Despite some signs of middle-age spread, the United Automobile Workers Union, now over 40 years old, sustains a politically sophisticated response to issues while preserving much of the democratic spirit that distinguished its earlier years. The UAW still is known …
Ghosts of the past haunt the political scene. Epithets like “cold war,” “isolationism,” and “appeasement” are heard again. While the Administration is trying to normalize relations with China or to find ways of accommodation with the future rulers of Africa, it hears charges from all sides: …
Lillan Rubin’s World of Pain is a moving study of working-class families, written from socialist and feminist perspectives. In sympathetic prose, Rubin conveys the frustration and anxiety that pervade the lives of the 100 men and women from Northern California …
A mong fellow economists, Veblen’s reputation over the years has ranged from low to ambiguous. A few years before his death in 1929, he rejected nomination for president of the American Economic Association on the ground that the recognition came …
Public-opinion polls indicate that Americans overwhelmingly distrust the Soviet Union—and favor nuclear-arms agreements with the U.S.S.R. This split vision happens to reflect a healthy dose of reality. On the one hand, Soviet leaders have done little to reassure the West in recent years. Soviet adventurism in …
The discussion of any important social question must involve an inextricable mixture of fact and value. The fundamental impulse to change and especially to great change is a perception of present wrong and a vision of potential right. The initial …
This past July Douglas Fraser, president of the United Automobile Workers Union, announced that he was pulling out of the high-level Labor- Management Group of union and business leaders presided over by former Secretary of Labor John Dunlop, because in Fraser’s view American capitalism had declared …
On the surface, the big business program for the 1970s is much easier to understand than its acceptance by much of mainstream liberalism and the public at large. From the early ’70s onward, such corporate-connected strategists as John Connolly, William Simon, David Rockefeller, and even Charles …
Everyone believes in rights. Everyone believes that rights should be taken seriously. But what precisely are rights, and what does it mean to take them seriously? Take the simple assertion: I have a right to do (or not to do) …
As Cuban-American relations move toward normalization, Pierre Golendorf’s account of his experiences in Cuba and its prisons from 1967 until his expulsion in 1974 offers a sobering perspective on the “success” of the Cuban revolution. A French Communist, Golendorf moved …
Motto: “Learn to read and to write so that you may be relieved of labor and become an official with honor. The scribe is a master. His writing pad distinguishes him from the humble oarsman.” —An Egyptian father to his son, about …
Now I know why I flunked the test given by Vivian Gornick at lunch in a Chinese restaurant. It turned out that she was screening me for an interview to be used in a book she was writing on the …
This article originally appeared in Yellow River, a magazine published in Hong Kong by Dormer Red Guards. The magazine is recognized as reliably informative, and in a note accompanying this piece the editors state that they vouch that: “What is related here conforms …
Editors: A few observations on the discussion of pornography in your Spring 1978 issue (“The Problem of Pornography,” by Murray Hausknecht, with comments by Lionel Abel, George P. Elliott, Cynthia Fuchs Epstein, Irving Howe, and David Spitz). With regard to David Spitz’s piece, surely Milton …
A specter is haunting Irving Kristol—the specter of The New Class. It consists of “some millions of people whom liberal capitalism has sent to college in order to help manage its affluent, highly technological, mildly paternalistic `post-industrial society.” These educators, …
