Winter 2024

Do you know who the ancestors of Joe McCarthy are?

Exactly when a recession becomes a depression, whether we will have the one or, in time, both, what can be done to prevent a further slide into unemployment — these, certainly, are important questions.

Now that the suffocating mortgage of communism has finally been lifted, opportunities for the democratic and socialist left in both East and West may have a second chance. Yet, by a curious twist of the zeitgeist many of our friends …

Lionel Trilling once told how he had been looking for an appropriate word to characterize George Orwell, whom he wished to eulogize. It finally seemed to him that a very old-fashioned word was most appropriate, the word virtue. This word …

Joseph Buttinger was one of the last of a now almost extinct species, a self-educated worker- intellectual. He was born in a provincial Austrian town into a working-class family. His father was a highway builder and his mother a servant. …

Most historical work on Austrian socialism in the interwar years is inclined to praise it, often somewhat over-enthusiastically. Helmut Gruber’s intention in this book, however, is to bury it. There was no doubt a strong tendency among socialist commentators in …

We bring together here several short comments on the remarkable events in Eastern Europe. As usual, each writer expresses an individual opinion—Eds. In one of the earliest issues of Dissent (Summer 1954) we published an essay by Isaac Deutscher on …

Carlo Tresca’s life was exciting and romantic, the stuff of legends. The anarcho-syndicalist Italian-born labor agitator, journalist, and fierce foe of capitalism, Stalinism, and fascism was a stormy figure on the American left. He was so flamboyant in the American …

Since the destruction of Nazi Germany,” wrote Irving Howe and I thirty years ago in the concluding chapter of our history of the American Communist party, “Stalinism has been the only political movement able to seize the initiative on a …

On July 17, 1936, the Spanish army under General Franco revolted against the Spanish Republic. Franco envisaged only a short resistance on the part of the Republic and expected to be installed in power within a few days. His expectations …

Last May I attended a lecture by Laurent Fabius, then minister of industry and now prime minister, at one of the fairly exclusive left-wing private political clubs in Paris. The audience consisted largely of academics, civil servants, and political journalists. …

France’s Socialist government is in deep trouble. There has been no real amelioration of economic conditions during the current year; in fact, things seem to have deteriorated further. The rate of inflation will come to roughly 9 percent this year …

When Voltaire was asked why he kept a Bible on his night table, he replied: “You have to know your enemies.” I subscribe to Commentary on this Voltairean principle. As a result I got onto the mailing list of Midge …