We live, my more literary minded friends tell me, in an age when irony is highly valued. So I suppose I should not be surprised that the continuing overbuilding of midtown Manhattan has taken a distinctly ironic twist. Still, there …
Somewhere around the middle of A Turn in the South, V. S. Naipaul compares his journey to a film shot in natural light—he is taking his trip as it comes, moving around without a thesis to prove or a desire …
Visiting Moscow after an eleven-year absence I was struck first by the freshness in the political atmosphere. The impact of glasnost is palpable: People talk in new ways, no longer tremulously, about the deplorable conditions in their country. The culture …
Chile’s plebiscite of October 1988 was a dramatic ending to fifteen painful years. Capitan General Augusto Pinochet Ugarte, Commander in Chief of the Armed Forces, President of the Republic of Chile, notorious worldwide as a symbol of violence and repression, …
These have been stirring days. The popular uprising in China, begun by students and then taken up by hundreds of thousands of workers, farmers, and other citizens—who could witness this, however fleetingly, on television or read about it, however skimpily, …
One of the differences between the two political parties over the past ten years is that the Republican presidential candidates forget many things; the Democrats only one. On a range of questions small and large—the date of Pearl Harbor Day, …
In the 1920s critics of the American Federation of Labor (AFL) “pointed repeatedly to the same weaknesses: the emphasis on a craft structure, the ignoring of industrial unionism, jurisdictional disputes, inertia in organizing the unorganized, weak or tyrannical or corrupt …
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 …
Marxist presence in Anglo-American political theory has grown in the last decade. Marxists have obtained prestigious positions at major universities and had their books issued by influential publishers. On some accounts, there is nothing good in this story—from the left, …
Read reservoir for pool and one of the West’s great environmental controversies begins to unsnarl. Read Two Forks Reservoir, a canyon-sized pool that Denver developers want to impound behind a giant dam on the South Platte River, a pool five …
The disruption caused by our chaotic medical system has reached such proportions that mainstream medical thought is beginning to call for a major revision of health services. As costs sprout upward the already limited care for low-income patients is further …
It is very difficult to address an audience after a film like the one we have just seen in this large theater, especially since this screening was attended by the few surviving former prisoners of Solovki, who have spoken to …
The subtitle of Professor Arno Mayer’s Why Did The Heavens Not Darken? is The “Final Solution” in History. Therein lies the major source of confusion and controversy in the book. Mayer does indeed attempt to set the “Judeocide” (a term …
More people are working at political theory in the academic world than ever before. The field is thriving, perhaps because there is so little serious thinking and arguing about politics outside the academy. The neoconservative think tanks of the 1970s …
Does socialism have a future? This question has been asked for almost two hundred years, whenever “socialism” as theory and movement reached a critical period. There can be little doubt that socialism, both as a movement and a theory, is …
