The twenty-five thousand Americans who converged upon Montgomery on March 25 surely did not represent the “best” of America in terms of wealth, status or power, but —in the words of Bayard Rustin—”all the best in America” was there. No …
I. Dennis H. Wrong Robert Heilbroner’s essay, “Counterrevolutionary America,” is the most intelligent and forceful statement of a point of view that is widely held by writers on economic development in the Third World.’ Although Heilbroner is an economist, his …
As I write the slum areas of several dozen large American cities have been ravaged by Negro rioters and by the cops and guardsmen who put them down. For urban Negroes, the pull-back of the poverty program may have been …
Hippies seem to fascinate the mass media somewhat less than they did a year or two ago. Butthey have not disappeared. Older Hippies, who refused to convert to straight society, have moved from Haight Ashbury to Big Sur or other …
I n recent years there has arisen a sophistication which understands that the abolition of private property alone will not guarantee the end of exploitation. The problem has been posed as: how does one check bureaucracy? The problem is a …
In an authoritarian age it is almost inevitable that manipulative and bureaucratic modes of thought should stain the writings of those who oppose society as much as they debase the writings of those who support it. Nor do we speak …
Ours is an omnivorous culture. Even the most prickly and apparently indigestible of critics, like Lenny Bruce and Paul Goodman, get cannibalized. Therefore, it ought to surprise no one that a socialist leader in America should be universally honored as …
Who’s at Center? Editor: I started to read the article “Are American Jews Turning to the Right?” [by Bernard Rosenberg and Irving Howe] in your Winter issue with considerable interest. I stopped reading it before the end of the very …
The future of socialism, I am convinced, depends more on its ability to provide a new conception of ownership than on its ability to redistribute property or secure social benefits. Those traditional aims retain importance even in a technologically mature …
In recent years the American working class has been called conservative, militant, reactionary, progressive, authoritarian, social democratic and, the unkindest cut of all, nonexistent. Except for the last, all the labels fit. The labor movement—I sharpen the focus on the …
Y e have to go back to the witch doctors or the Shakespeare of Hamlet or Macbeth to reach a world in which specters, abstract beings, names come to life, “objective powers” play so large a part as they do …
What can be said at this point about the broad goals and motivations of the present Chinese Communists leadership? The question is, of course, distressingly imprecise and begs further definition. Is the leadership a monolithic group? Have its goals remained …
The question persists. In both Jewish organizational and nonorganizational circles— Left, Right and Center, secularist and religious—there are tentative discussions, occasionally elated but mostly troubled: Has the traditional American Jewish commitment to liberalism been weakened in recent years? Are the …
Today most Mexican Americans live in the cities. Many came expecting better conditions than they had faced in the fields, others came from families of generations of urban workers. They all were disappointed—for poverty in the cities may in fact …
On Modern Economics Editor: There are good reasons to criticize modern economics, but, unfortunately, Mark Kelman and Robert Lekachman do not employ them in their articles in the Summer 1973 issue of Dissent. [See Robert Lekachman, “The Conservative Drift in …
