How the World Works

In the 1930s, left intellectuals were involved in worker education and writing books like Mathematics for the Millions. They con ...

Then, within a few years, we all disappeared from its pages. I think what happened is that the editors wanted to keep ahead of t ...

will go on, and then, when the whole thing collapses because of the US initiatives, they’re going to blame the Vietnamese (which ...

reason I wrote my book The Fateful Triangle. I was so infuriated at my inability to get one word even into the left press about ...

It’s not just me—any critic on the left is going to have to face that. If you don’t footnote every word, you’re not giving sourc ...

WHAT YOU CAN DO Signs of progress (and not) Over the last twenty or thirty years, new attitudes about gay rights, smoking, drink ...

Harvard had almost no Jewish faculty when I got there about When my wife and I were looking for a house in the suburbs, we were ...

Unfortunately, this trend hasn’t touched the central areas of power. In fact, it can be tolerated, even supported, by major inst ...

People don’t like the system. As mentioned earlier, 95% of Americans think corporations should lower their profits to benefit t ...

Resistance Who knows where the next Rosa Parks [the African-American woman whose refusal to sit in the back of the bus ignited t ...

The New Party has been running candidates and winning elections. What do you think of all this? Allowing new options to enter th ...

and by themselves they won’t overcome, but they’re the basis for overcoming. If you can rebuild, reconstitute and strengthen a c ...

churches in places like Arizona and Kansas than in the elite universities. As for the decline in student activism (and reading, ...

about it, but I couldn’t find much else. They subsequently published another book of essays commenting on the first one, and I’v ...

of others. They called this deeper effect the “domestication of aspirations”—which basically means that people lose hope. They k ...

That’s about right. That’s been the story for a couple of thousand years or so. Go back to the oldest recorded texts and see wha ...

long-term goal in order to devise a strategy? We learn by trying. We can’t start now, with current understanding, and say, Okay, ...

You’ve always seen top-down strategies and movements as inherently doomed. They can succeed very well at exactly what they’re de ...

human rights activists who are working under horrifying conditions. In places like that, people never ask, What should I do? The ...

I don’t think Howard Zinn, say, whines too much and turns people off, but there are probably other people who do. To the extent ...