As these carefully selected essays illustrate, the magazine Dissent, founded in 1954, has reflected demographic shifts in American society and moved with them while retaining core principles such as democratic socialism. In its early days, the magazine’s pages were often dominated by New York intellectuals like Irving Howe, Lewis Coser, novelist Harvey Swados, and Michael Harrington, the author of The Other America. Over the past decade or so, however, Dissent has published more women than ever before, including Sarah Jaffe, Kate Andrias, and Veena Dubal. Lichtenstein and Sonti, both academics, have selected an array of cogent, jargon-free essays about automation, factories, and union democracy. Divided into five sections and capped by a roundtable discussion with Luis Feliz Leon, Sara Nelson, and Daisy Pitkin, the collection explores the major issues that union organizers have faced, from the Cold War to the current environmental crisis. Since its inception, Dissent has been pro-union and pro–working class, but it has also been, as this book makes clear, critical of union bureaucracies, strong-arm tactics, and racism and misogyny. Eleni Schirmer and Sarah Jaffe write compassionately about teachers. E. Tammy Kim discusses “organizing the unorganizable.” Ruth Milkman insists that immigrants, so often scapegoated, are not to blame for trade union failures.
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English (US) ·