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International Socialism, September 1996

 

Editorial

 

From International Socialism 2:72, September 1996.
Copyright © International Socialism.
Copied with thanks from the International Socialism Archive.
Marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for ETOL.

 

TONY BLAIR’S march to the right in double quick time has provoked unprecedented pre-election discontent, and not just among the party’s rank and file. Alex Callinicos examines all the most recent policy shifts, concentrating on Labour’s economic programme. He concludes that although Blair once identified with the kind of revived Keynsianism typified by Will Hutton’s bestseller The State We’re In he is now aligned more closely with the most naked forms of capitalist accumulation.

JAPAN’S ECONOMY is touted as a model by Blair’s supporters. But, as Susan Cockerill and Colin Sparks demonstrate, that country’s economic miracle is fading faster than at any time in the post-war period.

RICHARD LEVINS is a biologist best known for co-authoring the highly praised book, The Dialectical Biologist. He founded Science for Vietnam and Science for the People in the United States. He refused nomination to the National Academy of Science in the early 1970s because of that organisation’s role as an adviser to the government’s war effort in Vietnam. This year he was awarded the 1996 Edinburgh Medal at the Edinburgh International Science Festival. His address to the festival, When science fails us, is a critique of establishment science and a vindication of a dialectical approach to science.

THE BICENTENARY of Babeuf’s ‘Conspiracy of Equals’ during the great French Revolution allows us to examine a moment that has occupied an uncertain place in the annals of revolutionary history. Was it a hopeless act of a desperate minority? Was Babeuf’s organisation the forerunner of the Leninist party? Ian Birchall offers a fresh view of an old controversy.

CHRISTOPHER HILL’S new book, Liberty Against the Law, is reviewed by Brian Manning, and Paul O’Flinn contributes a discussion of William Morris’s News From Nowhere.

BOOKWATCH looks at the Middle East peace process and the fate of the Palestinians.

 
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