Spring 2025

Just wars, inevitable wars, alternatives to war—can they be sorted out as we think our way through to a position on the Gulf crisis? Are there any sturdy principles to grab hold of? When close to a million soldiers face …

Our colleague Jack Rader died on September 24 at the age of 73. Beyond our association as editors of Dissent, there is the pain of losing a close personal friend with whom I shared good times and bad. How he …

We have been fortunate that Abraham Brumberg has been a frequent contributor to our pages. Our readers know him as an exceptionally well-informed and lucid analyst of Soviet affairs. In this volume he brings off an incredibly useful collection of …

Following the collapse of the one-party dictatorships in Eastern Europe, much of the discussion about socialism and capitalism has had a surreal quality. There have been in most such discussions the unstated but related assumptions that all market systems must …

Can perestroika—the reconstruction of the Soviet economy—work? The shape of the world economy, in particular the relations of the advanced industrial societies to the markets of tomorrow, depends upon the answer to that question. I distinguish here between Eastern Europe—Poland, …

The decision to dismantle the Berlin Wall on November 9, 1989, offers us the opportunity to reflect on walls in the past and their surprising renaissance in contemporary California. The most famous of all is probably the Great Wall of …

Poland today is the classic home of “anti-Semitism without Jews.” More than twenty years after the frenzied anti-Semitic campaign of 1968, which brought about the exodus of nearly all remaining Polish Jews, hardly a week goes by without some anti-Semitic …

In the general euphoria about the collapse of communist regimes in Eastern Europe, it is often assumed that capitalism has been vindicated. To be sure, the failure of the Soviet model has shown the futility of attempting to  organize an …

Was the Soviet Union’s a planned economy? The simple, answer is no. Is a planned economy possible? That is a more difficult question to answer. Marx never had a theory of a planned economy, for he thought—from The Communist Manifesto …

As the waves of popular revolution swept across Eastern Europe in 1989, great hopes were aroused for the future of the East European nations. The prevailing view in the West was that, once liberated from the oppressive communist yoke, these …

In the Soviet periodical Ogonyok (Number 39, 1989), an article about the last days of the great Russian writer Isaac Babel appeared, based on documents kept secret until now in the Lubyanka Prison and only recently accessible “in the light …

Western progressives have long pointed to Swedish social democracy as an outstanding success story. As recently as the 1988 elections, the dominance of the Social Democratic Labor party (SAP) appeared unchallengeable. True, the party slipped somewhat at the ballot box, …

Shelby Steele’s argument (“The Memory of Enemies,” Dissent, Summer 1990) has two intertwined parts. First, he asserts that since the early 1970s the opportunity-structure in American society offers more space for social mobility and achievement than black Americans have effectively …

It’s useful, sometimes even fun, to locate one’s self on the political map. This is true both for us as individuals and for Dissent collectively. As a political publication we need to maintain a distinctive position for ourselves among the …

The past decade dramatized questions of popular participation in politics on a global stage—but with some irony. Just when millions of people look to America as inspiration for democracy, our own politics is a mess. Problems facing America today require …