Spring 2025

1.) I am a radical because as a child I found myself in a world of lies. The three lies which, put together, make the biggest lie, are the lies of sex, money and authority. We were taught by conscious …

1.) The radical tradition has left us three things worth preserving. First, a complex of values related to the ideal of a democratic community of free and equal individuals. These values are by no means the exclusive property of the …

Dear Plastrik: Thank you for your cable of 19th inst. I find it difficult to understand what the dismay is about. Goa, Diu and Daman were three Portuguese possessions in India. After the British and the French left from India, …

A few hundred years from now (if there are any human beings left), historians will look back on the time we live in and call it the Period of Transition from Capitalism to Socialism. I believe this transition is the …

What makes me identify as a radical is the conviction that something new must be added to the American calculus of goods and bads, rights and wrongs. I have an uneasy sense of a whole nation skating lightly over a …

The size of the recent student peace demonstration in Washington only inadequately suggests its importance. Both in organization and ideology the demonstration differed from all that had gone before in the student movement. It is even possible that Turn Toward …

Among all the Communist parties outside the Soviet bloc, the Italian one (PCI) is probably the most skillful and adaptable. Its characteristic flexibility has been brought into full play during the past half year, when it has had to face …

Deliver us from our friends! They claim to know better what is good for the longshoremen than the Union does. Nothing is more infuriating, particularly when the friend is as generally knowledgeable as Harvey Swados. In this instance, however, it …

THE DEATH AND LIFE OF GREAT AMERICAN CITIES, by Jane Jacobs. The Death and Life of Great American Cities is the kind of book which suggests a two-column discussion; one labeled right, one wrong. The author attacks city planners, architects, …

It is hard to imagine that anything written these last few months could cast so harsh a light on the future of our society as Cybernation, a pamphlet written by Donald Michael and published by the Center for the Study …

THE CUBAN STORY by Herbert L. Matthews. George Braziller, 1961. Herbert L. Matthews, the New York Times correspondent whose 1957 interview with Fidel Castro in the Sierra Maestra Mountains was a key step in the rise of the Cuban leader, …

Khrushchev always reminds me of Prussia’s Sergeant-King, Frederick William, who used to exclaim “but ye ought to love me” while caning his subjects. No doubt, he would rather be loved than feared and prefers voluntary to forced assent. Unfortunately he …

MARX’S CONCEPT OF MAN, by Erich Fromm (with a translation from Marx’s Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts by T. B. Bottomore). Frederick Ungar, New York, 1961. 260 pp. Hearing the old Lutheran chorals in a Bach oratorio, one is astonished to …

To judge by the American press, one would think the third general election of independent India began and ended with the story of Krishna Menon! The moment his victory became clear, the press lost further interest and to this day …

MCGRAW-HILL ENCYCLOPEDIA of RUSSIA AND THE SOVIET UNION, edited by Michael T. Florinsky. New York: A Donat Publication. McGraw-Hill. Illus., maps. xiv + 624 pp. With this new Encyclopedia at hand, it seems inconceivable that we had to make-do without …