Erik Olin Wright’s Envisioning Real Utopias “seeks to counter widespread cynicism about radical social transformation,” writes Russell Jacoby. But in the end, “the book is startling and depressing evidence of what has happened to American academic Marxism, at least its sociological variant, over the last thirty years. It has become turgid, vapid, and self-referential.” (Image: Robert Owen’s New Harmony, Indiana, engraved by F. Tate in 1838)

Joanne Barkan reports on how the Gates Foundation, the Broad Foundation, and the Walton Family Foundation have exerted influence on education policy in the United States. "A few billion dollars in private foundation money, strategically invested every year for a decade, has sufficed to define the national debate on education; sustain a crusade for a set of mostly ill-conceived reforms; and determine public policy at the local, state, and national levels." (Image: Bill Gates; Guety/Wikimedia Commons/2004)

Kawasaki's Rose is "the first ever Czech or Slovak feature film to deal with the subject of informing and cooperation with the Communist secret police and the nature of collective memory," writes Leonard Quart. "Whatever its minor flaws, this film is a trenchant work about how one lives with a toxic history, where coming out unscathed may be a next to an impossible task." (Image: Archivaldo/Wikimedia Commons/1999)

Connectum, a "Sarajevo-based publishing house" without "native English editors or a global distributor," has released two books that "effectively double the number of Bosnian Muslim works in prose about the [Bosnian] war available in English translation," writes James Thomas Snyder. "Let us hope Connectum finds a partnering publisher and distributor willing to take a risk on future translations...Our literature will be richer, and this aspirant nation will only benefit, for the effort." (Image: UN troops in Sarajevo, Nov. 1995; Paalso/Wikimedia Commons)

The Chinese government forbade Liu Xiaobo, and his acquaintances, from accepting the Nobel Peace Prize last Friday and sponsored the creation of a Chinese alternative to the Norwegian award. While these actions led some to compare the Chinese government to the Nazi regime, "[it] is worth keeping in mind," writes Jeffrey Wasserstrom, "that some Chinese government actions paralleled...those of authoritarian regimes far less nakedly brutal than Nazi Germany's-such as Poland's, circa 1983." (Image: Liu Xiaobo [2nd from left] in 1989; 64memo.com)

The wave of ethnic violence in southern Kyrgyzstan this past June has subsided, but for weeks little stood to defend the Uzbek minority from attacks, arbitrary detention, and police abuse. Before the UN and other international governmental organizations had arrived, writes Sam Kahn, Human Rights Watch's Emergency Team--"a mix of a criminal investigator, a journalist, and a social worker"--was there, struggling to overcome "the international community's lethargy and lack of coordination." (Image: graffiti in an Uzbek neighborhood in Osh; Sam Kahn/2010)

Gilbert Achcar's The Arabs and the Holocaust usefully "challenges the propensity of much...scholarship to vilify all Arabs by lumping them together and assigning them a shared, primitive anti-Semitic mindset," writes Fredrik Meiton. Yet the book "goes too far in the other direction. [Achcar] seems stubbornly insistent on contextualizing anti-Semitism out of existence." (Image: Grand Mufti of Jerusalem; German Federal Archive/1943)

CARLOS THE Jackal was for decades a symbol of international, left-wing militancy--not to mention "a secular, non-suicidal precursor of modern-day terrorism," as Leonard Quart and William Kornblum write. But as Olivier Assayas's film Carlos makes clear, "Carlos [was] committed to nothing more profoundly than being in control and asserting his own indispensability."

