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Abstract: Many people tend to think, and not without reason, of emigrants from former communist countries as right-wing. In that respect, two recent memoirs, by Andrei Markovits and Lea Ypi, are refreshing and surprising. Each induces us to reflect on a theme central to the left: respectively, cosmopolitanism and socialism, both of which are currently on the defensive.Both authors were born under communism in southeastern Europe, on the periphery of the Soviet Union—Markovits in Romania, Ypi in Albania. Both came west early in their lives, though at very different moments—Markovits left in 1958, going first to Austria to complete his schooling, and then to the United States, and Ypi departed some forty years later, in 1997 ... Read More PubDate: 2022-03-27T00:00:00-05:00
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Abstract: Seven years ago, I reviewed in these pages the first major history of the American Socialist Party to appear in several decades: Jack Ross’s The Socialist Party of America: A Complete History (2015), an exhaustive and, for the reader, exhausting tome whose text ran to roughly 600 pages before the election tables, notes, and index, which ran for 200 more.Now, Gary Dorrien, a professor of religion at Columbia and of social ethics across the street at Union Theological Seminary, has produced his account of this nation’s democratic socialist history, a text that also runs to nearly 600 pages (before endnotes), though with smaller type squeezing in many more words than Ross had managed. Dorrien is a distinguished ... Read More PubDate: 2022-03-27T00:00:00-05:00
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Abstract: Last November, Chinese tennis star Peng Shuai, the former Wimbledon and French Open doubles champion, posted a lengthy statement on the social media site Weibo accusing China’s former Vice Premier Zhang Gaoli of sexually assaulting her, referring to a years-long, on-again, off-again relationship. The post was deleted by censors within a half-hour and Peng disappeared for several weeks, unleashing a flood of international news reports and prompting tennis celebrities such as Serena Williams and Naomi Osaka to post their concern on Twitter, using the viral hashtag #WhereIsPengShuai. Chinese state media sought to stanch the flow of bad publicity by releasing bizarre propaganda images of Peng through ... Read More PubDate: 2022-03-27T00:00:00-05:00
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Abstract: Thomas Healy’s book is an earnest and empathetic examination of Soul City, former civil rights lawyer and national director of the Congress of Racial Equality Floyd McKissick’s 1970s idea for a black-designed, black-led town in Warren County, North Carolina, near the Virginia border. The book is a moving account of McKissick’s commitment to his vision and the many obstacles, reasonable and unreasonable, objective and arbitrary, that hindered its realization. As a story of McKissick the man and his nearly indefatigable zeal, Soul City is nuanced and subtle, and it provides poignant, if not always fully intentional, commentary on the limitations of the political moment out of which McKissick’s idea emerged. Healy ... Read More PubDate: 2022-03-27T00:00:00-05:00
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Abstract: Workers at the JD.com headquarters in 2016 (Visual China Group/Getty Images)The term 996 has come to denote a culture of overwork in China’s tech sector. The numbers refer to a work schedule that runs from 9 a.m. to 9 p.m. six days a week, though they represent less a fixed schedule than an expectation that tech workers will consistently put in grueling hours. Even with a seventy-two-hour workweek, jobs in the country’s fast-growing internet industry are among the most sought after by young professionals. Skilled tech jobs are on average among the highest paid in the country, with university graduates at top firms able to earn salaries of up to 600,000 renminbi (roughly $70,000) out of college, and more than twice ... Read More PubDate: 2022-03-27T00:00:00-05:00
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Abstract: Ilham Tohti in Beijing on June 12, 2010 (Frederic J. Brown/AFP via Getty Images)When I heard that the Uyghur public intellectual Ilham Tohti had been given a life sentence for allegedly promoting ethnic separatism, I was living on a university campus just a few kilometers from the courthouse where he was sentenced in Ürümqi, the capital of Xinjiang. In whispered conversations, my Uyghur classmates and mentors told me how troubled they were by the news. Tohti had used his training in economics and Chinese to communicate to government authorities and the general non-Muslim public about how Chinese history was experienced from a Uyghur perspective. He gave a voice to the feelings of nearly everyone I knew, and he was ... Read More PubDate: 2022-03-27T00:00:00-05:00
