Variant, issue 35, Summer 2009

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Front cover: Chad McCail, detail from obedience doesn’t relieve pain, ‘food shelter clothing fuel’ series. www.chadmccail.co.uk

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Comment
The Progress of Creeping Fascism
Owen Logan
Logan asserts that Fascism ought to be understood as an ideologically sophisticated, creeping set of political relations. Corporate monopolisation of markets is the symptom and outcome of this onward march, but not the cause. The cause is the monopolisation of public reason by 'coercive rationalism'. Logan clarifies that the ideology of enforced co-operation and managed national solidarity provides the underlying logic of Fascism evident in the triangulation of policy towards “single purpose government”.

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Ae Fond Kiss, And Then We Sever!
Stephen Mullen
Homecoming Scotland 2009 is a Scottish Government initiative to develop business networks and the Diaspora Market. Examining Scotland's neglected historic relationship to the plantations of the New World - that this trade was built almost exclusively on Black chattel slave labour - Mullen asks where is the Caribbean Diaspora's presence in Homecoming? Importantly: "Does the Homecoming initiative have implications for race relations in modern Scotland?"

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Playing Ball
Private Business: Public Planning
Monika Vykoukal
"Charity as ordinarily practised, the charity of endowment, the charity of emotion, the charity which takes the place of justice, creates much of the misery which it relieves, but does not relieve all the misery it creates". (Joseph Rowntree, 1865)
A key role of government would arguably be that of regulating private and economic interests in relation to other values. However, Sir Ian Wood's intervention in Aberdeen City’s public planning (halting a granted planning application for the same site for a new contemporary art centre proposed by Peacock Visual Arts) is in many ways analogous to Donald Trump’s more widely reported golf course project for Aberdeenshire’s Menie Estate. Vykoukal digs deeper.

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Bill Gates, Philanthropy, & Social Engineering?
Michael Barker
Taking the Gates' as a significant example, Barker critically examines how powerful liberal individuals and their allegedly impartial progressive philanthropic foundations work to manipulate civil society to promote and sustain plutocratic political arrangements.

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Parcels of Rogues
Tom Jennings
In the wake of MPs' expenses scandal, public disenchantment with British parliamentary politics has hit an all-time low, unmatched since late-18th century disgust prompted the Great Reform Acts. But as politicians parrot the mantra of ‘no alternative’ to a vain hope for trickledown from globalised profiteering, where are the contemporary visions of government equivalent to those of Hogarth and Burns, focussing the righteous ire of the masses in withering critiques of such an abject here-and-now? Jennings examines In The Loop, Red Riding, State of Play, and The Wire for signs...

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

Artist as Executive, Executive as Artist
Kirsten Forkert
A response to an alleged organisational crisis in the Arts, 'Cultural Leadership' - which attempts to bind culture to aspiration and employment skills, reasserting the genius myth and individualism with regimes of professionalisation and managerialism - is seen as the cure to all problems. Forkert charts its programmatic progress.

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Never work!
Karen Elliot
It is a banality that we need to work in order to produce for our basic needs. But what is the nature of that work, for whom, and to what end? Useful work? Or useless toil? Recent UK welfare reform proposals maintain that work is the best route out of poverty, yet ignore the fact that the wage-labour relation has become a source of built-in insecurity and social instability. Wage-labour is the central pillar of capitalist relations, and the drive to productivity and valorisation of work is to be expected from the point of view of capital. However, how have social-democratic institutions, nominally of the Left, come to be complicit in the subjugation of labour through the mantra of productivity?

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