Das Schwerpunktheft enthält zwölf Aufsätze zu gewerkschaftlichen Perspektiven im EG-Binnenmarkt. Ein erster Block von drei Beiträgen ("Diskussionsforum") befaßt sich mit den wahrscheinlichen Auswirkungen der Einführung einer europäischen Wirtschafts- und Währungsunion. Ein zweiter Block behandelt die materiellen, politischen und organisatorischen Voraussetzungen und Realisierungschancen eines originär europäischen Arbeitsbeziehungssystems. Ein dritter Block erörtert schließlich die Auswirkungen von Zustand und Perspektive europäischer Arbeitsbeziehungen. Behandelt werden hier die Elemente eines europäischen Arbeitsbeziehungssystems gegenüber Japan, den USA und Lateinamerika sowie Aufgaben der Gewerkschaften im osteuropäischen Transformationsprozeß. Ein Beitrag zum Begriff der Subsidiarität und Rezensionen zum Thema runden das Heft ab. (IAB2)
When Michael Harrington's The Other America: Poverty in the United States first appeared in bookstores in March 1962, its author had modest hopes for its success, expecting to sell at most a few thousand copies. Instead, the book proved a publishing phenomenon, garnering substantial sales (seventy thousand in several editions within its first year and over a million in paperback since then), wide and respectful critical attention, and a significant influence over the direction of social welfare policy in the United States during the decade that followed. By February 1964, Business Week noted, "The Other America is already regarded as a classic work on poverty." Time magazine later offered even more sweeping praise, listing The Other America in a 1998 article entitled "Required Reading" as one of the twentieth century's ten most influential books, putting it in such distinguished company as Sigmund Freud's Civilization and Its Discontents and Alexander Solzhenitsyn's The Gulag Archipelago. Harrington's own knowledge of poverty was, for the most part, acquired secondhand, as he would recount in two memoirs, Fragments of the Century (1973) and The Long Distance Runner: An Autobiography (1988). Born in 1928 in St. Louis, the only child of loving and moderately prosperous parents of sturdy Irish-Catholic lineage, educated at Holy Cross, Yale Law School, and the University of Chicago, he moved to New York City in 1949 to become a writer. In 1951, he joined Dorothy Day's Catholic Worker movement as a volunteer at its soup kitchen; there he got to know a small subset of the nation's poor, the homeless male alcoholics of New York City's Bowery district. Within a few years he left the Catholic Worker (and the Catholic Church) and joined the Young People's Socialist League, the youth affiliate of the battered remnants of the American Socialist Party, a party then led by Norman Thomas. A tireless organizer, prolific writer, skillful debater, and charismatic orator, Harrington succeeded Thomas as America's best-known socialist in the 1960s, just as Thomas had succeeded Eugene Debs in that role in the 1920s. Socialism was never the road to power in the United States, but socialist leaders like Debs, Thomas, and Harrington were, from time to time, able to play the role of America's social conscience. In the years since Harrington's death from cancer in 1989, at the age of sixty-one, no obvious successor to the post of socialist tribune in the Debs-Thomas-Harrington tradition has emerged. Harrington's most famous appeal to the American conscience, The Other America, was a short work (one hundred and eighty-six pages in the original edition) with a simple thesis: poverty in the affluent society of the United States was both more extensive and more tenacious than most Americans assumed. The extent of poverty could be calculated by counting the number of American households that survived on an annual income of less than $3,000. These figures were readily available in the census data, but until Harrington published The Other America they were rarely considered. Harrington revealed to his readers that an "invisible land" of the poor, over forty million strong, or one in four Americans at the time, fell below the poverty line. For the most part this Other America existed in rural isolation and in crowded slums where middle-class visitors seldom ventured. "That the poor are invisible is one of the most important things about them," Harrington wrote in his introduction in 1962. "They are not simply neglected and forgotten as in the old rhetoric of reform; what is much worse, they are not seen." That was then. Fifty years since the publication of The Other America the poor are still among us -- and in a testament to the lasting significance of Harrington's work, not at all invisible. Whether or not the poor exist is thus no longer a matter of debate; what if anything can be done to improve their condition remains at issue. Adapted from the source document.