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Abstract: Demonstrators display banners and posters to support journalists from the Southern Weekend newspaper near the company’s offices in Guangzhou in 2013. (AFP/AFP via Getty Images)Is there any point in still paying attention to intellectuals in China' Today, educated young people like to dismiss intellectuals as nothing more than mouthpieces for various private interests. An abbreviated form of the expression gong zhi (public intellectual) has become a derogatory term, often hinting at foreign influence. While, since the beginning of post-Mao reforms, academics have been able to contribute to public discussions on certain carefully vetted topics, they are generally more likely to speak for the state than against it, a ... Read More PubDate: 2022-03-27T00:00:00-05:00
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Abstract: It is always worth trying to get as rounded a sense as possible of the many parts of the world that are flattened by soundbite-driven coverage. In some cases, the need to get beyond simplistic stereotypes takes on a special urgency. The People’s Republic of China is such a place. In spite of how often the PRC has made global headlines in recent years, many people still have only a superficial sense of the varied lives and views of its inhabitants. Similarly, there is often little understanding (including on the left) of the Chinese Communist Party, a complex organization whose centenary was marked with great pomp and circumstance last year in Beijing. The CCP, which has been in power for more than seventy years ... Read More PubDate: 2022-03-27T00:00:00-05:00
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Abstract: On December 13, 2021, activists with ShutDownDC held a candlelight vigil to draw attention to the Supreme Court's attack on abortion rights and mark the fiftieth anniversary of Roe v. Wade. (Alex Wong/Getty Images)I briefly dated a man who told me that he thought abortion should be legal but “didn’t think it should be used as birth control” and later, with no sense of irony, argued with me and then became so angry that I was frightened when I insisted that we use a condom. I bring this up for a couple of reasons. First, public writing about abortion is usually either personal and confessional or, more often, legalistic, political, and abstracted from what abortion is really about—people’s bodies, the most private ... Read More PubDate: 2022-03-27T00:00:00-05:00
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Abstract: Eric Li gives a TED Talk in 2013. (TED/YouTube)In late 2019, as the first COVID-19 cases were emerging in Wuhan, the Chinese venture capitalist and media figure Eric Li went for lunch with a Financial Times correspondent in Shanghai. Over a $640, eleven-course meal, Li, who is a founder of Guancha, a leading nationalist online media outlet, took the opportunity to proclaim the end of liberalism in China. For decades, people had been “debating what kind of government and society they want,” Li said. “That debate is over.” There were “leftover liberal phrases” and “liberal thoughts” held by academics and other holdouts, but he predicted they would soon change their minds.These kinds of statements are common today in ... Read More PubDate: 2022-03-27T00:00:00-05:00
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Abstract: An antiwar protester in Saint Petersburg on February 27, 2022 (Sergei Mihailicenko/Anadolu Agency via Getty Images)Nothing the U.S. left can do or say will change the course of the war in Ukraine, but it was still embarrassing to find DSA’s International Committee obsessing over “NATO’s militarization” in the lead up to the invasion. (A subsequent statement by the National Political Committee rightly condemns the Russian invasion but implies that NATO expansionism “set the stage” for the conflict.) There are excellent reasons to criticize NATO, and U.S. intervention abroad, both generally and in this specific context— and, of course, our primary duty as socialists is to critique the actions of our own government ... Read More PubDate: 2022-03-27T00:00:00-05:00
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Abstract: In early March 2020, as COVID-19 infections started to spread in U.S. jails and prisons, Roger was serving out the final months of a fifteen-year sentence in Eastern Correctional Facility, a maximum-security prison in Ulster County, about one hundred miles north of New York City. By April 1, movement in the facility was restricted, recreation areas were closed, and visitations and educational programs were suspended. For several months, Roger recounted, “we were literally locked in our cells, as if we were in solitary confinement.”Under such circumstances, it felt like a blessing that in 2017, New York had signed a contract with JPay, a subsidiary of prison telecommunication giant Securus Technologies, to ... Read More PubDate: 2022-03-27T00:00:00-05:00
