguistic, cultural, …
The famous American liberalism/communitarianism debate, which is now being reproduced (at least among academic political theorists) in many parts of the world, is far less important for real politics than the recognition of two competing kinds of communitarianism, one focused …
The most remarkable thing about South African politics is how unremarkable they have become. I say this as someone born and raised there, who left in the early 1970s at the age of fifteen. On returning for a year’s sabbatical …
Sir Vidia’s Shadow: A Friendship Across Five Continents by Paul Theroux Houghton Mifflin, 1998, 368 pp., $24 Ex-Friends: Falling Out with Allen Ginsberg, Lionel & Diana Trilling, Lillian Hellman, Hannah Arendt, and Norman Mailer by Norman Podhoretz The Free Press, …
Steve Fraser’s article renders me virtually (but not totally) speechless. He doesn’t claim, directly, that democracy, as a general system of governance, is bad for unions. Had he done so, it might be easier to have a clear discussion. Although …
This issue marks forty-five years of Dissent. It is easy to imagine that our founders would have been a bit surprised if told back in 1954 that this magazine would still be a vigorous venture at the century’s close. After …
