The oldest democratic socialist magazine in the United States. Its tradition will be the tradition of democratic socialism."
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Founded in 1954 by a group of New York Intellectuals, the magazine set out to "dissent from the bleak atmosphere of conformism that pervades the political and intellectual life of the United States ...The accent of Dissent will be radical. Dissent has published essays by Hannah Arendt, Erich Fromm, Daniel Bell, Paul Goodman, Günter Grass, Michael Harrington, Dwight Macdonald, C. Wright Mills, Czes
law Milosz, Norman Mailer, Amos Oz, Richard Rorty, Ignazio Silone, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Cornel West, Ellen Willis, Richard Wright, Marshall Berman, Paul Berman, David Bromwich, Todd Gitlin, Jürgen Habermas, Hendrik Hertzberg, Irving Howe, Michael Ignatieff, Alfred Kazin, Benjamin Kunkel, Norman Mailer, C. Wright Mills, Louis Menand, Martha Nussbaum, Amos Oz, George Packer, Samantha Power.
Whether you consider yourself an anarchist or not, to be denounced as one by the police and mass media is to be branded with one of the state’s most damning scarlet letters.
Georgia’s sweeping and political application of conspiracy law echoes a tactic that shattered the left roughly a hundred years ago, when the U.S. government targeted socialist parties and militant unions with laws against criminal syndicalism, espionage, and sedition.
American-backed violence is routinely repackaged as essential for the enjoyment of constitutional principles at home and abroad. The result has been a vision of constitutionalism that has gone hand in hand with unchecked and coercive power.
A culture of reverence for the U.S. Constitution shields the founding document from criticism, despite its many shortcomings. We need an alternative vision that provides meaningful freedom at home and embraces self-determination abroad.
Biden thinks that his argument against Trump is self-executing. He seems not to recognize that even dictatorships command a degree of popular support.
Biden claims he is remaining in the race because the threat of Trump is too great. That’s the exact reason he should consider retiring.
Is a president so old and so unpopular the best choice for another turn as democracy’s savior?
The two old men worried to their very cores about Trump came to opposite decisions: Mitt Romney quit, and Joe Biden is running again. Both may have chosen wrong.
The trajectory of food assistance captures both the promise and the limits of American social policy.
In an era of retrenchment in social policy, food assistance is becoming more generous and inclusive. But Republican politicians are attempting to gut one of the most popular programs: free school lunch.
Fanon had no singular identity. He spent his life in perpetual motion—physically, intellectually, and politically.
Frantz Fanon’s psychiatric work was the most practical manifestation of his larger ambition to restore agency to alienated subjects.
While Giorgia Meloni has ideological ties with the Trumpian right, her record in power has been that of a junior ally to the Biden administration.
The Italian prime minister has become a central figure in the EU establishment as a mood of decline and threat pushes voters toward reactionary parties.
For conservatives around the world, Israel’s democratic deficit is a feature, not a bug—an alternative constitutional model that defies liberal universalism.
For conservatives around the world, Israel’s democratic deficit is a feature, not a bug—an alternative constitutional model that defies liberal universalism.
A growing number of observers question whether India still warrants being called the world’s largest democracy.
Another electoral victory would enable Narendra Modi’s party to inscribe de facto Hindu supremacy into law.
Denied the effective right to bargain with fast-food corporations, Fight for $15 has operated in an environment much like the Wild West faced by workers prior to the passage of the NLRA in 1935.
The National Labor Relations Act still functions, just barely, for Starbucks workers. Employees at fast-food franchises face even worse odds under federal labor law.
In extraordinary moments, “transformative” presidents defy the Supreme Court frontally as an overtly political (and politicizing) tactic in a public contest over who gets to say what the law is.
The risks of calling on politicians to push back against the court must be weighed against the present reality of a malign judicial dictatorship.
The campaign of starvation in Gaza is part of a war on health waged by Israel’s government.
The Israeli government is restricting access to food in Gaza at the same time as it is destroying healthcare infrastructure. Each process intensifies the lethal consequences of the other.
Sahra Wagenknecht accuses Die Linke of disregarding working-class voters in favor of pandering to an “academic clientele” who promote “gender-conscious language and pricey organic products.”