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Abstract: AMLO supporters attend the Third State of the Union Report on December 1, 2021, in Mexico City. (Manuel Velasquez/Getty Images)On December 1, 2021, Mexico City’s central public square, the Zócalo, began to fill with supporters of President Andrés Manuel López Obrador. It had been two years since there had been a public gathering of this size. Buses arrived from around the country, some organized by municipalities governed by AMLO’s party, Morena, and some by labor unions. After hours of musical performances, the president appeared. His supporters were happy to see someone that they looked up to both as a politician and as a moral authority. In his speech, AMLO highlighted the government’s signature policies and ... Read More PubDate: 2022-03-27T00:00:00-05:00
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Abstract: There was a cultural moment a few decades ago, capped by the absorbing 1998 documentary Arguing the World, when scholarship of and nostalgia for the so-called New York intellectuals was at its acme. A groaning shelf of titles spotlighted one or another aspect of this august midcentury group, which was analyzed, fawned over, and (far too hastily) lamented as the last great gasp of public intellectuals in America. The bold-faced names of the so-called Partisan Review “crowd”—Dwight Macdonald, Hannah Arendt, Mary McCarthy, Lionel Trilling, James Baldwin, Susan Sontag—had all been associated with a handful of small-circulation literary journals and were celebrities to a select few.Amid the glorification, one name ... Read More PubDate: 2022-03-27T00:00:00-05:00
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Abstract: People sit in a shelter under a hotel as sirens warn citizens to take cover on March 2, 2022 in Lviv, Ukraine. (Dan Kitwood/Getty Images)I am writing these lines in Kyiv while it is under artillery attack.Until the last minute, I had hoped that Russian troops wouldn’t launch a full-scale invasion. Now, I can only thank those who leaked the information to the U.S. intelligence services.Yesterday, I spent half the day considering whether I ought to join a territorial defense unit. During the night that followed, the Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky signed a full mobilization order and Russian troops moved in and prepared to encircle Kyiv, which made the decision for me.But before taking up my post, I would like ... Read More PubDate: 2022-03-27T00:00:00-05:00
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Abstract: Courtesy of Deacon LuiIf Hong Kongers once hoped they could create their own future, that dream was crushed in June 2020 when the Chinese Communist Party enacted a “National Security Law” in the former British colony. That move criminalized dissent, defeating a year of massive street protests and a decades-long struggle for democracy. In its wake is a painful stillness. Police continue to round up and jail anyone suspected of undermining the Beijing-backed government. Hong Kong has long been called a crossroads of East and West. Now it feels like both the graveyard of liberal optimism and the threshold to a disorienting new world.This piece, by Hong Kong artist Deacon Lui, is about the uncertainty of how to move ... Read More PubDate: 2022-03-27T00:00:00-05:00
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Abstract: Recently, I spoke at a virtual event on Chinese politics and Western perceptions of China. During the question-and-answer session, an audience member asked if any of the speakers were concerned that rising tensions between the United States and China could lead to a new Cold War or even full-blown military conflict.The moderator directed the question to me, the only U.S.-based panelist who was also born and raised in China, but he repeated it with a slight modification: do any of your friends or relatives worry about a potential war between the two superpowers'I appreciated the moderator’s thoughtfulness in trying to create some distance between me and a sensitive subject. I figured that was also the reason he had ... Read More PubDate: 2022-03-27T00:00:00-05:00
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Abstract: In justifying the need for “strategic competition” with China, both Democrats and Republicans rely on the argument that China is an authoritarian threat to democracy that must be stopped. Authoritarianism is indeed on the rise in China, and we should all be concerned about the future of democracy, but in the United States the greatest threat to democracy comes not from overseas but from the authoritarian movement that is on its way to taking over the Republican Party. And stoking the U.S.-China rivalry will only strengthen the forces lined up against democracy, both at home and abroad.Authoritarianism and nationalism are on the rise around the world, driven by long-term dysfunctions in the global economy that have ... Read More PubDate: 2022-03-27T00:00:00-05:00
