Western progressives have long pointed to Swedish social democracy as an outstanding success story. As recently as the 1988 elections, the dominance of the Social Democratic Labor party (SAP) appeared unchallengeable. True, the party slipped somewhat at the ballot box, …
Shelby Steele’s argument (“The Memory of Enemies,” Dissent, Summer 1990) has two intertwined parts. First, he asserts that since the early 1970s the opportunity-structure in American society offers more space for social mobility and achievement than black Americans have effectively …
It’s useful, sometimes even fun, to locate one’s self on the political map. This is true both for us as individuals and for Dissent collectively. As a political publication we need to maintain a distinctive position for ourselves among the …
The past decade dramatized questions of popular participation in politics on a global stage—but with some irony. Just when millions of people look to America as inspiration for democracy, our own politics is a mess. Problems facing America today require …
A moral being looks on other human beings as ends and not means. Is there such a thing as a moral being? Shrewd behavior implies inducing another to do what suits me. The other’s intention is to get me to …
An attack on “market socialism” is now coming from a number of East European economists, converts to free-market ideology, who usually express regret at their own “naive” illusions of earlier times about the “reformability” of Soviet-type “socialism.” A leading exponent …
Of all the historical phenomena discussed by Karl Marx, his treatment of nationalism, nationalist movements, and the emergence of the nation-state is the least satisfactory. It also left a problematic heritage to the socialist movement, with a veritable “black hole” …
Dear X This is a letter to help clear my head with respect to the ideas we chatted about last night. I am eager to pursue them as far as they lead, although I am not at all easy about …
The events in the German Democratic Republic (GDR), as in the rest of Eastern Europe, have come at a time when the world market dominates as never before the various national economies. The reign of capital is today less open …
In the eighties, the idea of the market triumphed. From Reagan’s America and Thatcher’s Britain to the crumbling economies of the Soviet bloc, the “market” became a mantra for all occasions. Chanted long enough it would bring freedom, choice, prosperity, …
Headlines in late spring announced that at least half the states had started cutting government food allotments in the WIC program (Special Supplemental Food Program for Women, Infants, Children), which provides milk, cereal, cheese, and juice for poor women and …
If we could afford a democratic economic program, both in fiscal and resource terms, wouldn’t redistribution of income from the top to the middle and bottom throw cold water on people’s economic initiative? Do we not need the stakes of …
The Reagan era has bequeathed to us much, including, ironically, a new version of the materialist theory of the politics of culture. The essential claim of this theory is seductively simple: cultural expression reproduces, through all the appropriate “mediations,” the …
This may seem an odd time to be thinking about socialism in the 1990s and in the West. The collapse of the communist regimes of Eastern Europe has been so much the most interesting political event of the 1980s, and …
This year marks the thirtieth anniversary of Paul Goodman’s Growing Up Absurd. Those old enough to have been students in 1960 remember the shock waves it caused. As one writer “under thirty” put it, at last someone from the older …
