A Symposium

...The Spring 1956 issue contains articles that cut across the gamut of concerns that would engage Dissent's editors and contributors for the next three-andahalf decades...

...We of Dissent must, I believe, use the magazine to challenge America's racist patterns as firmly as we used it in the past to challenge Soviet bloc totalitarianism...

...Of course, today's world is fundamentally different from what it was in Spring 1956, with the end of the cold war and the collapse of the Soviet totalitarian system constituting the most important changes...

...The multinational corporation is the agency of this globalized capitalism: increasingly disengaged from nation-state obligations, admitting only bottom-line profit and marketplace obligations...

...This capitalism brilliantly employs the rhetoric of market freedom to mask de facto market hegemony —a hegemony that might well have an impact on the life options of human beings worldwide not unlike that of the Soviet Empire...

...Unlike some of our neoliberal colleagues associated with Dissent who downplay the place of racist patterns in the plight of some 33 percent of black households who are poor, I consider this plight fundamentally linked to America's racist patterns...

...This collapse should, I think, free Dissent from its long-standing and correct concern with totalitarianism as a defining global reality...

...there is, rather, a multiplicity of dangers...

...for in our post–cold war era it is the character and caliber of living standards that are being threatened in the developed states of the West...

...Our very notion of a global threat must now be recast—no longer "a threat to freedom" as our measuring rod, so to speak, but perhaps "a threat to human decency...

...Dissent must take a front-and-center role in a new effort to re-nationalize and humanize the multinational corporation and its elites, on behalf of the working-class and the technical/ professional bourgeoisie—as well as on behalf of the environment...

...Though Dissent has always been engaged with America's racist patterns and legacy—a major source of my own intellectual fidelity to Dissent—this engagement has left much to be desired...

...These arise in both developed and developing states...

...The global power vacuum created by the demise of the Soviet bloc is being filled by a globalized capitalism...

...Finally, Dissent must put the crisis of race and poverty in the American system at the top of its agenda...

...In many developing states—whether the advanced type in South Asia or the retarded type in Africa—the quality of civil-society processes will be under perpetual threat...

...The crime-and-violence cycle that is ravaging poor inner-city black neighborhoods cannot be reversed without a prior attack on the connections between race and poverty in the American system...

...First, no longer is there a single allpowerful, all-threatening regime system...

...For example—events in the Soviet Union surrounding the Twentieth Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, resistance in Russian prison camps, Eastern European political degradation (conveyed through a poem), authoritarian patterns in Spain and Latin America, the decolonization war in Algeria, the threat of world extinction from the H-Bomb, the dilemma of the left-wing or radical intellectual in the bourgeois, satisfied America of the 1950s (three articles), and the nascent radicalization of the civil rights movement in the South and North (three articles— one by Irving Howe on civil rights activism in the North...

...Today, some two-thirds of African-American children are being reared in poverty...

...Dissent in the future must radicalize its perspective, criticizWINTER • 1994 • 13 The Left After Forty Years ing the new plutocracy of global capitalism in the West and its civil-society-constraining spinoffs in developing states...