Opinion

Down and Out in Havana

Issue section: 
Columnists
Issue: 
July / August 2002
Author: 
Chris Harman

Is Cuba free from capitalism? Chris Harman looks at the novels of a writer who does not think so.

Sometimes a novel can engross and repel you at the same time. Certainly that's what happened to me with Pedro Juan Gutiérrez's 'Anclado en Tierra de Nada' ('Anchored to the Land of Nothing')--the first part of his 'Dirty Havana' trilogy.

It repelled me because it belongs to the genre of what might be called 'lower depths' fiction. This wallows in the dirt, squalor, drunkenness and mechanical, dehumanised sexuality of those who live on the margins of society, where the artistic petty bourgeois merges with the lumpenproletariat.

A Race into the Gutter

Issue section: 
Columnists
Issue: 
June 2002
Author: 
Pat Stack

There's nothing respectable about appeasing the Nazis.

Many years ago I wrote in this column about a judge who had admonished a victim of rape for being provocatively dressed which, in his view, meant that she had contributed to her own downfall. Rape, I argued, seemed to stand alone as the crime where the victim was seen to share responsibility.

However, I was wrong--for it is increasingly clear that victims of racism, victims of tyrannical governments, those who take desperate flight from their homelands, are also being blamed for their own predicament.

To Vote or Not to Vote?

Issue section: 
Columnists
Issue: 
June 2002
Author: 
Chris Harman

It was wrong to call for a vote for Chirac against Le Pen in the recent French elections.

One of the fascinating things about the present period is how it brings up old issues in a new form. Take the debate which erupted last month among the French revolutionary left about how to react after Le Pen came second in the first round of the presidential election, and knocked out the Socialist Party prime minister Jospin. It was very much a rerun of the arguments over the Popular Front between revolutionaries, Communist Party supporters and social democrats back in the 1930s.

Jackson's Hole

Issue section: 
Columnists
Issue: 
June 2002
Author: 
The Walrus

New Labour's favourite union leader is facing problems in the forthcoming election.

A remarkable transformation appears to have overtaken Sir Ken Jackson in recent weeks--morphing from his customary incarnation as great lummox into the D'Artagnan of the TUC. Presumably this is not entirely unrelated to the fact that Sir Ken finds himself up for election again, an experience he had not entirely bargained for and one which he has not undergone since 1995.

Tired of Weighting

Issue section: 
Columnists
Issue: 
May 2002
Author: 
The Walrus

The rising cost of living and shortages of labour means London's workers now have more industrial power.

On the face of it the issue of London weighting payments is not all that thrilling. Nevertheless, it has helped add a bit more spice to the recent upsurge of rank and file militancy which has managed to send the mainstream press into such a lather.

Argentina: Swimming with the Tide of Revolt

Issue section: 
Columnists
Issue: 
May 2002
Author: 
Chris Harman

As renewed political crisis sweeps Argentina, Chris Harman following a recent visit to the country argues there is a huge opening for the revolutionary left, provided it breaks from its sectarian past.

'It must have been fantastically exciting,' a lot of people said to me on my return from a visit to Argentina last month.

Christiania Incorporated

Issue section: 
Columnists
Issue: 
May 2002
Author: 
Mike Gonzalez

Has the dream of the hippy commune now turned into a nightmare?

Twenty five years ago groups of hippies and squatters took over a military barracks in the centre of Copenhagen and announced the creation of a 'free territory at the heart of the city'. It was called Christiania. Walking through it today, the marks of the Christiania commune are still there--the makeshift huts surrounded by plants neatly set inside tin cans, the military blocks occupied by squatters and, in one case at least, turned into a halfway house for the homeless.

Silence is Golden

Issue section: 
Columnists
Issue: 
May 2002
Author: 
Pat Stack

Thatcher has at last agreed to shut up, although Tony Blair has now continued her legacy.

It was not the foot of Beckham, the last breath of some old royal or even Kylie's bottom that was the cause of most interest in trivia corner over the last month. No, it was the Trappist vow of silence that we are being assured Margaret Thatcher will keep from now on that caught this columnist's imagination.

Move Over, Darling

Issue section: 
Columnists
Issue: 
April 2002

Is your pension at risk? Yes, minister.

You would either need to have a very short memory or a tremendously blinkered New Labour kind of mindset to regard the latest crisis in the pensions industry as not worth getting all that worked up about. When a whole series of the biggest firms in the country suddenly announce that they are pulling out of 'final salary' pension schemes--because they claim they can no longer afford the payouts--and the top man at the National Association of Pension Funds starts talking about people having to work on to the age of 72, some of us might start to get a bit nervous.

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