Editor's Page

...It is especially important to insist that the second, alone, is not enough...

...With affirmative action on the ballot in California, and perhaps in other states as well, 1996 will be no different...

...And that claim is simply false...

...There is some truth to this claim, obviously, but the argument is contrived in such a way as to deny that there is anything structurally wrong or even problematic in our domestic economy...

...Still, the economy does matter, in a central way, and it is ominous that the politician who has been saying this most forcefully is a Republican populist who is more than willing to speak the coded language of racism and antiSemitism, and xenophobia generally...

...Nothing else on the horizon would make such a difference inAmerican politics, and so the connected efforts to increase union membership, regain the strike weapon (now virtually lost), and intervene decisively in electoral politics need to be critically and concretely assessed...

...Labor's revival, at this moment more prospect than reality, perhaps more wish than prospect, will be the subject of a series of articles, starting in the Fall issue, put together by three of our editors, Bill Kornblum, Mark Levinson, and Jo-Ann Mort...

...David Garrow writes about the inward turning in the black community, which can be, but doesn't have to be, a form of separatism...

...Martin Kilson and Phillip Richards focus, from very different angles, on the black middle class, which provided most of the participants in last October's Million Man March, and whose politics is increasingly contested by competing groups of separatists and integrationists...

...their message, decoded, has nothing to do with ending or reducing inequality—and it has played a central role in their campaigns in the last seven presidential elections...

...This is a longstanding commitment ofDissent, a sign, some would say, of our nostalgia for the old left...

...Gordon's calmly documented but ultimately savage portrait of American companies undone by their own anti-union and anti-worker ideology should be required reading (it will soon appear as a book) for Democratic party politicians and for officials and organizers in the revived labor movement...

...These four articles hardly "cover" the complex connections of race and politics, but they are a beginning (and there will be another article in the Summer Dissent, a special issue devoted to minority rights around the world, including here at home...

...Racial inequality remains the single most important and most divisive problem of American society—and one with a greater potential than any other for dividing and confusing the political forces of the left...

...Republicans talk about race mostly in code...

...And Carol Stack reports on a new kind of community organizing in the black South...

...David Gordon's article, the most important piece of economic analysis that we have carried in some time, is specifically a critique ofAmerican capitalism, and the economic reforms it calls for can be carried through without any change in the international regime: they are the legitimate and achievable goals of a domestic politics...

...It is in fact a sign of our longing for a new left...

...The actual arguments have focused, several times now, on race and politics in America, and so we decided to treat that question at greater length in this issue...

...The issue of race suggests emphatically that it's not only the economy that matters in American politics...

...M.W.LJ SPRING • 1996 • 5...

...Patrick Buchanan argues that the troubles of American capitalism—declining wages and living standards, above all—are produced by globalization and foreign competition...

...Presumably, the left's response has to include the two elements that Kilson describes in this issue: new efforts at coalition-building and new efforts at community "uplift...