Between the two Soldiers’ Field meetings, a massive student defection from the SDS position took place. In part, the call to discontinue the strike sprang from weariness and the fear of academic abortion that haunts all of us. Yet it is important to realize that there was a definite element of political rationality in the […]
Tag: Politics
Toward An Ethic of Political Conduct
Any system of political ethics has two functions. 1) To serve as a guide for one’s personal political conduct and 2) to enable one to consider the actions of political bodies, governments, in the past or the present, which in turn would have implications for individual behavior. Max Weber, in his fundamental essay, “Politics as […]
Back to the Basics-Theoretics
There are different definitions of “class” in political theory. My prefered one is that a class is determined by its objective material conditions. Thus, depending on the kind of house you live in and the amount of money you have to spend on food you are a member of a certain class. The potential difficulty […]
A Radical Vision
RADICALS view American society as being dominated by a relatively small group of people–an elite, more or less tightly co-ordinated, that benefits considerably from the present system. Under this upper crust lies a vast semi-oppressed white lumpenproletariat and a clearly oppressed black proletariat. Such an analysis of the situation leads a radical to the conclusion […]
The Old Mole
IN AN ARTICLE entitled ‘Sexual Role Exploitation,’ in the first issue of The Old Mole, the writer suggests that one way of restoring dignity to male-female relationships is to have girls pay their own expenses when they go out with boys. This idea is sensible since it would assure that girls would go out only […]
The Digger Papers
The magazine, The Realist, made its name ten years ago (didn’t know it was going that long did you?) as a scurrilous irreverent underground rag. In its latest issue though, Paul Krassner, the organization’s guiding light, has turned to the more elevated purpose of spreading the hippies good word. The diggers, that nimble group of […]
Presidential Sack?
THERE is no institution so perfect that it cannot be subjected to calm criticism. The office of the Presidency of the United States, despite its hallowed aura, is in need of such scrutiny because it has become too intensely concentrated a center of power. Worse, the Presidency has come to be viewed by the public […]
The Politics of Culture
THE fork of “liberalization” that is jabbing all of Communist Europe these days has two prongs: “Cultural Freedom” and “Political Liberty.” It is easy in an advanced capitalist country to forget sometimes how closely inter-related the two are. European Communist reformers, however, have never lost sight of this close connection–indeed, they sometimes disguise their political […]
An Argument From Self-Interest
ATTACKING the immorality and illegality of the Vietnam war could conceivably shame people into stopping it but this is unlikely. Human beings are remarkably impervious to the calls of conscience when acting on self-interest. The most fruitful argument, then, is one that attempts to show that the American interest is not, in fact, advanced by […]
The War Economy
THE President’s Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders (read Riots Commission) will probably recommend, unsurprisingly, that up to $20 billion be spent in the cities over the next five years. Skeptics have doubted that such large outlays will ever materialize. They reason that the health of the economy as a whole depends on such heavy Federal […]