Variant 32 Summer 2008

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Front & back covers by:
'New social art school, free daze!'

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Notes on the front cover

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The Left Hand and the Right Hand of the State
Pierre Bourdieu interviewed by R. P. Droit & T. Ferenczi
Bourdieu conjures up the useful metaphor and with it he illuminates the devastating impact of neoliberalism on social democracy. The key issue remains, how the public interest and the common good can be manifested under the conditions of corporate and financial globalisation, even as proponents of competitive nationalism launch manifestos for cultural rejuvenation in the global marketplace.

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The New Bohemia
Rebecca Gordon Nesbitt
Detailed, insightful article, based on academic study undertaken at Strathclyde University, revealing the controversial creation of Culture and Sport Glasgow (CSG) - the private company set up to take over the running of culture and sport from Glasgow City Council.

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Diagram of Culture and Sport Glasgow structure:

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Corrections and Clarification

Craven New World
Tom Jennings
A refreshing class-analysis of recently screened British sci-fi films - Taking Liberties, Faceless, Children of Men, The Last Enemy, Exodus, Polly II - where Jennings "seeks signs of hope in ... dystopian visions that reflect prevailing trends in biopolitical divide and rule."

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http://www.tomjennings.pwp.blueyonder.co.uk

Comic & Zine Reviews
Mark Pawson
A survivalist summer school that takes in shed-fetishists and kitchen screen printers. Your emergency rations include: MOLLSUK #04, Sheds, Do-It-Yourself Screenprinting, A C Dickson’s Guide To eBay Powerselling, The Garden Sketchbook, Omskbook, Ratio - Pan-Dimensional Film Guide.

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Structural Greed: The ‘Credit Crunch’
John Barker
Detailed assessment of the origins and consequences of the much fetishised financial 'crisis'. "What needs explanation is how the crisis had an impact greater than the relative amount of money involved." Barker turns the spotlight on a self-confidence endemic of structural greed.

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Reading is an argument:
Althusser’s commandment, conjecture and contradiction
Liam O’ Ruairc
In reassessing the 'dead dog' of Althusser, can "No revolutionary ... afford to ignore the weapons of scientific criticism put at [their] disposal...?"

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Sense & Knowledge
Daniel Jewesbury
Jewesbury contrasts two recent documentary projects: 'Projecting Migration' - "an anthology presenting work that transgresses multiple boundaries", with "materials produced by visual anthropologists, ethnographers, documentarists and film and video artists... engaging with themes of diaspora, migration, and representation, between and within cultures and in various forms"; and Melanie Friend's 'Border Country' - a book of photographs (devoid of human subjects) documenting spaces in 'immigration removal centres' around Britain, accompanied by an audio CD of interviews with detainees. He asserts that it's essential that artists continue striving "to discover new ways of looking; and through that, new ways of knowing."

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Hindutva, Modi, and The Tehelka Tapes:
The Communal Threat to Indian Secularism
Neil Gray
Following the Tehelka expose of Hindutva - "...a communalist Hindu Nationalist ideology seeking to equate the very idea of ‘Indian-ness’ with ‘Hindu-ness’..." - in the context of "... neo-liberal advocates and boosters, fronted by the bought media worldwide ... busy extolling the ‘competitive’ and ‘dynamic’ virtues of India’s de-regulated economy...".

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[A longer version of this article is available here.]

Propaganda Compliant Society
Alex Law
Through the prism of interlocking networks of civic elites, Law reviews 'A Century of Spin', where "David Miller and William Dinan plot with scholarly care the real extent and corrosive nature for democracy of the public relations industry", and Nick Davies' 'Flat Earth News', who "dissects conspiratorial theories that purport to explain away the degradation of the craft of journalism by recourse to the dubious character of individual journalists." While "the unseen influence of ideology, where journalists share the same narrow political and moral worldview, might account more adequately for media distortion" the danger is "it becomes divorced from the workaday institutional reality that journalists find themselves caught, day in and day out..."

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Nationalism and Neoliberalism
Neil Davidson
"...The difficulty here is a deeper one. Because nationalism is such an inescapable aspect of capitalist development, the first response to intolerable conditions is to seek to establish a new nation-state, although this is usually only possible where some level of national consciousness already exists, as it does in Scotland. In other words, neoliberalism may require nations, but it does not require particular nations..."

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The End of Tolerance
Daniel Jewesbury
'The End of Tolerance' by Arun Kundnani describes the fundamentally racist nature of British state policy in a host of areas over the last decade, mapping trends in government policy and rhetoric concerning immigration, asylum, multiculturalism, war, terrorism, globalism and aid. Jewesbury evaluates the importance of Kundnani's work at a time when the most basic conceptions of citizenship and rights are under threat, and argues that only with the aid of Kundnani's broad picture of global relations and British state thinking can we generate an effective, contemporary anti-racism.

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