Harlot’s Ghost opens on a fog-ridden winter night in Maine, 1983, when the narrator, a CIA operative and Yale graduate named Herrick (Harry) Hubbard, is with fear in his heart driving along perilously icy roads to his mystery-shrouded home on …
I must first apologize for the title of this essay. I am not interested in the crisis of Marxism but in the crisis of politics—I mean, emancipatory politics. What must be called not the “crisis” but the wholesale collapse of …
Earl is a small, quiet town in the old sharecropping country of eastern Arkansas. But on October 25, 1991, a noisy drama was taking place in the parking lot of Earl Industries, the town’s leading employer. Staging a grim parody …
At a recent educational conference of the Machinists union (IAM), I asked several groups of local officers and staff how many of their locals were involved in “employee involvement” (EI) or “labor-management cooperation” (LMC) programs. An overwhelming majority said they …
“Rix” (as he was known to his friends) died this past August in Berlin after a prolonged illness. An early and frequent contributor to Dissent, he was social democracy’s major theorist in postwar Germany, an acknowledged authority on international communism, …
Most Americans think that federal housing assistance is a poor people’s program. In fact, fewer than one-fifth of all low-income Americans receive federal housing subsidies. In contrast, more than three-quarters of wealthy Americans—some with two expensive homes—get housing aid from …
Why is there no labor-based radical political party in the United States? There are two main problems. First, organized labor has always been too weak and too self-involved to be the basis of a new party, which could only succeed …
PATCO, Hormel, Greyhound, Eastern, Nordstrom, Equitable: the list goes on and on. Organized labor has suffered its worst decade since the 1920s, as intense employer opposition, encouraged and supported by conservative national administrations, left the labor movement reeling, its membership …
Whatever the outcome of the continuing debate over the Western tradition on college campuses, multiculturalism appears to have won an impressive victory in the public schools around the country. The list of urban school districts with programs in place or …
Hunger kills millions more people each year than wars or political repression. By a rough estimate, the current toll of hunger-related deaths equals several hundred jumbo jets crashing each day with no survivors. Yet, apart from concern about recurrent famines, …
The fall of the communist regimes of Eastern Europe and the rapid disintegration of the Soviet Union raise the question of whether conclusions may now be drawn in the historic argument over the nature of the capitalist system. Has the …
In 1950 John L. Lewis, head of the United Mine Workers of America (UMWA), and leading operators representing the entire softcoal industry negotiated the first National Bituminous Wage Agreement. It was a triumphant moment for Lewis, culminating an entire career …
In this age of widespread ideological disenchantment, it is fashionable for political theorists to declare the demise of transhistorical “foundations” in political inquiry: to proclaim our rootedness in particular locales and to deny that it is possible to justify universal …
The events set off by Mikhail Gorbachev were welcomed by some and caused vexation to others. Among the latter were politicians, journalists, and scholars for whom the external fixity of communism was something of an article of faith. Gorbachev’s reforms, …
American management has always been vehement in its opposition to unions. This book demonstrates convincingly that whatever the reasons for this, the impact of unions on economic performance is not among them. America’s economic performance has declined relative to that …
