Wouldn’t you rather work in a sweatshop than starve? Yet the neoliberals have set up an artificial dichotomy between no investment at all and investment in abusive sweatshops. It’s like asking if African-Americans would be better off being fed regularly on a slave plantation in Alabama or dying of malaria in the jungles of the Congo.There is a better option: investment in factories which allow democratic trade unions, so workers’ anxieties – such as providing mouth guards for Tebello and comeback for Nanti against her corrupt, abusive boss – can be addressed, and terrible employers can be punished through strike action if necessary.Investment in countries with democratic elections, so that the minimum wage can be set at a rate which is widely agreed by the population. These conditions might slow down economic growth very slightly – but they will also make it possible for the generation that brings economic growth to live through it in minimally human conditions.To suggest that these meagre prerequisites would remove the competitive advantage of poor countries and lead to disinvestment is preposterous. Obviously the people of Bangladesh will not demand the same wages as somebody in Boston, because living costs are so much lower.

Sweatshops and child labour are not a necessary phase in human history, any more than slavery. They are a political choice, built on the artificial suppression of trade unions and workers’ rights – and many of our multinationals currently lobby for the very political conditions that make this repression possible.To give one small but revealing example, Nike Vice-President Jozef Ha, in a leaked letter written to the oppressive Vietnamese government in 1999, attacked trade unionists in Vietnam for “wanting to create a so-called democratic country on the US model [the monsters!]. The director of Rebel Without A Cause, Bigger Than Life and Johnny Guitar may have been revered in Europe (“the cinema is Nicholas Ray,” Jean-Luc Godard famously said of him), but back home in the US in the mid-Seventies, his reputation didn’t count for much.
That night in Barney’s, the new owner was threatening to throw him in jail because he didn’t have the funds to pay a $13 bar tab. It was 3am in Barney’s Beanery, one of the oldest restaurants in Los Angeles, and the 64-year-old filmmaker Nicholas Ray was sitting on his own at the bar. It had been a harmless, revelation-free indulgence – nothing more.. The year was 1975. “Five Star Life” was the first of these tunes worth hearing, a rough draft on guitar and clarinet, about fame’s downside.

It was followed by, “half a song we stretched a bit, because it’s nice,” – a wisp made from acoustic guitar strums and high harmonies, the kind of tune Blur specialise in, but only half-complete here.”Not Stupid Rap Song” was next, its skimpy lyrics over before they’d begun. “If I finish that, I’ll get someone who can rap,” Albarn wisely concluded. A pretty, promising, minute-long African instrumental and a ragged, Syd Barrett-like alienation ballad followed that. We’d be hearing “ideas for songs”, he told us, half-apologetically. His new, limited-edition album Democrazy – roughly recorded sketches of songs – suggests the anonymous direction in which Albarn is now tentatively going.Taking the stage with a three-piece band and a low-tech sampler, wires hanging from its back, Albarn was dressed in a baseball cap and shabby blue sweater. Asking us all to sit down, he established a hippyish, Art Lab-like atmosphere early.

It’s notable, too, that Hall (another culture-clashing artist, who in collaboration with Mushtaq, the former DJ for the British dance collective Fun-Da-Mental, made an album, Hour of Two Lights, with Arabic and Jewish musicians earlier this year) played in support at Albarn’s gig.However, Albarn’s own place in such a movement is open to question. Less a celebrity or pop star than when he celebrated “parklife”, he now exists to the left of true celebrity: too famous to disappear back into the crowd, but too aggravating to appear in Heat. An easily triumphant headline set at Reading shows that the British public supports this new attitude.Albarn’s extracurricular activities have importantly centred on west London’s Honest Jon’s record label and shop – both of which focus on global sounds far off Britpop’s beaten track. Tonight’s imperfectly kept “secret”, solo gig is in part a tribute to this adopted home: the venue, supported by DJs such as the ex-Specials icon Terry Hall, has been handed over to the resistant, axis of evil-transgressing spirit that world music now suggests. He spent 2002 faking hip-hop attitude, snarling at photographers and hiding behind Gorillaz’ anonymous cartoon silhouettes whenever he deigned to write a hit song. This year, the singer’s initial reluctance to rejoin Blur, and the fractious exit of guitarist Ian Coxon when he did, has resulted in unexpected, low-key triumph.
Shorn of the desire for globe-conquering success (which Albarn now reserves for Gorillaz), Blur’s new album, Think Tank, is more sensuously relaxed than anything they’ve done before. Drawing inspiration from its Moroccan recording location, it combines Arabic, African-American and English sensibilities in a purely musical riposte to George Bush’s divisive world order.