In this study of a coal-producing valley in central Appalachia, John Gaventa recounts one of his earliest experiences in the region—a conversation with a retired miner living in one of the valley’s innumerable hollers. Accompanied by a local community organizer, …
“A historical phase is ending. The momentum originating with the October Revolution is exhausted. The societies of the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe have lost their capacity for renewal.” Enrico Berlinguer, head of the Italian Communist party (PCI), spoke these …
Whether labor unions are good for America is now controversial. A decade ago John Kenneth Galbraith’s analysis that unions were a necessary “countervailing power” was widely accepted, but recently corporate America has legitimated a new paternalism. Today liberals, radicals, conservatives, …
Far from being “perhaps the most comprehensive portrait yet drawn of the inner workings of Salvadoran politics,” Gabriel Zaid’s article “Enemy Colleagues” is a confused and confusing polemic. Its publication, to the extent that it immobilizes Dissent readers with a …
The December putsch was certainly not aimed at implementing a Communist utopia. It was a classic antiworker counterrevolution, defending the conservative interests of the old regime. Contrary to the contentions of official propaganda, this was by no means a response …
Steel in the United States is a “mature” industry, and our political-economic discourse, like other aspects of American culture, is particularly ill-equipped to deal with maturity and aging. Steel’s best years are behind it. It has not been “profitable” by …
Like those who knew about the Holocaust, my colleagues in the China field and I did not speak out loudly and publicly about the persecution of intellectuals in China’s Cultural Revolution in the late 1960s. A whole generation of Westernized …
The bellicose nationalism of Ronald Reagan’s 1980 campaign and his insistence on the need for “nuclear superiority” help explain the interest stirred by Jonathan Schell’s The Fate of the Earth when it first began to appear in the New Yorker. …
Peter Prescott, book critic of Newsweek, wrote this study of the Juvenile Justice System in New York City, knowing and keeping in mind that he was not qualified to discuss either the causes of juvenile crime or the means of …
One mid-October evening in 1927, three friends were dining at the Casenave Restaurant in the Rue Boissy-d’Anglas in Paris. They were Christian Rakovsky, the Soviet ambassador to France, Panait Istrati, the Rumanian who wrote in French and had been a …
“What are they like?” Because I teach and because the college at which I teach, Sarah Lawrence, has a reputation for being experimental, I am constantly asked this question about my students. Most of the time I resist answering. I …
The public perception that economists do not agree upon anything is probably even more disconcerting than their failures in prediction and control. Something happens and then upon the TV screen appear two economists who in the 30 seconds alloted them …
During the 1970s, European socialists grew dissatisfied with the welfare state they had built, despite the prosperity and security it brought to European society. In the Swedish Social Democratic party of Olaf Palme, the French Socialist party of Francois Mitterrand, …
Surely no literary vision of the future can match the power and enduring influence of Orwell’s 1984. Perhaps the most provocative element of that vision is the prospect of using sophisticated technologies of intrusion and manipulation to consolidate totalitarian power. …
Forty years ago Henryk Erlich, an internationally famous leader of the General Jewish Workers’ Bund, the Jewish socialist party in Poland, wrote these words to his family from Moscow. It was his first opportunity to write to them since his …
