Creeping Repression in Washington  

There is an air of creeping repression in Washington. You can detect it in many ways. Civil rights enforcement at Health, Education and Welfare is at low ebb. A voting bill is beaten in the House of Representatives, albeit narrowly. …



The Inner World of Italian Communism  

Rossana Rossanda is one of the keenest and most turbulent minds womanhood has contributed to international Communism since the death of Rosa Luxemburg. A long-time militant of the Italian party (PCI), she was appointed in 1963 head of the Cultural …



Indeed, They Did Grow Up Absurd  

The theater of the absurd is now being enacted on the public scene. Letters recently sent to a number of corporations which were subsequently bombed stated that the bomb throwers were full of loving care for mankind and therefore felt …



Dissident Voices from Paris  

We have recently had some interesting new political books in France. La Nouvelle Société, by Jacques Chaban-Delmas, the Premier of France; Le Grand Tournant du Socialisme, by Roger Garaudy, a leading Communist intellectual; and Le Manifeste du Parti Radical, by …



Dove Sentiments Among Blue-Collar Workers  

What are the major sources of opposition to the Vietnam war? Who are the hawks? What does the “silent majority” really think? Among political commentators, public officials, and even antiwar leaders, there has been a general—and unexamined—agreement that working-class citizens …



Another Modest Proposal  

I do not understand what the fuss is about. These complaining editorials, these worried, pained people—when the solution stares us in the face. Yes, there is that huge stockpile of deadly nerve gas that nobody knows what to do with. …





Old Categories and New Realities  

I should like to open a political discussion about a problem that seems unprecedented, especially in France and Italy. In both countries there are mass Communist parties, allied with the Moscow wing of Communism. These are perhaps the largest, certainly …



In the South, Murder Continues  

The South may be changing, but the old South has not disappeared. In May 1969, for example, an all-white federal court jury in Meridian, Mississippi, acquitted three Ku Klux Klansmen accused of murdering a black civil rights leader and could …



Spain: Cracks in the Column  

It is amazing. Thirty years have gone by, yet books about the Spanish Civil War still sell. Every year, a dozen or so new volumes appear and almost always there is a best-seller among them. At least half their readers …



Why We Need Socialism in America  

America needs socialism. Our technology has produced unprecedented wealth, rotted great cities, threatened the very air and water, and embittered races, generations, and social classes. Our vision of society, even when most liberal, is too conservative to resolve these contradictions, …



Communism and Jacobinism  

The New Jacobins, The French Communist Party, and the Popular Front, by Daniel R. Brower. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 265 pp. $7.95.   There are two themes in this book: (1) the way Stalin used the French Communist party and …



Remembering the Wobblies  

The Wobblies (IWW) stand for modern American radicals as a mythic memory of a virtuous past. There are those of the New Left (perhaps a majority) who do not even remember their informal name, but remember or not, they employ …



Historian’s Decline  

“Tempora mutant,” remarked the Roman analysts of social change, to which we can add not only our Amen but also our uncomfortable awareness of the rapidity of change in analyses of change. In the 1950s, Americanists of various disciplines seemed …



On “Democratic Pluralism”  

Ralph Miliband, of the London School of Economics, has prepared a careful defense of a socialist critique of “advanced capitalist society.” The main burden of this defense is to show that the theory of “democratic pluralism,” which Miliband associates variously …