The March on Washington was initiated not to break down racial barriers to voting rights, education, and public accommodations but to highlight “the economic subord-ination of the Negro” and advance a “program for economic justice.”
For Zadie Smith, the time had come for the radicalism of experiment and the realism of political economy—for a new social realism that was capable of capturing both the mechanics and experience of today’s growing inequality.
Delivering flexibility and scale at rock-bottom prices, Foxconn keeps pounding out the very real underpinnings of the New Economy, remaking global manufacturing in its own image. Foxconn stands as the archetypal industrial firm for today’s planet of slums.
Despite being the “world’s manufacturer,” China has been moving toward a consumption-led economy. In this photo essay, Tong Lam looks at the consumer products and information that saturate everyday life in China.
A combination of factors in recent years has contributed to a fall in the status and material well-being of Chinese women relative to men.
Increasingly, residents of the Chinese mainland, especially the middle-class urbanites who regularly go online, seek answers to questions like: Is it possible to be a Chinese patriot, while acknowledging one’s unhappiness with the status quo?
Guest workers are too often invisible in popular discussions of work; when they appear, it’s as outliers. But Saket Soni, who founded the National Guestworker Alliance amid the New Orleans’s post-Katrina guest worker influx, says they’re better understood as a bellwether.
No liberal democracy, political party, market economy, or human right is set in stone. People created these concepts, and people have the power to destroy them. These social constructs are often elevated to the rank of universal laws or endowed …
Books and Articles Discussed in this Essay: Dignity: Its History and Meaning, by Michael Rosen (Harvard University Press, 2012) A World Made New: Eleanor Roosevelt and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, by Mary Ann Glendon (New York: Random House, …
A few months after the attacks of September 11, 2001, Michael Walzer wrote an article for Dissent, “Can There Be a Decent Left?,” which made a number of American leftists rather mad. In it, Michael reproached those who saw the …
One night last fall, eating my dinner somewhat hastily between an afternoon meeting and an evening meeting, I picked up the latest issue of Dissent (Winter 2013), opened it at random, and began reading. Immediately my feeling of being rushed …
Humanitarian Negotiations Revealed: The MSF Experience by Claire Magone, Michael Neuman, and Fabrice Weissman, eds. Columbia University Press, 2011, 250 pp. On March 19, 2011, French and British forces, with the military support of the United States, launched a massive …
From the Ruins of Empire: The Intellectuals Who Remade Asia by Pankaj Mishra Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2012, 356 pp. Pankaj Mishra asks good questions. As he has ascended from posh-poor Brahmin in provincial India, to New York Review of …
The Mansion of Happiness: A History of Life and Death by Jill Lepore Knopf, 2012, 304 pp. The Story of America: Essays on Origins by Jill Lepore Princeton University Press, 2012, 420 pp. In high school, Jill Lepore—now an Americanist …
The Right and Labor in America: Politics, Ideology, and Imagination Nelson Lichtenstein and Elizabeth Tandy Shermer, eds. University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012, 432 pp. As the overall unionization rate in the United States dips ever closer to single digits, the …
