Editor's Page
Walzer, Michael
Our interview with the leader of the Italian Democratic Party of the Left, Massimo D'Alema, suggests the difficulties faced by European social democracy as it struggles to adjust to, but also to...
...We welcome suggestions from readers about other experiences of market vulnerability that we should cover...
...Why bother with arguments or organizations, movements or campaigns, parties or lobbies, if you can hang your opponents in the courts...
...n We begin with some reflections on the current Washington melodrama—not only because that odd couple, sex and politics, is always interesting, but also because political melodrama is sometimes a clue to serious politics...
...and Stephen F. Cohen's moving account of Nikolai Bukharin, sitting in one of Stalin's prisons, writing a novel about How It All Began...
...What it suggests this time, it seems to me, is the ascendency of litigation over every other form of political activity...
...Bashi Fein describes the HMO revolution that followed hard upon Clinton's failure to reform our medical system, and worries about the impact of marketed medicine on both the delivery and character of health care...
...How should we respond to the "creative destruction" of entrepreneurial capitalism...
...These difficulties are ours too, here in the United States, though we approach them without a party or political tradition that embodies an alternative view of social organization...
...And Philip Green demonstrates how market forces shape and degrade American television...
...That experience is examined here in four articles...
...Gerald Markowitz and David Rosner tell the story of what might best be called the class struggle over silicosis—the unrelenting fight of industry lobbyists against government regulations that would save workers from this terrible disease...
...Our interview with the leader of the Italian Democratic Party of the Left, Massimo D'Alema, suggests the difficulties faced by European social democracy as it struggles to adjust to, but also to resist, the material and ideological power of the market...
...n This issue also features two fascinating political/historical essays: Manning Marable's revealing analysis of the long-term connections between black nationalism and far-right politics...
...This is an ongoing Dissent project: to expose the harms that uncontrolled markets bring to ordinary men and women and to defend collective remedies...
...Louis Farrakhan's Nation of Islam is sometimes thought to stand on the left of American (and global) politics, but that perception is as wrong and, if on a vastly smaller scale, as damaging as the idea that Stalinism was a legitimate left politics...
...American politics and society have always been peculiarly vulnerable to market forces, and today vulnerability is the painful everyday experience of many Americans...
...Intellectuals who make any kind of peace with Farrakhan will have to reckon with Marable's Black Leadership, from which the essay printed here was adapted...
...Eric Freyfogle examines and criticizes the use of market mechanisms to deal with environmental pollution...
...n The Arguments section is also devoted to markets this quarter: What should be the left's position on free trade...
Vol. 45 • April 1998 • No. 2
