Frances Fox Piven and Richard Cloward, like many other intellectuals from the 1960s, have moved from anti-electoral positions to an intense interest in the American electoral process. In Poor People’s Movements: Why They Succeed, How They Fail (1977), they argued …
Tourist guidebooks say that Wall Street starts at Broadway and ends at the East River. Political analysts know better: at the end Wall Street changes into Pennsylvania Avenue. Economics alone can no longer explain the ups and downs of the …
We are pleased to print below two excerpts from a journal that Daniel Bell wrote after his trip to the Soviet Union last spring. The first excerpt describes a lecture he gave at the Leningrad State University.—Eds. In the afternoon, …
Here is a rich book—a dozen essays, of uneven quality, some hitherto unpublished, some published in inaccessible places, which, taken together, offer a conspectus of Herbert Gutman’s energetic genius. Yet the volume would seem shapeless and sprawling—now labor struggles in …
I’m not quite as sanguine as some Dissent editors about Dukakis but when you look at the other candidate, Bush caving in to the troglodyte right and its Quayle, there isn’t any choice but Dukakis. He isn’t going to set …
I first made contact with the women’s liberation movement twenty years ago, in the fall of 1968, when Linda Gordon showed me a copy of a magazine called No More Fun and Games, put out by an organization called Cell …
Michael Dukakis has been a liberal, a champion of fiscal responsibility and in his latest phase an enthusiastic practitioner of industrial policy, translated into cooperation between state government and corporate enterprise on terms exceedingly generous to the latter. His running …
It never fails. The man who survives the nutty primary system and wins the Democratic nomination is hailed for a while as a media genius—and his staff is full of geniuses, too. It happened to McGovern, Carter, and Mondale—and now …
We have received a copy of the following letter written by Professor Adi Ophir, who teaches philosophy at the Tel Aviv University, and we print it here for the information of our readers. —Eds. 26 June 1988 Mr. Yitzhak Rabin …
In Ronald Reagan’s America, Bob Kuttner has emerged as the Great Refuter. In The Life of the Party, Kuttner bemoans the paucity of Reagan Age journalists attempting to “influence the mainstream debate from the left.” Kuttner is the preeminent exception …
Students remain active in a variety of left-liberal causes. Students have marched with unionists at Yale and Harvard, staged anti-contra sit-ins in congressional offices in upstate New York, registered voters in Kentucky, protested campus racism in Michigan and Massachusetts, and …
Between 1977 and 1986 there occurred a sweeping assault upon gays and their culture. Sadly, the left failed to respond to this offensive. This was not an episodic lapse but an abiding failure of the left to take homosexual politics …
The subtitle of Todd Gitlin’s book about the sixties, Years of Hope, Days of Rage, echoes the famous tag, “the best of times, the worst of times.” It was an intensely political time and for some the memory shines with …
American unions have been generally more interested in pension benefits than pension funds. The employer-pension system originated in the late 1880s as a management device to ensure worker loyalty to the firm. Most pensions weren’t portable (and still aren’t); the …
Inside a small and somewhat shabby little office building in a rundown part of San Salvador, a group of activists is beginning a political experiment that may shape the course of events in Central America for years to come. The …
