Opinion

No one likes to be proved wrong. But sometimes it is more painful to be proved right. At the end of January I took part in a debate with Michael Hardt, the co-author of Empire, over 'The working class or the multitude' at the World Social Forum in Porto Alegre. Only a minority of those in the room agreed with what I had to say. Most agreed with contributors from the floor who came in again and again with the same refrain. Argentina, they said, showed how wrong 'Leninists' were to go on about 'vanguard parties' and 'industrial workers'.

Tom Lehrer, the brilliant American musical satirist of the 1950s and 1960s, famously announced that he was retiring from satire after the warmongering monster Henry Kissinger was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. When the world was satirising itself in such a way, what was there left for him to say, he asked.

What connection could there be between Texas, Vietnam, Camp X-Ray, US vice-president Dick Cheney and computerisation of the National Health Service? The answer, of course, is Halliburton--the US corporation which has been handed one of the first contracts for 'reconstruction' in Iraq and which the folks back in England are only just beginning to find out about.

In the last few weeks the Spanish government has begun to excavate graves where civilian prisoners were buried during, or immediately after, the Spanish Civil War. It might seem an odd thing to do, so long after the event, when even the relatives will barely remember their lost husbands or wives, or cousins, or parents. Yet the families of those murdered by paramilitary gangs or off-duty soldiers in country after country have fought relentlessly for the right to know where and when their dead were buried, and by whom.