The Example of Agnes Heller, 1929–2019
Heller, like Dissent’s founders, believed in making an unjust world a little better, while recognizing that justice could never be complete.
Fall 2025
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Design for a Green Future 
The Green New Deal will require us to revolutionize the design professions, untethering them from the whims of private clients and capitalists and reorienting their work around movements for housing justice, environmental justice, and workers.
Reply to Joshua Leifer
This article is part of a debate. Read the original argument by Michael Walzer here, and Joshua Leifer’s response here. I disagree radically with Joshua Leifer’s response and won’t be able to get to every point of disagreement in this …
Socialism Beyond Equality
We need to think not only about beating the 1 percent, but also about the kind of world we want to build, the kind of existence we want to have on this earth.
National Neoliberalism in Turkey
If progressive critics of neoliberalism aim to recuperate the national arena to regain policy space back from global capital, they also need to think hard about how to challenge capitalists they face at home.
Ursula K. Le Guin’s Revolutions
Le Guin’s work is distinctive not only because it is imaginative, or because it is political, but because she thought so deeply about the work of building a future worth living.
Organizing Skid Row
Activists in L.A. are connecting homelessness to the issues of over-policing, gentrification, and the fight for affordable housing—and asking the city to recognize the homeless as members of the community, rather than a problem to be swept out of view.
Can Elephants Be Persons?
Personhood for Happy would create a legal precedent and framework for granting fundamental rights to nonhumans in the future.
“Hurrah for the Time Man!”
The labor historians of the 1960s were born into the culture of unity forged in the working-class movement’s classical phase, between 1890 and 1945. In one form or another, they told the story of this era, not realizing how radically it might come undone.
Material World
Bruno Latour’s flirtations with the paranoid style of climate politics are a summation of ideas long in the making—ideas that those attempting to preserve a planet shared by all will have to take into account, but will also have to reach beyond.
Kwame Nkrumah and the Quest for Independence
If the nation-state had failed to overcome the problem of colonial dependence, then the postcolonial political kingdom had to be reimagined. Nkrumah’s vision of pan-African federation was an effort to do just that.
Political Scenarios for Climate Disaster
In the Global North we often act as if our future will be a warmer version of today: liberal capitalism, plus flood insurance, minus coral reefs. That future is a fantasy.
The Collapse of Secularism in West Bengal
Can West Bengal’s traditions of religious tolerance and equal rights survive the rise of Hindu nationalism?
Pop-Up Populism: The Failure of Left-Wing Nationalism in Germany
Aufstehen’s leaders insisted that their movement was not defined by its opposition to migrants. But they consistently cast migrants as either pawns in the game of finance capital or as the phony poster children of misguided urban idealists.
An Interview with Yanis Varoufakis
“We have to talk to people in a way that combines addressing these [economic] anxieties with the issues of the environment. Unless we manage to do that, we will fail.”
