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April/May 1996 Vol. XXI No. 2
Editor's Note:
This issue's Democracy Project section brings together two very
different articles. Stephen Lerner, a leader of the
Justice for Janitors movement and a union organizer for the past 20 years, explains
what the labor movement must do to rebuild the strong unions on which democracy
depends. His solution is greater militancy in service of an industry-wide organizing
strategy. Adam Przeworski, a political scientist,
replies to the neoliberal argument that economy efficiency requires stringent
limits on government economic intervention. Agreeing that economic performance
depends on political reform, he pro- poses that we need to improve current mechanisms
of government accountability, not simply tie the hands of political officials.
Lerner, then, emphasizes the need to reconstruct unions; Przeworski, the need
to reconstruct political institutions. Seen from one angle, they offer two components
of a larger project of democratic reform. Seen from another, they present alternative
positions in an old debate: between strategies of political reform that focus
on changing the underlying distribution of social power, and those that concentrate
on reshaping the political arrangements through which that power is expressed.
Lerner and Przeworski do not provide any final resolution to this debate. But
by giving powerful expression to its alternative poles, they sharpen our understanding
of contemporary options.
--Joshua Cohen
CONTENTS
Fiction Reviews
Poetry Reviews
| James Longenbach
| Atlantis
| Mark Doty
|
| Stephen Burt
| At Passages
| Michael Palmer
|
| Rachel Wetzsteon
| Doubles
| Robert Polito
|
MicroReviews
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