Capitalist fetishism and the decay of art Someone has said that one of the criteria for winning the Turner Prize is not to be understood. The philosophy behind this is: the less I am understood, the better the art. Yet the kind of art that wins the Turner competition also has merit. They have the merit of holding up a mirror to the society that produced them, and saying: “This is what you are, and this is all you are capable of producing.” These works point out to us that beneath the sleek, comfortable bourgeois surface of modern society, horrors are lurking: dead vermin, murder, death and decay.
Kronstadt: Trotsky was right! New material from Soviet archives confirms the Bolsheviks' position New material that has emerged from the old Soviet archives over the past decade or so have allowed new books to be published on the events surrounding the Kronstadt rebellion in 1921. Far from confirming the criticisms of those hostile to the Bolsheviks, the latest sources show that Trotsky's position was correct and totally justified.
Soyinka and the crisis of Nigerian petit-bourgeois radicalism Wole Soyinka is a prominent Nigerian playwright, and in 1986, he became the first African writer ever to be awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. In October 1965, Soyinka was arrested for allegedly seizing the Western Region radio studios and using them to publicly dispute the published results of the recent elections, but in December of the same year, he was acquitted. Didi Cheeka of the Workers' Alternative Editorial Board looks at the ideas and works of this well known writer.
