https://dissentmagazine.org/article/vision-versus-television/
In a perfect world, the media wizards who spawned Willie Horton would be out of business. But these propagandists are just one feature of a larger crisis of...
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https://dissentmagazine.org/article/notebook-real-news-and-automated-villains/
The counterattack has started. Purveyors of the conventional wisdom have suddenly launched an all-out assault on all those who over the last few years have...
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https://dissentmagazine.org/article/island-left-neglected-taiwan-dppp-tsai/
If the American left is serious about opposing a reactionary foreign policy that preserves unequal power relations, it should speak up for Taiwan.
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https://dissentmagazine.org/article/redefining-power-in-the-global-age-eight-theses/
How should such concepts as power, dominance, and authority be redefined from a cosmopolitan perspective? I have eight theses. 1. The world economy stands in...
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https://dissentmagazine.org/article/the-toxic-book/
The Sound Bite Society: Television and the American Mind by Jeffrey Scheuer Four Walls Eight Windows, 1999, 280 pp., $23.95 Above all, keep it short. The...
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https://dissentmagazine.org/article/if-we-build-one-they-will-come/
The Paradox of American Democracy: Elites, Special Interests, and the Betrayal of Public Trust by John B. Judis Pantheon, 2000, 305 pp., $26 John Judis has...
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https://dissentmagazine.org/article/free-elections-for-dominican-republic/
U.S. policy in the Dominican Republic may take a slight turn for the better with the transfer of Ambassador Tapely Bennett to Portugal, a country that shares...
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https://dissentmagazine.org/article/single-payer-or-bust-two-souls-universal-healthcare/
By providing a single tier of coverage to all, with automatic enrollment, comprehensive benefits, and no cost-sharing, single-payer provides a distinct,...
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https://dissentmagazine.org/article/marx-and-the-jews-another-view/
The Image of Karl Marx towers so high above all other socialist thinkers that it has encouraged iconolatry. In no other area is this more prevalent than in...
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https://dissentmagazine.org/article/the-ills-of-the-system/
Thanks to the election of Bill Clinton, Americans are going to discover whether a change in leadership can cure the ills of their political system. Are the...
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https://dissentmagazine.org/article/prostitution-and-the-case-for-decriminalization/
Leftists generally respect working-class people and their political and economic struggles. Yet they rarely exhibit respect toward prostitute organizations or...
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https://dissentmagazine.org/article/not-your-parents-protest/
The 1999 WTO protests brought together a unique coalition of trade unionists, environmentalists, and direct actionists, governed by a spirit of respect and...
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https://dissentmagazine.org/article/gay-marriage-the-third-option/
When the New Jersey Supreme Court ruled in October 2006 that gay and lesbian couples must be guaranteed the same rights and benefits as heterosexual couples,...
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https://dissentmagazine.org/article/holding-hands-african-americans-reclaim-the-rural-south/
The exodus of rural African-Americans from the South to northern cities had all but ceased by the 1970s. Since then, the process has reversed. Black Americans...
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https://dissentmagazine.org/article/cuba-ideology-meets-globalization/
In the last year the American focus on Cuba has shifted from emigration to trade. The threat of unwanted landings of hundreds of thousands of boat people has...
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https://dissentmagazine.org/online_articles/the-venezuelan-crisis/
Socialists need to fight against the dangerous and destabilizing actions of the Venezuelan opposition and the United States, while supporting the vast majority...
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https://dissentmagazine.org/article/deconstructing-history/
One good reason to read this book is that it directly addresses the current right-wing attack on university attempts to modernize their course offerings. As...
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https://dissentmagazine.org/article/style-and-passion-in-tocqueville/
Tocqueville is a writer of immense emotional power, and the secret of that power lies in the poetic rhythms of his prose; and, in the whole of Democracy in...
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https://dissentmagazine.org/article/the-specter-still-haunts-revisiting-1989/
In January 2010, I met a Bulgarian friend for dinner in a Georgetown pizza parlor. This friend, whom I will call Svetozara, had recently immigrated to the...
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https://dissentmagazine.org/article/homeless-in-midtown-the-view-from-mainchance/
The face of homelessness in New York City is changing, but the underlying problem remains the same: the failure to build affordable housing.
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https://dissentmagazine.org/article/fire-in-the-ashes/
Behind the facade of Soviet ideology, there is a tremendous longing for the clear, pure word of truth. That, more than anything else, is the driving force...