The former Die Linke politician's new party embraces a model that has found purchase among sections of the left across the Global North: left-wing economics paired with a variety of political positions pulled from the right.
The NUPES parties will need to rediscover their delicate unity; the stakes are too high to continue infighting.
Voters understand that a left unity pact provides the only path to victory on the national level.
The German political establishment has abandoned the belief that the Holocaust gave it a responsibility to humanity and replaced it with a responsibility to Israel alone.
The German political establishment has abandoned the belief that the Holocaust gave it a responsibility to humanity and replaced it with a responsibility to Israel alone.
A well-functioning democracy requires social movements, because people have a right to organize toward collective goals not directly related to accessing political power or winning elections.
A roundtable discussion on the challenges that left-wing political formations face around the world.
The defeat of hardline national-Catholic rule in Poland was welcomed with euphoria by the big-tent opposition. The outcome for the Polish left is more ambiguous.
Read Cyryl Ryzak's postcard from our Winter 2024 issue:
The defeat of hardline national-Catholic rule was welcomed with euphoria by the big-tent opposition. The outcome for the Polish left is more ambiguous.
AMLO’s government has faced considerable criticism at home and abroad for perceived democratic backsliding.
The Mexican president has built his durable popularity by combining traditionally left- and right-wing policies and positions.
Arévalo and his party, the Semilla (Seed) Movement, have been persistent in criticizing this system and the national elite that hoards power and wealth.
After months of political battle, Bernardo Arévalo has become the president of Guatemala. His winning campaign was built on attacking the corruption of the institutions that tried to keep him from office.
The British Labour Party’s hopes rest on the belief that a combination of green industrial policy and supply-side reform can cure British economic malaise. Is this a fairy tale?
Read James Stafford in the Winter 2024 issue:
The British Labour Party’s hopes rest on the belief that a combination of green industrial policy and supply-side reform can cure British economic malaise. Is this a fairy tale?
It was in the face of racist retrenchment that the perfectionist faith was most remarkable, and most needed.
The African American perfectionists offered “faith” instead of “hope”—emphasizing the struggle to realize a vision of justice rather than passive assurance that it would prevail.
Memoirs of a Weatherman.
Glacier v. Teamsters was not a crisis averted but another step in the right’s plan to stifle labor power.
What would it look like if we subordinated finance to the public interest?
We're extending our offer until Friday: Get a joint Dissent and Los Angeles Review of Books subscription and save $20 on a year of fresh perspectives.
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Tyranny, Inc. aims to build a working-class coalition between the left and right. But Ahmari cannot get around the GOP populists’ dismal record on labor.
Tyranny, Inc. aims to build a working-class coalition between the left and right. But Ahmari cannot get around the GOP populists' dismal record on labor.
Editors and writers from Jewish Currents stop by for a discussion on the contradictory history of the Anti-Defamation League—and how to make sense of its recent showdown with Elon Musk.
A left that is ambivalent about liberalism can still seek to engage it.
We’re teaming up with Los Angeles Review of Books for a special subscription offer: get a year of both magazines and save $20. This week only.
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The neoliberal order has been exposed as fraudulent, inefficient, and inequitable. Yet it hardly lies in the dustbin of history.
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Do you have any questions for J.W. Mason about inflation? Send them to [email protected] and Sarah Jaffe will ask them on this week's show.
Beyond Bidenomics: Our Winter Issue Launch “President Joe Biden impressed many on the left with both the level of his initial ambition and his appointment of progressives to key positions,” Mike Konczal writes in Dissent's Winter 2022 issue. “Yet a series of institutional challenges and the weaknesses of the Democratic coalition have left a sense of doom hanging over the party and the larger network of left-liberal political actors, writers, and organizers that surround it.” On Tuesday, January 25, Konczal is leading a discussion on the political landscape of the Biden era with three contributors to our latest special section, “Beyond Bidenomics”: economist J.W. Mason, antitrust legal scholar Sanjukta Paul, and political scientist Deva Woodly, author of the new book “Reckoning: Black Lives Matter and the Democratic Necessity of Social Movements.”
"The most radicalizing experience that a union member can have is to participate in bargaining, because they see an entirely different side of their employer than they see in any other context. And also, if you do it right, they see that they actually have, not enough power, but some power in their workplace," C.S. Lewis said on the latest episode of Belabored. "When you have that many people in one room and they feel the power dynamic shift, that is an incredibly useful tool that builds worker confidence and builds worker expectations."
