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“... I arrived after dusk at Toussaint Louverture Airport and was relieved to see someone holding a board with my name on it. The State Department and Foreign Office websites had been very discouraging. A taciturn young man from Sécurité whisked me through passport control and into a tacky VIP lounge, then down some steps to an exit, watched over by an unsmiling female security guard ...”

“... The origins of state pensions are to be found in market failure. States have intrinsic advantages over companies as pension providers: because they have the power to tax, and are around for a long time, they can count on those not yet born to pay for the pensions of those not yet retired. Today’s contributions are used to pay today’s retirees (a company that did this would be convicted of running a pyramid scheme ...”

“... in her lengthy acknowledgments, Tariq Ali is singled out for thanks twice. Rowbotham also thanks Robin Blackburn, who, we understand, is to review Richard Gott’s new book, In the Shadow of the Liberator: Hugo Chávez and the Transformation of Venezuela (Verso, 246 pp., £16, 1 July, 1 85984 775 7) for the New Statesman. Again, it has not gone ...”

“... in colonial America, seeking to explain the system’s origins. The new books by Ira Berlin and Robin Blackburn are outstanding contributions to this literature. Berlin, who has already written a study of free blacks in the 19th-century South, for many years directed the Freedmen and Southern Society editorial project. Documentary editing rarely ...”

“... A sugar plantation with its mill, and its businesslike organisation and rhythms of work, bore, as Robin Blackburn points out, a clear resemblance to the factory that emerged with the Industrial Revolution; and its labour force was ‘more intensively exploited than any group of this size in history’. By a kind of poetic justice, of the three ...”

“... societies is away from the public funding of pensions and towards private, commercial provision. Robin Blackburn describes the finance companies selling pension schemes as a new form of tax farmer, offering dubious deals in return for tax subsidies and lavish commissions. The analogy indicates the tenor of his thinking: tax farmers contributed to the ...”

“... I was last there forty years ago as part of a four-man team (the others were Perry Anderson, Robin Blackburn and Ralph Schoenman) sent by Bertrand Russell to attend the trial of Régis Debray in Camiri, not far from where a besieged Che Guevara was fighting to escape the Bolivian army. Debray had been captured while attempting to leave the guerrilla ...”

“... which raises at once the preliminary question of what that failure has to do with this future. Robin Blackburn, the book’s editor, assumes that they have everything to do with one another. He writes at the outset of his own chapter that ‘the anti-capitalist Left will have no credibility unless it can account for the dire experience of Communism ...”

“... R.B.: You were imprisoned in the Brezhnev period because of your oppositionist ideas. What was prison like? B.K.: The really difficult thing was that you were forced to stay with the same person for months on end. A manager who had been arrested for taking bribes taught me a lot about the functioning of the Soviet management structure and the way the economy worked, but even so you cannot spend day after day with the same person: it becomes psychologically destructive ...”

“... Harrison, professor of social history at Warwick, but Jack Jones and Stan Newens MP; not only Robin Blackburn of New Left Review but Mike le Cornu, shop steward at Heathrow. They all, with remarkably few reservations, agree with Hobsbawm not only that there is a crisis of capitalism but that the apparent ineffectiveness of the Left is, therefore, all ...”

“... studies, its sympathy with poets, translators, excitable theorists, its egalitarianism. Robin Blackburn on slavery, Angela Livingstone on Tsvetaeva, Ernesto Laclau’s charismatic mystifications. Dawn Ades’s work on Latin America inspired artists from all over the continent to donate paintings and sculpture, so it has a collection unrivalled ...”

“... and not allude to, among others, E.P. Thompson, Raymond Williams, Stuart Hall, Perry Anderson, Robin Blackburn, R.D. Laing, and the personnel of the New Statesman, would be to create another kind of absent centre. Caute solves this problem by resort to the teasing deceits of the Disraelian political romance. That is, he daringly hints at real persons ...”

“... control, the importance of the clitoris, an introduction to a circle of socialists – Robin Blackburn, Gareth Stedman Jones, Perry Anderson – who challenged her acceptance of Edward Thompson’s non-sectarian New Left, the frivolity of mascara) came from Bob Rowthorn, who became Rowbotham’s adviser and long-term – oh I don’t know ...”

“... enemies. One must ask what good is a critical intellectual if he won’t criticise his own side? Robin Blackburn, introducing Resources of Hope, writes that Raymond Williams ‘was the most authoritative, consistent and original socialist thinker in the English-speaking world’. One cannot but be struck by the warmth and number of similar tributes ...”

“... of the ship’s passage, prices, rates of exchange, slaves’ vital statistics and deaths. As Robin Blackburn has argued, the slave trade and the slave plantation were run with an instrumental rationality, according to business principles that were ahead of their time, and produced an abundance of statistics. Durand’s journal is one of the handful ...”