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https://dissentmagazine.org/article/three-economic-models-capitalism-the-welfare-state-and-socialism/
In the capitalist economy business decisions are made by the owners of resources; the latter may take the form of money, real estate, machinery and equipment,...
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https://dissentmagazine.org/article/a-case-for-affirmative-action/
Gertrude Ezorsky presents a powerfully reasoned argument in favor of raising out of misery that part of the American population that has been relegated to the...
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https://dissentmagazine.org/online_articles/the-seeds-of-war/
Putin sees Russian statehood and Russian national and linguistic identity as inextricably connected, and he is willing to spill Russian and Ukrainian blood to...
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https://dissentmagazine.org/article/about-the-election-4/
This is the year of the Tory tickets. All four of the men selected to run are the sons of millionaires. The fathers of three of the four were millionaires many...
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https://dissentmagazine.org/online_articles/the-rise-of-border-fascism/
Far-right groups threaten violence amid a contested election. How did we get here?
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https://dissentmagazine.org/article/in-praise-of-1984/
I envy the Russians. They destroy their discarded leaders. If a Khrushchev has to be deposed, he is utterly done in, made into an unperson, prevented from...
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https://dissentmagazine.org/article/france-an-end-to-politics/
Let me go directly to the heart of the matter: at present, there is no more politics in France. No more politics, that is, if we mean by politics a reasonable...
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https://dissentmagazine.org/online_articles/the-war-on-health-in-gaza/
The Israeli government is restricting access to food in Gaza at the same time as it is destroying healthcare infrastructure. Each process intensifies the...
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https://dissentmagazine.org/article/glib-tawdry-savvy-and-standardized/
Prognostications about media and society generally oscillate between two poles: to the north, one hears dithyrambs to a projected utopia offering fingertip...
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https://dissentmagazine.org/article/the-alliance-for-progress-2/
We viewed the original Kennedy program for Latin America (Alliance for Progress) with a good deal of scepticism, but welcomed the proclaimed ideals behind it....
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https://dissentmagazine.org/article/beyond-criminal-justice-reform-black-silent-majority/
Real criminal justice reform demands profound social change. The fixation on severe sentences and police brutality masks harder truths.
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https://dissentmagazine.org/article/harvey-cox-market-chris-lehmann-as-god-money-cult-review/
Somewhere between the apostles and Joel Osteen, mainstream Christianity turned from a wellspring of egalitarian promise into yet another exponent of the market...
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https://dissentmagazine.org/article/utopian-dream-a-new-farm-bill/
In the fall of 2011, I taught a graduate food studies course at New York University devoted to the farm bill, a massive and massively opaque piece of...
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https://dissentmagazine.org/article/in-dreams-begin-responsibilities/
A socialist president would have to navigate with great skill between the rocks of utopia and the shoals of compromise.
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https://dissentmagazine.org/article/the-seussian-left/
Dr. Seuss Goes to War: The World War II Editorial Cartoons of Theodor Seuss Geisel ed. Richard H. Minear, introduction by Art Spiegelman The New Press, 1999,...
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https://dissentmagazine.org/article/collective-bargaining-through-education/
Our neighborhood school, P.S. 29, is 75 per cent Negro and Puerto Rican, mostly Puerto Rican. The kids are a tough lot, coming from the tenements off Columbia...
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https://dissentmagazine.org/article/labor-remains-in-politics/
Whether or not the idea ever had any validity, no one could argue plausibly after November 6 that labor is the leader or vanguard of the people. But this much...
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https://dissentmagazine.org/article/robert-lekachman/
I admired Bob Lekachman long before I met him. It was not only that we shared a political perspective. an interest in the history of economic thought. and a...
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https://dissentmagazine.org/article/a-demented-man-for-all-seasons/
This has been a season of demented men. They flicker on the movie screen, igniting our emotions, and then leave us in darkness. Rarely do they touch the better...
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https://dissentmagazine.org/article/the-pastoral-retreat-of-the-new-left/
What has happened to the young men and women of the New Left? The movement is invisible these days, a specter regularly invoked only in neoconservative...
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https://dissentmagazine.org/article/the-american-corporation-ideology-and-reality/
In recent years, managerial elites have urgently sought to justify what it is they do. As Wilbert Moore remarked in his Conduct of the Corporation (1962),...
