Variant 33 Winter 2008

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Front cover by: Angry Art Works

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Comment
Variant Affinity Group
From the censorship of Variant magazine by Culture & Sport Glasgow to the forced formation of Creative Scotland, in the midst of the ongoing financial crisis, a warning of the effects of devolving power to private interests set on the marketisation and financial exploitation of culture. If reason prevails, this moment should provide an opportunity for cultural workers to redefine what constitutes 'the public interest' and to reassert a claim over how public finance in the field of culture should be managed and allocated and in whose interest.

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Labour History Resurgent?
Terry Brotherstone
An inclusive, constructive review of Paul Mason's ‘Live Working or Die Fighting : how the working class went global’ (Vintage paperback, London, 2008), which "is not a programmatic statement for new forms of socialist organisation that can meet the needs of the emerging global working-class movement Mason writes about, but it is certainly relevant to those who want to participate in creating them."

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The Clyde Gateway: A New Urban Frontier
Neil Gray
Examining the "biggest regeneration programme in Scotland", Gray probes the "disjuncture between the triumphal neo-liberal ideology of the city – of successful self-regulating markets achieving optimally balanced economic growth – and the everyday reality of uneven development, intensifying inequality, and generalized social insecurity..."

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Forget Habermas?
Robert Porter
Clear-cut review of Nick Crossley and John Michael Roberts' edited collection of essays which both directly and indirectly respond to Habermas’s thinking on the public sphere; ‘After Habermas: New Perspectives on the Public Sphere’, Blackwell Publishing, 2004.

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Urban Nightmares and Dystopias, or Places of Hope?
Gerry Mooney
Addressing the spectre of the council estate, Mooney establishes that "there's no escaping that what we have ... is the continuing prevalence for a people and place stigmatisation that is shaped ... by decades of conservative thinking around poverty and disadvantage." Countering, that social housing provides a unique opportunity for building community.

'Estates: An Intimate History' , Lynsey Hanley, Granta Books, 2007
'Urban Nightmares: The Media, the Right and the Moral Panic over the City' , Steve Macek, University of Minnesota Press, 2006

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Public Service Denouncement
Tom Jennings
US crime fiction has enjoyed a renaissance, aspiring to the status of serious literature as well as pulp populism, embracing ambitions to critical social commentary. Pioneer James Lee Burke built on the genre’s founding characteristics; temporary victories of cynically lovable rogues unmasking the amoral excesses of the rich and powerful, but which promise no enduring impact. But there is another trajectory in recent noir fiction which starts from the proposition that the suffering associated with criminal violence falls disproportionately and routinely on the poor; Dennis Lehane's books are now the source material for big-budget films. The last adaptation to reach the screen 'Gone, Baby, Gone' provides Jennings with an opportunity to evaluate any advances made by this revisionist hardboiled realism.

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

Jagged Edges or Natural Flows
Philippa Hall
A review of James Ferguson’s ‘The Anti-Politics Machine: Development, Depoliticisation and Democratic Power in Lesotho’ (1994) and ‘Global Shadows: Africa in the Neo-Liberal World Order’ (2006), that trace the complex relation between rhetoric and policy within neo-liberalism. "Rather than seeing Africa as an anomaly to the successes of globalisation elsewhere in the world, such as the Asian ‘tiger’ economies, Ferguson suggests that the economic marginalisation of large parts of Africa is not anomalous, but rather is intrinsic to the process by which a globalised economy is restructured."

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The Food-Fuel Crisis
Derek Reid
The devastating inter-connections between: the decline of cheap oil, modern agriculture and food practices, international finance and speculation...

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Creative Scotland Blog
Creative Scotland is the proposed merger of the public bodies, the Scottish Arts Council and Scottish Screen, into a private company. Culture Minister, Linda Fabiani, recently insisted of Creative Scotland: “We all want to get this up and running.” In truth, this apparent urgency conceals a major ideological fault line between public and private provision in Scotland.

http://creativescotland.blogspot.com