New Politics, Vol. XI, No. 1, Whole Number 41

Exactly 40 years ago we received an article from Poland with views of the Soviet system close to ours: We saw it as a new form of exploitation, and we opposed it with the same vigor we opposed capitalism. We published the article, by Jacek Kuron and Karol Modzelewski, in our spring and summer '66 issues as "An Open Letter to the Party." When both men were released from prison, they founded KOR, an organization that succeeded in uniting workers and intellectuals. From that came Solidarity.

I attended part of a January 20, 2006, "day workshop of interventions" — aka "a day of dialogic interventions" — at Columbia University on "Radical Politics and the Ethics of Life."[1] The event aimed "to stage a series of encounters . . . to bring to light . . .

Victorian philanthropists didn't mince words when they talked about poor kids — those kids were dangerous or perishing — that is, in danger of becoming criminals or already sunk in crime. The philanthropists formed charity schools, "Ragged Schools," and Sunday Schools to teach these children some morals and a little reading — not enough to give them big ideas about their station in life, but enough to get them to work a little more efficiently and obediently.

Industrialized societies have done some things well. They increased the standard of living for large numbers of people, they opened up opportunities for knowledge not found in most agrarian cultures and they have advanced technology to the point where we can explore the solar system and transplant a human heart.

When most on the left think about the politics of caregiving, they think about finding a caregiver for their elderly parent or daycare for their preschool child. Or they think about the (frequently romanticized and flawed) feminist debates that interrogate whether there is a feminist ethic of caring and the implications of this for feminist politics.

[Note: This is a corrected version of the footnoted article that was earlier posted on the web.]

The title to this article may sound terribly pretentious since, for all we know, in the coming months the Hamas government may very well end up under siege like Arafat and his entourage.

With the growth of U.S. imperial power and its military reach, warfare today extends across the cultural as well as the institutional and battlefield terrains, the result of great technological changes now altering the very character of modern combat. Expanded military influence within the corporate media and popular culture is an inevitable outgrowth of the largest war machine the world has ever seen.

If one of the great socialist leaders of a century ago could see us now — Debs, say, or Luxemburg — he or she would certainly be puzzled by the state of the world. In every direction they would be able to see struggles for liberation or the fruits of such struggles: of those with whom they would immediately be in solidarity, such as women, former slaves, indigenous people, former colonial people, and racial, religious, and ethnic minorities.

The first thing that strikes me about this book is the irony of the title: When was affirmative action not white? As Mark Nathan Cohen states in his book, Culture of Intolerence (Yale University Press, 1998), "Affluent white males themselves have always received the most affirmative action, some by law, some by custom and practice, and some by factors so subtle and so deeply ingrained in our cultural training that we generally don't consciously recognize them." He goes on to say, "Critics tend to find affirm