Before World War II, no indigenous Marxian tradition existed in France. Stalinist hacks dominated the scene, and the socialist movement largely subsisted on a thin gruel of traditional Marxist ideas mixed with generous infusions of Jacobin ideology and native “utopian …
This is a bad movie. Surprisingly so, since it had a naturally sympathetic subject on which there is likely to be universal agreement in feeling. The reviewers haven’t let on to its failure, perhaps they didn’t notice. Its badness is …
Particularly at a time of slow growth and global economic disarray, a new president’s first budget assumes even greater importance than usual as a statement of priorities and a forecast of policy for the remainder of his term. As commentators …
On Eurocommunism Editors: Never-being-tired-with-being-always-duped: now this seems to me a fair, even though not very courteous summary of the long history of attitudes a significant part of the Western left kept displaying for several decades in face of Communism. Every …
Italy’s instability is unique among the disorders common in contemporary industrial societies in which, as Pierre Viansson-Ponte puts it, “many dikes in the collective unconscious have begun to give way.” In Italy the economic maladjustment caused by the enormous inflation …
For a walker through Times Square or the downtown areas of many American cities a stop for a newspaper means a confrontation with the tastelessness of Screw and Hustler; a glance at a record shop window discloses an album-cover photograph, …
We Were There: The Story of Working Women in America, by Barbara Mayer Wertheimer. New York: Pantheon Books. 427 pp. America’s Working Women: A Documentary History – 1600 to the Present, compiled and edited by Rosalyn Baxandall, Linda Gordon, Susan Reverby. …
Despite rhetoric about free enterprise, big business has long sought government aid to protect it from the rigors of the market, insure large profits, and allow it to escape taxes on profits and wealth. Apologists for capitalism often hold welfare …
Criticism of commercial television seems to increase each year. Educators complain that it has not lived up to its potential. Political scientists, who expected TV to increase communication between citizens and government—to enhance democracy—now complain that it has deteriorated into …
Partisans of Freedom: A Study in American Anarchism, by William O. Reichert. Bowling Green: Bowling Green University Popular Press. 602 pp. The American anarchist tradition, which dates back to the 1840s and has earlier antecedents, has never been well interpreted; …
A cartoon in the Paris rightist daily Figaro shows a gleeful (President of the Republic) Valery Giscard d’Estaing watching a television screen on which Francois Mitterrand (Socialist party), Georges Marchais (Communist party) and Robert Fabre (Left-Radicals) attack one another. Turning …
Setting on my front porch swing I’m like a man forgotten Head all filled up with angry thoughts And lungs filled up with cotton Fourteen years ago, the Textile Workers Union began their campaign to organize J. P. Stevens, the …
The democratization of the investment process is the key to a socialist strategy for full employment during the short and medium term. In saying this, I do not suggest that we socialists have “the” answer. There is no such thing. …
A political question cannot be answered by a philosophical definition. Leszek Kolakowski has decided, to his own satisfaction, that Communists are Communists are Communists, an insight that he derives from reading their texts. For him, the criteria for their conversion …
Editors: Boris Souvarine (Dissent, Summer 1977) twists Solzhenitsyn’s somewhat mythological Lenin in Zurich into a springboard for a peculiarly lopsided account of the evidence for the German subsidy to the Bolsheviks in 1917-18. The tone of this lopsidedness is set …