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Abstract: “A quarterly just can’t keep up,” Irving Howe wrote on November 15, 1989, “but we try.” This line appeared in an addendum to an interview about Poland that would be published in Dissent in January 1990. As the editors were dotting the i’s and crossing the t’s of that issue, the Berlin Wall had fallen. The world, and the articles, looked completely different.As we were finalizing this issue, Russia invaded Ukraine. Thankfully, on the internet we can keep up a little better, so we paused our work on the print magazine and turned our attention to the website. We include two of those online articles here.In “A Letter to the Western Left,” Ukrainian socialist Taras Bilous fiercely critiques leftists whose narrow ... Read More PubDate: 2022-03-27T00:00:00-05:00
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Abstract: Connecticut International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union members rally for John F. Kennedy's presidential campaign in 1959. (Kheel Center/Flickr).When trying to figure out how they should interact with political parties, social movements face a common challenge: Should they push from without or seek to operate from within' Should they act as a destabilizing threat to all politicians, or should they work to build strength within a mainstream party'Frances Fox Piven and Daniel Schlozman are two theorists who stand at opposite poles of this debate. In Piven’s view, movements win by deploying disruptive power from the outside that can polarize the public and create discomfort among politicians. “[M]ovements of mass ... Read More PubDate: 2022-03-27T00:00:00-05:00
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Abstract: The concept of a “cold war” can only have meaning when the term’s implied polarity—a “hot war” between superpowers—exists as a real possibility. Until recently, no such thing was imaginable. That began to change in the years after 2008, when a critical mass of official and popular opinion began to weigh the likelihood of a hot war between the United States and China, and to consider what combination of deterrence, engagement, and concession on the part of the United States would be most likely to prevent such a war. The new outlook was driven first of all by economic developments. Contrary to widely held expectations, China managed to sustain average growth rates of nearly 10 percent of GDP per year for forty ... Read More PubDate: 2022-03-27T00:00:00-05:00
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Abstract: Ching Kwan Lee’s The Specter of Global China: Politics, Labor, and Foreign Investment in Africa (2017) had a major impact on discussions about Chinese global economic policy, transcending a tired debate about whether China is engaged in neocolonialism. Lee’s fieldwork drew our attention to both the continuities and ruptures between Euro-American empire and an ascendant China in patterns of investment, natural resource extraction, and labor politics. But much has changed in the half-decade since the book was published. China’s overseas investments have been dramatically curtailed; political and economic disarray in the United States has bolstered China’s relative geopolitical standing; the Chinese government has ... Read More PubDate: 2022-03-27T00:00:00-05:00
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Abstract: Last November, a 704-page doorstopper of a book with a sixty-three-page bibliography, démodé section headings, and winding ruminations on Rousseau landed in the number two spot on the New York Times Best Seller list. This event is just the sort of wacky, unpredictable quirk of human history that the book’s authors, David Graeber and David Wengrow, bask in. Maybe readers are hungry for iconoclasm, which The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity delivers in ample proportion. At their feet, idols lay shattered. In their epic retelling of our distant past, they challenge nearly every dogma littered across the pages of popular histories like Yuval Noah Harari’s Sapiens and Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs, and Steel ... Read More PubDate: 2022-03-27T00:00:00-05:00
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Abstract: A poster for The Battle at Lake Changjin in Beijing on October 3, 2021 (VCG/Getty Images)Have the United States and China begun a second Cold War' At first there seems to be no lack of evidence pointing to yes. The raising of barriers to trade and immigration, the imposition of sanctions and embargoes focused on sensitive technology, the constant rise in military budgets, an ever-more critical tone from the press regarding the other state, all of it contributing to an almost complete collapse of trust between the rival superpowers’ polities: surely such a lack of warmth must signal winter. Yet more careful observation should give us pause. For all the chatter of divorce, the marriage of convenience between the ... Read More PubDate: 2022-03-27T00:00:00-05:00
