One of the more insidious dangers in political analysis is to name things too soon. Faced with events or situations that are essentially without precedent, we are tempted to pin down their novelty with a phrase. Everyone can provide his …
When doctrinal doubts begin to arise, Communist intellectuals frequently tend to revise more than the political framework of their system of beliefs. This tendency has been evident in the case of Poland, a country with an ancient and powerful European …
Half-way through the morning the barrier was lifted and a car came through and drew up in front of the customs house. Inside were German Red Cross men and a German journalist. The car was full of food and medical …
Five years he was locked in a cell Under sentence of death. During those years Daily the sun traced its arc The stars revolved Slum houses reeked of alcohol Music poured from radios Into crowded streets Chatter: “Marx Engels Justice. …
Punch recently published a cartoon that shows three frightened little men storming into a launching station for guided missiles and shouting, “It’s coming back!” John Foster Dulles must have had similar feelings during the last few months as his whole …
Having digested the current issue of DISSENT in the comparative isolation of Puerto Rico, I am moved to sum up impressions on the publication’s relevance in the last two years. A lot of theoretical debris has been cleared away. Issues …
IN EARLY July 1956 James Burnham made his appearance as a government witness at a Department of Justice hearing held as the climax to a six -year-long effort by the Independent Socialist League to have its name removed from the …
Some time ago the Fund for the Republic sponsored a poll to discover how Americans felt about “Communism, conformity and civil liberties.” The general findings of the study make highly illuminating reading; they are available in book form (Communism, Conformity …
In the first days of the Hungarian Revolution, Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, Vercors and 19 other well-known French writers and intellectuals associated with the Communist movement produced a statement which, timidly and with much circumlocution, nevertheless questioned the Russian …
The television show Person to Person employs a technician whose job is to hide a small microphone in the bosoms of women who appear on the show so that the women may be heard without the apparatus being visible to the …
Few claims concerning the direction of the American economy have been more important to social and political theory than the assertion that income has been radically redistributed. The theoretical systems built around this theme have captured the imagination of a …
The recent events in Russia, particularly a number of references made at the 20th Congress of the Russian Communist Party, have brought back into public discussion issues and problems concerning the history of 20th century radicalism that for a good many years had been …
R.H.S. Crossman, reviewing John Strachey’s Contemporary Capitalism* last summer, began by observing that British socialists have run out of fresh ideas. This is true, but the explanation lies not, as he seems to think, in their overwhelmingly successful concentration upon …
At the end of March 1949 a number of us were transferred from Camp Zaiarsk to “our” headquarters at Bratsk, Siberia. We were each given two kilo and 400 grams of black bread, four herrings and 60 grams of sugar—our …