"One thing that is inspiring people to organize is that... they might have, in a general sense, maybe realized their boss didn’t care about them, but they now have seen, maybe sharper than ever, that the boss doesn’t care if they die," Rebecca Givan said on the latest episode of Belabored. Listen to the rest here: https://www.dissentmagazine.org/blog/belabored-the-great-resignation
Belabored is live! Co-hosts Michelle Chen and Sarah Jaffe speak with Rutgers University professor and union leader Rebecca Givan and Strikewave's C.M. Lewis about “The Great Resignation” and what the past year has meant for workers.
After over a year of Zoom purgatory, universities are coming back to life again. But can higher education be more than the sum of its scandals? Our Fall 2021 Issue, Back to School, invited contributors to assess the political battles—adjunct precarity, changes in funding, graduate worker conditions, and more—that are still waiting to be waged in the university. Help the students in your life join the conversation. Set them up with a gift subscription to Dissent. https://www.ezsubscription.com/dis/giveagift
On this week's Belabored podcast, Nastaran Mohit, Organizing Director of the NewsGuild of New York, talks about how Occupy Wall Street changed the labor movement: https://www.dissentmagazine.org/blog/belabored-the-legacy-of-occupy-wall-street
Our Spring 2021 issue, Global Economic Disorder, is out now. On Wednesday, April 14 at 7 p.m. ET, Dissent board member and special section co-editor Julia Ott will moderate a discussion with contributors Tim Barker, Penelope Kyritsis, Walden Bello, and Anakwa Dwamena. In the issue, Tim Barker examines global secular stagnation; Penelope Kyritsis and Genevieve LeBaron investigate textile workers’ widespread hunger; Walden Bello charts multilateralism’s declining legitimacy; and Anakwa Dwamena analyzes the limits of sweatshops as springboards for industrialization in East Africa. -- Julia Ott is Associate Professor in the History of Capitalism and the director of the Robert L. Heilbroner Center for Capitalism Studies at the New School. Tim Barker is a historian of modern American capitalism and a member of Dissent’s editorial board. Penelope Kyritsis is the Director of Strategic Research at the Worker Rights Consortium. Walden Bello is the cofounder and co-chair of the Bangkok-based think tank Focus on the Global South and the International Adjunct Professor of Sociology at SUNY Binghamton. Anakwa Dwamena is a contributing editor for Africa Is a Country.
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TONIGHT, April 5th, at 7:30pm ET/4:30pm PT! Galvanized by Black Lives Matter, heirs to Alabama’s legacy of militant Black unionism have mounted the largest organizing drive at an Amazon warehouse to date. Just days after the union vote closes, historian Robin D. G. Kelley will join Sarah Jaffe and Michelle Chen, co-hosts of Dissent’s Belabored podcast, and Steven Pitts, host of the Black Work Talk podcast on Organizing Upgrade, to discuss the drive and what it has to say about the state of the Black working class today.
"If we were to create trade unions from scratch now, we would not create them in the model that they are. Being accountable to survivors, making sure that our unions are safe spaces, is fundamentally important if we want to build movements that are fully inclusive." Jo Grady, general secretary of the University and College Union in the United Kingdom, talks about the prospects for a truly feminist labor movement on the Belabored podcast: https://www.dissentmagazine.org/blog/belabored-women-on-labors-frontline-with-jo-grady
Lapsis, written and directed by Noah Hutton, takes place in a parallel present. Deliveryman Ray Tincelli is struggling to support himself and his ailing younger brother. After a series of two-bit hustles and unsuccessful swindles, Ray takes a job in a strange new realm of the gig economy: trekking deep into the forest, pulling cable over miles of terrain to connect large, metal cubes that link together the new quantum trading market. As he gets pulled deeper into the zone, he encounters growing hostility and the threat of robot cablers—and must choose to either help his fellow workers or to get rich and get out. On Wednesday, March 10 at 4 p.m. ET, Hutton will talk with Boots Riley, writer-director of Sorry to Bother You, about class, solidarity, and the dystopia of twenty-first-century work on film.
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