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Abstract: As tensions between the United States and China have escalated in recent years, Taiwan has once again become a place of growing international concern. The historical roots of the conflict over Taiwan are fairly well known. The island fell to the rule of the Kuomintang (KMT) when Nationalist forces fled there following their defeat at the hands of the Communist Party during the Chinese Civil War. From 1949 to 1987, the KMT ruled by martial law—a right-wing dictatorship propped up by the United States to counter China. The KMT claimed Taiwan was quintessentially Chinese and sought to paper over the fifty-year Japanese colonial period. Today, because of the victories of popular movements in the 1980s and 1990s, Taiwan ... Read More PubDate: 2022-03-27T00:00:00-05:00
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Abstract: Joe Biden and Xi Jinping meet virtually on November 15, 2021. (Alex Wong/Getty Images)Early in 2022, the question of whether the world had entered into a new Cold War was a matter of debate. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine on February 24 seemingly answers the question. It reignited nuclear fears and, for all that has changed, inevitably echoed the Soviet occupation of Czechoslovakia in 1968. As this issue goes to press, the outcomes are impossible to predict. But the conflict could play an analogous role to the Korean War by institutionalizing existing tensions.What we’re witnessing today is not the potential Cold War most had been expecting, and, if we are entering a new era of Cold War, it will not simply be a ... Read More PubDate: 2022-03-27T00:00:00-05:00
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Abstract: Todd was the political big brother I never had. When he wrote about what was wrong in our country and what the left should do about it, I either agreed with him immediately or needed to understand why I did not—and assumed he could persuade me to change my mind.Better than anyone I have known, Todd combined a passion for changing the world with a healthy skepticism about those on our side who, in their own righteous zeal, made self-defeating choices. He knew what drove some SDSers—like me—to try to “bring the war home” but also cautioned that smashing windows and making bombs would only push more Americans into the not-so-silent Nixonian majority. He empathized with the hunger for recognition, respect, and power ... Read More PubDate: 2022-03-27T00:00:00-05:00
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Abstract: On January 30, 2022, marchers pass a mural of the victims of Bloody Sunday. (Charles McQuillan/Getty Images)The first thing you notice about Derry, a city of 110,000 or so in the north of Ireland close to the much-contested border of partition, is that it’s beautiful. It’s hilly and green and the River Foyle winds through it and the ancient walls that enclose the old city are gorgeous—if you forget for a moment that they were built to keep the Irish out of the colonial settlement. Like so many other places that have become household names because of the violence inflicted on their people, the loveliness of this particular part of Ireland often gets forgotten.Derry was beautiful on Sunday, January 30, as a cold ... Read More PubDate: 2022-03-27T00:00:00-05:00
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Abstract: In 1990, the Christian author James Dobson issued a grave warning about “so-called fantasy roleplaying games.” They masquerade as simple creative exercises for children, but “the fact is, in order to play these games properly, you usually have to use magic and mysticism, things that are clearly not Christian,” he said dolefully. Some former players even said the game had led them into contact with demons, he asserted. Dobson, the founder of the influential organization Focus on the Family, didn’t mention any particular game by name. He didn’t have to: by the time his warning was broadcast, Dungeons & Dragons, a tabletop roleplaying game that starred elves, orcs, and other fantasy beings, had become synonymous with ... Read More PubDate: 2022-03-27T00:00:00-05:00
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Abstract: Commentary on China these days often presents lazy thinking that leads to some ridiculous historical statements. That President Xi Jinping is a would-be Mao Zedong or that China is facing a “new Cultural Revolution” are examples of this laziness. In a charitable light, such assertions stem from a broad misunderstanding of the logics of contemporary China and its role in the world today. In a less charitable light, they are driven by ideological fealty to some of the most outdated and frankly racist aspects of Cold War Western anticommunism. My premise in the following comments: China today is not Maoist, and Xi is not Mao redux. China today is also not communist in any genuine sense of that term, even though the ... Read More PubDate: 2022-03-27T00:00:00-05:00
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