People should not ask why, but only say because.
Public submission to parliamentary committee discussions of Creative Scotland and the Public Service Reform Bill, from Variant magazine. "The bill’s proposals for Creative Scotland...represent an historic revision and backward trend in cultural policy. ... Creative Scotland’s mission appears to be more about ideological engineering than economic necessity, improved service levels, or the public good."

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The Last Days of Jack Sheppard
...is the latest film by Anja Kirschner and David Panos, based on the inferred prison encounters between the 18th Century criminal Jack Sheppard and Daniel Defoe, the ghostwriter of Sheppard’s ‘autobiography’. Set in the wake of the South Sea Bubble financial crisis of 1720, the film explores the connections between representation, speculation and the discourses of high and low culture that emerged in the early 18th Century and remain relevant to the present day. Bringing to bear a host of allegorical associations and narrative forms, but re-fashioning them to create uneasy resolutions that probe into the problems and possibilities of class politics, the boundaries of different genre styles, the false division between high and low art, and the vexed question of ‘political art’, Neil Gray asked the film-makers to discuss their work.

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Locus Of Control
Eddie Molloy
"As Belfast continues to travel the seemingly inexorable road toward ‘normality’, ‘stability’ and ‘peace’, the past dies. Or, more accurately, it becomes delocated. Delocation does not destroy the past but rather shifts it, sanitises it, builds over it. ... And now, it can perhaps be said...the ancient divisions have been overcome in an orgy of vulgar consumerism... A future defined by the objects of intended acquisition or intangible ‘lifestyle indicators’ such as ‘gym membership’, ‘time shares’ or the accumulation of ‘air miles’. ... How can anything intrude into such a timeless zone? ... It is here that art appears once again on the fringes of society’s hetero-mediated self-representation."

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When and why did the Russian Revolution go wrong?
Brian Pearce, with commentary by Terry Brotherstone
In November 2008, Brian Pearce died, aged 93, at his north London home. One of Pearce’s last articles was a review of Simon Pirani’s pioneering book, 'The Russian Revolution in Retreat 1920-1924: the Soviet workers and the new Communist elite', the first fully to exploit the Russian archives to access the mentality of workers in the immediate aftermath of the Revolution. The subject was of close personal interest to the reviewer as he reflected on his own life and the history he had lived through.

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Vagabonds, criminals, paupers & gangrels?
Interview with Edinburgh Coalition Against Poverty & Edinburgh Claimants
A false division exists between those in work and those ‘out of work’, and, despite the correlation between welfare and work, there have been few effective movements to defend the unemployed and low-wage workers collectively. However, with the unemployed increasingly herded into a privatised workfare industry, and with the onset of large-scale unemployment under recessionary conditions, there lies the possibility of a convergence of interests and perspectives between the unemployed, people in precarious work, and all those who contribute to society outside of the wage-relation. In the context of punitive Welfare restructuring there have been some challenging community responses - ECAP and Edinburgh Claimants are among those groups that are only too well aware of the implications. Variant interviewed them, as building and strengthening coalitions between people in low paid work and people on benefits is surely more urgent than ever.

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Between rhetoric & reality
Susan Fitzpatrick
Critiques of Capitals of Culture have tended to interrogate the authoritative claims of the legacy of the event, its legitimacy as a vehicle for urban re-structuring, or the consequences of symbolic re-invention of ‘identity’ of bidding or host cities. This article engages specifically with the community involvement dimension of Liverpool’s European Capital of Culture 2008. The Russian literary critic and socio-linguist Mikhail Bakhtin defined ‘dialogism’ as “meaning created through dialogue". Liverpool’s year as European Capital of Culture presents the opportunity to enquire how we might understand the event’s dialogic character - particularly narratives about the aims for ‘creativity’, not just for the City’s year as European Capital of Culture 2008 but for the broader re-assignment of Liverpool as a ‘Creative City’, and the conditions of emergence that give rise to alternative voices.

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Sticky Fingers
KPMG and the Accountancy Oligopoly
John Barker
The ongoing Crunch-and-Squeeze precipitated by the over-valuation of capitalist assets is making for all kinds of anger as its impact on not-bankers and not-auditors is felt, and will be felt for years to come. The intention of this investigation is to help put the spotlight on the outrageous and shameless actions of the auditor/tax avoidance oligopoly. It aims to show how the oligopoly in general, and KPMG in particular – a worldwide organisation with offices in 24 tax havens – has their sticky fingers in so many areas of economic and political life, in which everything it does is to the benefit of capital and the individual rich. It also brings to light the elitism that rationalizes both KPMG's highly lucrative government consultancy, and its resistance to formal regulation which it does not control. It is that form of anti-democratic elitism which says that only the few who are in the know can understand the complexities of finance and contracts, even when those in the know are self-interested.

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The Space Merchants
Escaping the Iron Cage of Rationality by Rocket to Venus
Bryan Fanning
'The Space Merchants' by Frederik Pohl & C.M. Kornbluth was first published in 1953: “An overcrowded world is dominated by giant corporations, who struggle violently with each other. Mitch Courtenay, a Madison Avenue copywriter, has been given the job of selling the idea of emigration to Venus. He has rivals. Conflicts develop.” Pohl & Kornbluth, like Orwell and Huxley, wrote about individual autonomy beleaguered by totalitarian mass cultures. All were connoisseurs of contemporary anxieties about modernity. 'The Space Merchants' shared themes with the work of Herbert Marcuse who viewed technology and industrial society primarily as instruments of domination and social control. This was determinist stuff and 'The Space Merchants' was similarly pessimistic on the question of future individual autonomy. Yet the contours of Pohl & Kornbluth's dystopia and Mitch Courtenay’s trials and tribulations remain, in their own way, as compelling as those in '1984' or 'Brave New World'. Near the end of 'Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism', the sociologist Max Weber struggled to explain his theories about how the systems of modernity could encroach upon human lives. The image he came up with was that of “the iron cage of rationality”. Weber described the inmates of this “iron cage” as specialists without spirit. To illustrate his argument better, he referred his readers to Leo Tolstoy’s 'The Death of Ivan Illyich', just as many writers about 20th century modernity have done so using Orwell or Huxley. Sometimes social theorists must cede to fiction, and to science fiction, to explain their preoccupations...

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The Ill-Health of the State
Tom Jennings
That “war is the health of the State” has proved an enduring motif in critiques of Western government policy. From World War II-era pacifism to the Cold War, and the Vietnam debacle to contemporary global Wars on Drugs or Terror, governments claim noble motives in justifying and organising themselves with military metaphors and modus operandi, so that "war is the health of the State" seems as apposite now as ever. Mainstream current affairs coverage of the State’s monopoly over coercion, meanwhile, still generally accepts at face value the protestations of power, taking seriously only minor policy differences among the ‘loyal opposition’. Fictional representations, however, have more latitude – even in the mass media – and this survey of english-language cinema and television narratives related to the Iraq War assesses their performance in communicating and negotiating the present health of the State in operations at home and abroad...

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

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