Anti-Americanism must not become a pillar of left-wing thinking, says ALEX MILES Of all the clichés attached to the United States of America, one of those repeated most often is that it is a land of contrasts. Clichéd it may be, but the statement is also accurate. The ‘land of the free’ is also...
Orwell’s boy
BARRY WINTER remembers Staff Cottman, life-long socialist and veteran of the Spanish Civil War, who died last year. Last September, after a year’s illness, Stafford Cottman died. Staff was a veteran of the Spanish Civil War, a life-long socialist and trade unionist. What impressed me most about him was his comradely warmth, abundant energy...
Beneath American skies
GARY KENT reports on the diversity of opinions he found on a recent State Department-sponsored trip to USA. The United States is not a uniform entity. Anyone who says, “America thinks this, that or the other” is just plain wrong. There is possibly more diversity of opinion in America than in Europe. Bush made...
Zimbabwe in crisis
WILLIAM BROWN unpicks the rhetoric and looks beyond the headlines to examine the origins and assess the likely outcomes of the recent unrest in Zimbabwe. Not since independence was granted in 1980 has Zimbabwe accounted for so many minutes of TV news and so many column inches in the broadsheets in Britain. However, the...
Coalition of the careless
WILL BROWN reports on the sorry tale of a ‘left wing’ attack on Iraqi trade unionists. As Gary Kent’s article makes clear, support for Iraq’s trade unions has been a contentious issue on the British left. Indeed, it has grabbed media attention and exposed some woeful political judgements by the Stop the War Coalition...
Africa: Imperialism goes naked
SARAH BRACKING and GRAHAM HARRISON argue that imperialism is a far more useful concept than globalisation for understanding Africa’s relations with the global economy. ‘The profound hypocrisy and inherent barbarism of bourgeois civilization lies unveiled before our eyes, moving from its home, where it assumes respectable form, to the colonies, where it goes naked.’...
The left, the war and the obligations of the oppressed
In the wake of September 11th, and opposition to the war on terrorism, WILL BROWN calls for the left to re-examine its knee-jerk responses to international conflict. Writing in the left-wing American magazine, Dissent, Michael Walzer has issued a stark indictment of the left’s response to the events of September 11th and the war...
The battle for democracy in Iraq
GARY KENT urges the British Labour movement to support Iraq’s emerging trade unions and grassroots democrats. All the Iraqis I know were exiled by Saddam Hussein, as were four million other people. They detested Saddam’s murderous regime, which was modelled explicitly on those of Stalin and Hitler. The victims ran into the millions. My...
Shaking up the left
HARRY BARNES finds Nick Cohen’s book, What’s Left?, a stimulating yet flawed polemic. Love it or hate it, this is a readable and serious political romp. In What’s Left? How liberals lost their way, Nick Cohen wishes to shake up wide elements of left and liberal opinion which he feels ignore some clear home...
The last Porto Alegre
Mark Engler reports from the World Social Forum, now five years old It’s not Paris or Tokyo, Beijing or New York. Nor is it Sao Paulo or Rio de Janeiro. Enthusiastic residents of Porto Alegre, Brazil, will tell you that their modest city of 1.5 million people in the country’s deep south is ‘the...
No quick fix
Can Live8, G8 and all those promises really make poverty history? WILL BROWN examines the recent period of unprecedented attention on Africa’s development. The London bombings in July quickly shifted Africa, and debates on debt, trade and aid, away from their unfamiliar position on the front pages. However, there is still a need to...