Editor's Page
C., M.
SHOULD "Americanization" take place by consent of the governed? The question was posed eight decades ago by a rebellious intellectual, Randolph Bourne. He was responding to polemics—both...
...Miller acknowledges, however, that some major issues, like the environment, cannot be addressed within national confines...
...n The future left will have to think on many levels—global as well as national and local, cultural as well as political and economic...
...watch the evening news and see how much of it is devoted to celebrities or sensation or trivia and how much to, well, news...
...And it will have to address the mediations among these levels if it is to provide a persuasive voice on behalf of liberty, equality, and solidarity...
...News has become, as Todd Gitlin remarks, whatever happens to "newsworthy" people...
...A "security" definition of environmentalism, he argues, works against what is needed: cooperative globalism...
...They also presaged an important democratic question for our times: can there be "globalization" by consent of the governed...
...It hastens to deregulate business, globally and within U.S...
...n Cooperative globalism will be increasingly important for trade unions...
...The left calls for democratic unionism as a vital element of social emancipation...
...This last point dovetails with Ken Conca's reproach to the Clinton administration for "repackaging" environmental issues as "strategic" matters...
...n Fraser worries lest union elections replicate the worst in our general elections—the dominance of money, sound bites, personalities...
...He was responding to polemics—both political and cultural—about "hyphenated-Americanism," roused by immigration but more broadly by a changing world...
...This transcontinental corporate marriage will also oblige expanded ties between America's United Auto Workers (now moving toward consolidation with our Steelworkers' and Machinists' unions) and Germany's IG Metall...
...A "globalizing" era presents new challenges to unions...
...M.C...
...n In this issue of Dissent, David Miller takes a critical look at some of the implications of the current process of "Europeanization...
...Steve Fraser, in his important article on union democracy in America, notes that unions have always played multiple, sometimes incongruous roles...
...Democracy becomes a complex matter when you are sometimes a fighting organization (in strikes), sometimes a diplomatic corps (in negotiations), and at other times a vehicle for democratic mobilization...
...borders, but to regulate unions...
...The right, on the other hand, does so to undermine any balance of power between labor and the corporate world (which hardly functions democratically...
...Those disputes anticipated today's arguments about multiculturalism...
...Surely, this is one implication of the announced merger of Chrysler with Daimler-Benz...
...He makes a claim that is controversial for many in the European left: to turn from politics on a national level risks the left's basic purposes, namely, democracy and social justice...
...This sort of politics reflects some distressing aspects of our culture...
Vol. 45 • July 1998 • No. 3
