By Craig Brittain
Magazines don't often get reviewed. This is a shame, because unless you happen to stumble across them, you might never know of their existence — especially left-wing magazines which don't make the newsstands.
Dissent was started by Irving Howe and Lewis Coser in 1954 — a time in US history when it was not easy to be a socialist, even of the anti-Stalinist variety. It was the middle of the Cold War and the height of McCarthyism. Increasingly, and deliberately, socialism was being confused with communism — the one party state and the rule of terror, with its show trials, expulsions and labour camps.
Dissent was to counter this perception by presenting the democratic socialist position. As Irving Howe put it in his autobiography, A Margin of Hope: "We were beginning to see that for us the prime value was democracy, and that without it we could not even imagine a desirable socialism ... What Dissent should be we were not quite sure, what it should not be we knew. We would avoid like the plague any party line. And the linked plague of scholastic pickings-over of Marxist doctrine."
They'd had enough of both of these in the past; most of them had come up through the factions of the US left in the '30s and '40s (the Trotskyists, the Shachtmanites or the Socialist party). What they wanted now was real thought (as opposed to ideology), constructive analysis and a breath of fresh air. Dissent would be democratic, socialist and independent; it would also try to be interesting and well written.
Reflecting this belief in pluralism, its contributors ranged in position, from the Marxism of Michael Harrington to the Social Democracy of Robert Heilbroner. Recent issues have contained articles on the break-up of the Soviet Union, nationalism, the global economy, market socialism and the environment and the market. On the Gulf War, Dissent editors took different positions, and their arguments were published side by side.
Some socialists would condemn this as not being hard line enough, too self-questioning and too liberal. Dissent would argue that intolerance of dissenting opinion has done the left more damage, in the minds of ordinary people, than the right has ever done. They work on the principle that those on the left should be able to disagree and still work together; that many issues are just too complex for any one person or party to have The Answer — that perhaps more than anything else we have to be careful of those with The Answers.
Dissent comes out quarterly; a subscription costs approximately A$38 per year (including bank charges). It is in many of the larger libraries. For sanity and honesty, it can't be beaten; and it deserves more readers on the Australian left.