TONY BLAIR has claimed that the Labour Party suffered in elections earlier this year because it departed from the New Labour model. But, as Paul Thompson writes, Blair's new memoir shows little awareness of the political lessons of his public downfall: "In the end we learn more about Blair's personal journey than the transformation of British politics, or of the Labour Party." (Image: World Economic Forum/Wikimedia Commons/2008)

CAN THE United States achieve economic recovery with a divided government and a GOP opposed to further stimulus spending? Fred Block argues that "a bold plan to revive the economy could gain powerful support both in the public and in the business community...[W]hen it becomes apparent that the masses of people who support [such a] measure far outnumber the famous Tea Party activists, some Republicans would be forced to abandon the strategy of obstruction." (Image: National Archives and Records Administration/1930)

IN THE Summer issue of Dissent, Danny Rubinstein described "the decline of the Palestinian nationalist movement," concluding that "the forces working against [a two-state solution] are many and powerful." In the Fall issue, Alexander Yakobson responds: "The true alternative to a two-state solution is not some binational fantasy but a single state that is Arab and Muslim: one state for one people." (Image: Justin McIntosh/Wikimedia Commons/2004)

DAVID GUGGENHEIM'S latest film claims to take a serious look at "the state of public education in the U.S. and how it is affecting our children." "Though it purports to be a documentary," writes Ilana Garon, "Waiting for Superman in fact bears more resemblance to propaganda in its one-track exploration of the issues plaguing American public schools." And to Guggenheim, the "issues" are reducible to a single problem: bad teachers. (Image: Marlith/Wikimedia Commons/2008)

WALLACE KATZ reviews recent books on the economy by Harold James, Robert Brenner, and Raghuram Rajan. Together, their accounts show that current economic woes were decades in the making: "the growth fueled by thirty years of financial speculation and the export of manufacturing production abroad has resulted in inequality and unemployment or underemployment for ordinary people."

DISSENT ASKED six of its contributors to write down their initial impressions of the midterm elections. Mark Engler, Todd Gitlin, David Greenberg, Feisal G. Mohamed, Christine Stansell, and Julian E. Zelizer provide explanations of how we got here-just two years after what some hoped was a liberal renaissance. (Image: Wikimedia Commons/2007)

SCOTT SHERMAN interviews Benjamin Taylor, the editor of a new collection of over 700 of Saul Bellow's letters. Says Taylor, "Bellow's letters build up a picture of unbroken professional drive. And of longing for self-metamorphosis through his art....[He] did have some very formidable peers...But Bellow had more language in him than they did." (Image courtesy of Penguin)

AFTER INTERNATIONAL protest, UNESCO has decided not to hold its World Philosophy Day in Tehran. Ramin Jahanbegloo explains his opposition to the decision and explores how "reading philosophy in Tehran" can be "an encouragement to look for 'signals of humanity' in everyday experiences, but...also a way of saying 'No' to all those who want to use philosophy against its perennial responsibility, which is always to think critically." (Image: Raphael's School of Athens)

LAST MONTH, Newt Gingrich claimed that President Obama was comprehensible only to those who "understand Kenyan, anti-colonial behavior." Paul Ocobock argues that this is more than mere race-baiting: "Ideas about colonialism...are central to Gingrich's own intellectual past....While we have no proof of Obama's Kenyan, anticolonialist mindset, there is in fact evidence of Gingrich's rather Belgian, colonialist worldview." (Photo: Mission School in Bolobo, Congo; Harry H. Johnston/NYPL)

ACORN SPENT decades mobilizing poor Americans to better their communities and elect leaders who would advocate for them, but it only became a household name when the Right turned it into a punching bag. Writes Jack Clark, "ACORN proved powerful enough to earn the enmity of very powerful forces determined to destroy the organization, but not powerful enough to defend itself from these attacks." (Photo: Andrew Breitbart; Shal Farley/Wikimedia Commons/2009)

A NUMBER of new advocacy groups have fixed their attention on food-a focus that brings together "those concerned with health, the environment, food quality, globalization, workers' rights and working conditions, access to fresh and affordable food, and more sustainable land use," write Robert Gottlieb and Anupama Joshi. These groups now "show promise of contributing to and inspiring a new social movement." (Photo: Steven Walling/Wikimedia Commons/2007)

THE RIGHT-WING federalists of the Tea Party propose "dismantling the central government as we know it," writes Gary Gerstle. In the face of electoral losses, the Left must assert that another federalism is possible - one which "would call on states to act in the public interest, and would seek to turn state governments into what the liberal jurist Louis Brandeis once celebrated as 'laboratories of democracy.'" (Photo: Sage Ross/Wikimedia Commons/2009)