The value of a socialist orientation to contemporary events is demonstrated by the most unlikely people. In the course of his mea culpa in Washington the head of the Columbia Broadcasting System set forth the framework for understanding the quiz …
By now there is a whole repertoire of responses to the quiz fix. One hears a muffled mea cu/pa from the fixed and the fixers; some simulate indignation or cry on cue, while others demonstrate their know-how more creatively. One …
Khrushchev is reported to have remarked that Dr. Zhivago might have been published in the Soviet Union if only a few hundred words had been eliminated. The fact is, of course, that it was not published; but it might be …
We are soon going to be asked: whom will you vote for in November? Given the quadrennial pressure to face utter disaster with reaction or coddle the future with facsimile liberalism, I would like to record my opinion early: the …
There are grey moments when I charge myself with some small responsibility for the endless chatter about “conformity” that has swept the country. Six years ago, when McCarthyism was at its worst and the response of many intellectuals somewhat less …
Translated from Russian by George Dennis, this article, written in poetic prose, is presented in its first full English translation.
One wet October morning the telephone at the foreman’s desk rang. It was a call from the chairman of the shop committee. “I’m putting you in my place as committeeman,” he said. “Why?” “Because,” he answered, “I’ve been fired. 1 …
It was all very odd, even eerie, as if by some trick one of my youthful political fantasies had come true in a perverted form. There I sat, in a union hall jammed with cheering truck drivers, listening to their …
There has been much talk in recent years about Big Labor, some of it warranted and some of it malicious; but almost no one has paid any attention to the scores of small unions which, quietly and persistently, continue to …
About the steel workers’ union only one thing can be said with assurance: no ready-made formula will take us far on the road to understanding. Here is an important section of the classical “proletariat”; yet in consciousness, initiative and militancy …
DEMOCRACY AND THE CHALLENGE OF POWER, by David Spitz. Columbia University Press, 1958. “Power” seems to have a peculiar fascination for the modern mind, in part, perhaps, because men feel en. trapped by the superordinate-subordinate relations which become more ubiquitous …
DESEGREGATION: RESISTANCE AND READINESS, by Melvin Tumin. Princeton University Press, 1958. This book reports the results of an investigation conducted by Professor Melvin Tumin and his assistants into the attitudes of white people in Guilford County, North Carolina, toward the …
MILLS VS. HOWE Editors: Commenting on C. W. Mills’ “Causes of World War III” in the Spring DisSENT, Irving Howe charges Mills with “a relentless thrust of assertion” and “analytic carelessness and moral disequilibrium.” It seems to me that in …
AT THIS WRITING thirty South African men and women are again on trial for their lives because they dared publicly oppose the Nationalist Government’s harsh apartheid program of total segregation of the “Bantu” population (total except for daily work, for …
I want to discuss a mistaken policy of certain theater craft unions, and suggest a remedy. The matter has an importance in itself, because in recent years there has been a growth in new theater “off Broadway” that may, if …