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https://dissentmagazine.org/article/corporate-democracy-civic-disrespect/
With the events of late in the year 2000, the United States left behind the era of constitutional republicanism and turned to a different form of government....
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https://dissentmagazine.org/article/schadenfreude/
My German dictionary says that Schadenfreude is a feeling of malicious delight in the discomfort of others. The element of Schadenfreude was especially strong...
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https://dissentmagazine.org/article/rules-for-the-game/
Frank Lentricchia has chosen a difficult problem for his new book, Criticism and Social Change. His ambition is to devise a Marxism responsive to the...
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https://dissentmagazine.org/article/communists-role-in-the-unions/
As a participant and survivor of the labor and radical struggles of the 1930s and 1940s, Bert Cochran has substantial credentials for undertaking this major...
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https://dissentmagazine.org/article/anne-parsons/
The brief life of Anne Parsons was a search for purity and meaning, a longing for a better world to live in. There was about it the white beauty of a church...
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https://dissentmagazine.org/article/on-susan-sontag/
Susan Sontag, who died in December at age seventy-one, was a brave intellectual; but her bravery was not just intellectual. In 1989, when Ayatollah Ruhollah...
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https://dissentmagazine.org/article/cross-gavel-secularism-religious-liberty-asad-milbank/
Progressive critics of secularism argue that the Protestant origins of religious liberty make it corrupt beyond saving. But to achieve real pluralism, should...
dissent magazinecrossgavel
https://dissentmagazine.org/online_articles/power-over-the-police/
State violence has no opposition party. Communities that want to dismantle police departments will need the power to do that work themselves.
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https://dissentmagazine.org/article/peace-in-the-third-world-the-case-of-angola/
Last September, while in Angola as an election observer, I met a young soldier in the Angolan army named Raul. Sporting green fatigues and an AK-47, he told me...
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https://dissentmagazine.org/article/new-orleans-a-right-to-return/
New Orleans has been challenging the limits of taste for over a century now. It is the city of Mardi Gras, of decadence, romance, stylish bohemianism, and, on...
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https://dissentmagazine.org/article/seductions-of-the-lower-strata/
Spring brings out robins, crocuses, and the homeless. On a May afternoon I was sitting on the bank of the Charles River in Boston, angling for the first...
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https://dissentmagazine.org/article/marxism-and-totalitarianism-rudolf-hilferding-and-the-mensheviks/
In April 1940 the Paris-based Russian Menshevik journal, Sotsialisticheskii Vestnik (SV), published an article by the famous Austrian Marxist Rudolf Hilferding...
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https://dissentmagazine.org/article/another-view-of-the-draft-2/
In war, the Greek historian Herodotus once explained, truth is the first casualty. But some- times where questions of war and militarism are concerned truth...
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https://dissentmagazine.org/article/joseph-clark/
You might say that my first encounter with Joe Clark was not entirely friendly. He was speaking at a Communist rally in the Bronx, and several young...
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https://dissentmagazine.org/article/response-to-zelda-bronstein-2/
Ever eager to see progressives detach themselves from the pair of miscreants in the White House, I welcome Zelda Bronstein to the growing circle of feminist...
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https://dissentmagazine.org/article/holes-in-the-new-economy/
Growing Prosperity: The Battle for Growth with Equity in the 21st Century by Barry Bluestone and Bennett Harrison Century Foundation, 2000, 345 pp., $25 Barry...
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https://dissentmagazine.org/article/john-steinbecks-hurricane-katrina-lesson/
Seventy years ago this October, before he was famous as a novelist, John Steinbeck published a seven-part series in the San Francisco News on the Dust Bowl...
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https://dissentmagazine.org/article/transforming-electoral-process-our-revolution-justice-democrats/
In a year of pivotal midterm elections, the rising left wing of the Democratic party is distinguished as much by how it organizes as the policies it advocates.
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https://dissentmagazine.org/article/the-prague-spring/
The Prague Spring of 1968 remains one of the traumatic experiences of the left. It revealed both the tensions at work beneath the surface of the...
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https://dissentmagazine.org/article/abandoning-the-world-bank-pitfalls-when-right-and-left-agree/
In 1994, activist groups mounted a unified campaign against the World Bank and its sister organization, the International Monetary Fund (IMF). The two...
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https://dissentmagazine.org/article/both-eyes-open/
Are there dumb laws of nature? This reasonable question occurred to me some years back after I heard an eminent economist explain why automakers ought not to...
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