HE WAS A squat man. He wore thick glasses. Photographs captured him badly--none make it clear why he was so popular with women. Memoirists insist that his seemingly benign, even flabby looks could inspire intense fear. Some fifty years ago Lionel Trilling judged Isaac Babel as looking rather like either a 'Chinese merchant,' or a 'successful Hollywood writer,' or a 'typical' Jewish intellectual. 'It is,' wrote Trilling of Babel's face, the kind 'which many Jews used to aspire to have, or hoped their sons would have.' Babel's close friend Konstantin Paustovsky is still more vivid and more than mildly deprecating: 'Stooping, almost neckless ... with a duck's bill of a nose, a creased forehead and an oily glint in his little eyes, he was anything but fascinating.' Why so many who write about him write so much about his appearance is by no means the greatest mystery surrounding Babel and his brilliant but still much debated literary legacy. The secrets Trilling had in mind, in particular, were the uncertainties left in the wake of Babel's stunning, mosaic-like portrait in Red Cavalry of the Polish-Soviet War of 1919-1920. How he felt here about the Russian Revolution, the goodness of man, Jews, violence, bourgeois values, or values at all he leaves unclear. The book was built around its contradictory, confounding stances toward these and other critical and (in Soviet Russia already at the time it appeared in the mid-twenties) rather dangerous topics. Babel leaves the reader often stunned by his intermittent inhumanity, his incorrigible sentimentality, his deep attachment to Jews, his breezy indifference to Jews, and his love and horror in the face of revolutionary upheaval. In Red Cavalry, he has his protagonist--who seems, at least at times, very much an autobiographical stand-in--muse about how keenly he wishes for the ability to kill his fellow man. The sentence pierces the heart like the power Babel attributes elsewhere, in his story 'Guy de Maupassant,' to the uncanny, stunning resonance of skillful punctuation: 'No iron spike can pierce a human heart as icily as a period in the right place.' Picking out stray lines from Babel stories in an effort to encapsulate his essential message is, if you will, as useless as choosing stray passages from the Talmud to illuminate the fundamental teachings of the rabbis. The story is addressed to Vasily; he is mentioned four times in as many pages ('Do you remember Zhitomir, Vasily?' is how it begins). He is, it would seem, an unidentified Russian It is not far-fetched to see him also as the very same Russian whom Babel knew read, sometimes with bemusement or hostility or shock, the not infrequently bitter, always frank, sometimes transparently loving portraits of things Jewish in his fiction. Russian Jewish fiction had, since its first appearance in the mid-nineteenth century, been acutely aware, often overwhelmed by this gaze, and, as a result, so much of it was self-conscious and cramped in ways that, not infrequently, diminished it, in contrast to Yiddish or Hebrew literature. Babel refused to edit out of his fiction those intimate, uneasy things acknowledged by Jews to one another behind closed doors, in the clammy privacy of third-class railways cars, or on the pages of Yiddish prose. And he resisted the temptation, on the whole, to hide his ferocious love for his own people. Moreover, Ilya, he insisted, was no less Russian than a character of Chekhov's or Gogol's while he was, at the same time, emphatically Jewish. The future of Russian literature, he predicted in 1916, belonged to Odessa, not foggy, gray St. Petersburg, where 'the spicy aroma of acacias and a moon filled with an unwavering, irresistible light' shine; Russian literature's 'Messiah, so long awaited, will issue ... from the sun-drenched steppes washed by the sea.' Here was as bald, as transparent a claim for ascendancy as produced by any writer and, in the wake of the last, mostly truly terrible century that savaged his beloved Russia, Babel's voice remains more fresh, arguably more relevant than any other. One now reads Babel's youthful, brash declamation as far from frivolous, one reads it as almost chilling in its pertinence.
