The breakthrough for the CIO and industrial unionism came at Flint, Michigan, in the winter of 1936-37. On December 30, 1936, United Auto Workers militants sat in at General Motors’ Fisher Body plants One and Two. Several weeks later, throwing …
This past spring two young Dissent writers, Mark Levinson and Brian Morton, went to Baltimore to interview Philip Van Gelder, one of the founders of the CIO and a former secretary-treasurer of the Industrial Union of Maritime and Shipbuilding Workers …
No question that human beings can ask themselves is more attractive morally than “Were we wrong?” It is a question now being insistently put to those of us who opposed the Vietnam War. The Cambodian horrors and the shameful Hanoi …
One of the most important and stimulating books on the problems of socialism written during the last few decades is Alec Nove’s The Economics of Feasible Socialism, published in 1983 by George Allen & Unwin, Ltd., London, and Allen & …
In the early 1950s, right-wing extremist groups in Israel were peripheral, their members regarded as outcasts. For example, the Zerifin underground, composed of some former fighters from Lehi (the Stern gang) and Etzel (Irgun, the Begin-led Revisionist underground), was caught …
PARIS — A deep crisis besets the French labor movement. Membership is shrinking, so is the percentage of unionists who pay dues regularly. The lifelong absorption of the rank and file in union activities is virtually gone. Gone, too, are …
Most liberal-democratic states took a long time to appreciate the juridical inventiveness of both the Third Reich and the Soviet Union. Once they had perceived, among other things, the reappearance and justification of torture, their first response was to dismiss …
Let me add a brief note to David Bromwich’s trenchant article. The more public tumult about the Holocaust, the less likelihood that the memory of its terribleness will become a serious part of human consciousness. What has been happening with …
Notwithstanding the vigorous economic up-swing that began early in 1983 and continues at this writing, if at a slower pace, the American labor movement remains on the defensive. Its wage settlements have shrunk—in 1984, major collective bargaining contracts provided the …
PARIS — A deep crisis besets the French labor movement. Membership is shrinking, so is the percentage of unionists who pay dues regularly. The lifelong absorption of the rank and file in union activities is virtually gone. Gone, too, are …
Remember candidate Ronald Reagan’s promise to “get the government off the backs of the great American people”? It was one of his most effective rhetorical thrusts in the 1980 television debates with Jimmy Carter. Spokespeople for the Administration have flourished …
Simply by choosing to write a biography of Josephine Herbst, an almost forgotten American writer (1892-1969), Elinor Langer demonstrates both courage and an eye for an unconventional subject. Women who lead “lesser lives” are not sure bets for full-length biographies. …
Emil Dorian, a Romanian Jew, was born in 1893. As his parents were unable to pay the tuition that the public schools required of “foreigners,” he received his early education in Yiddish classrooms. Yet by the age of 18 he …
From ancient Greece on down, a recurrent male fantasy, born of envy and the desire to control, has been to eliminate women from the reproductive process altogether. Recently, rejecting the idea that biology is destiny, some feminist thinkers have also …
BAGHDAD — Development has become a sacred cow in Iraq. Despite an agonizing war now in its fifth year, costing an estimated $1 billion per month, vast public-works projects are under way. Using imported labor and imported technology, Iraq is …
