Our country lacks critical culture today, brooks little questioning of “how human beings should live and what our life means.” So argues Marshall Berman in his remarks opening the symposium in this issue. We need, he proposes, some “jaytalking.” But …
Instead of critical culture, “struggl[ing] actively over how human beings should live,” we have a pale culture of critics. Censorship is a permanent irritation but serious-minded people (who can also be joyful, why not?) need to face up to the …
It’s difficult to cook without a recipe. Marshall Berman offers a three part one: powerful and provocative ideas, smart and imaginative people, and experimental neighborhoods where these people and ideas can interact. It sounds good, and I think Berman is …
Marshall Berman sees in the incoherence of a punk culture the same potential that Marx once thought he saw in the rising consciousness of a proletarian movement: the coming “negation” of the capitalist order. But neither the street youths of …
The August 1998 financial crash and its aftermath shattered all conventional schemes for explaining Russian postcommunism. The latter can hardly be viewed any longer as an instance of “modernization” or “transition” (however hazardous) from something blameworthy or undeveloped to something …
Anyone old enough to remember gas lines, Love Canal, or Three Mile Island will recall a time when the environmental movement focused mainly on domestic issues. To be sure, the idea of a fragile planet was always part of the …
An American Love Story, a cinema verité treatment of an interracial family in Queens, aired for five nights on the Public Broadcasting System in mid-September. Compared to the documentary about the Loud family shown twenty-five years ago, this exercise in …
You’re sitting there reading Dissent in the new millennium and I’m sitting here at the end of September 1999 with carte blanche from the editors: “Say what you like.” Easy enough for them—but what happened on the way to 2000? …
How should democratic socialists think about the family and its role in modern society? The essential problem is to find alternatives to individualist and marketized conceptions of social life. Solutions to this problem are most commonly sought in the political …
I love Marshall Berman’s notion of jaytalking. It reminds me of Ms. Frizzle, in the Magic School Bus series, telling her kids, “Take chances, make mistakes, get messy.” It’s exactly the opposite of the push in today’s culture, to “get …
A Covert Life: Jay Lovestone, Communist, Anti-Communist, and Spymaster by Ted Morgan Random House, 1999, 402 pp., $29.95 American labor has played a central role in U.S. foreign policy over the past six decades. Yet because of the difficulties in …
Mark Levinson One of the most important people to this magazine, Simone Plastrik, never appeared in its pages as a writer. In fact, when I think about Dissent, I think about Simone. This is not only because of the role …
I had always been sympathetic toward the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) and the Southern Poverty Law Center. As a Jew whose father’s family had been murdered during the Holocaust, and as someone on “the left” for whom the civil rights movement …
The end of the century, out of convenience or convention, because of nostalgia for the past or apprehension of the future, encourages the drawing up of balance sheets. This is especially so concerning communism, which played such a dominant role …
Juneteenth by Ralph Ellison, edited by John F. Callahan Random House, 1999, 384 pp., $25 Ralph Ellison’s posthumous novel, Juneteenth, has become a book mired in charges of betrayal, and its editor, John Callahan, has been hounded for overseeing the …
