For Portugal the analogies were almost always wrong. It was not Czechoslovakia in 1948. Throughout 1974 and into mid-1975, the Communists held many of the key positions of power: in the government, the local administration, the unions, the press, and …
The Russian poet Varlam Shalamov spent almost 25 years in Soviet prisons and labor camps, 17 of them in Kolyma, for “counterrevolutionary activities.” One of his Kolyma Stories, published here under the title “Lend-Lease Comes to a Soviet Camp” (these …
Under Stalin, Soviet society was effectively atomized by the application over two decades of mass terror. In an important if paradoxical sense, it was depoliticized. Since his death in 1953 a process of incipient repoliticization has begun, affecting both the …
My thought in this article is to identify and comment in a scientific way on one of the notable political phenomena of our time. That is, the powerful and wonderfully persistent devices by which recurrently we are persuaded that conservatism …
The idea of a potential capital shortage has been insistently argued by Administration officials and given academic respectability by Harvard professors and Brookings Institution researchers. It has also gained wide currency by alarming projections and been the subject of inquiry …
I n my previous article on this subject I have discussed the differential social conditions that can, without difficulty, be seen as accounting for most or all of the average black/white IQ gap that Arthur Jensen has tried to explain …
European Communist parties, for threescore years Stalin’s vanguard, seem to be discovering democracy. Few Americans have noticed and fewer still are willing to trust the change. With reason—and yet, if genuine, the change could mark the end of an era, …
In the Communist Manifesto, Marx and Engels described “conservative, or bourgeois, socialism.” A part of the bourgeoisie [they wrote] wants to remedy social grievances in order to ensure the stability of bourgeois society. . . . They want to have …
The Target Probably all the people in the United States—left, right, and center—would say they are in favor of an equitable society. The differences arise with regard to what exactly is meant by equity, and the divergent evaluations of the …
1. Irving Howe Since about six weeks will elapse between writing these comments and their appearance in print, it’s likely that much of what we say here will be dated. Still, a few of us from Dissent want to put down …
The municipal elections held on the Israeli-occupied West Bank this April resulted in a decisive victory for a new generation of Palestinian nationalists. In town after town, the enlarged electorate (including women for the first time) turned out in record …
At a recent gathering of the Congress party of India held in Chandigarh, Mrs. Gandhi presided over the meeting from a high platform, looking down upon her courtiers. The image evoked was that of Catherine the Great, haughty and contemptuous. …
The year was 1922 and the speaker was not a New York hardhat but Heinrich Mann (brother of the Thomas who was to become the oracle of Weimar Culture). From this source, the complaint sounds surprising; for Heinrich Mann had …
The following summary of socialist ideas for reshaping the American economy is taken from testimony that Michael Harrington, chairman of the Democratic Socialist Organizing Committee, gave before the Joint Economic Committee of the U.S. Congress last November. Harrington began with …
November 25, 1975 There are certain events that are awaited for such a long time that when they finally occur they seem unreal. For years and years, since the time I was first a university student, I have waited, like …
