Adam Mars-Jones says of a literary critic who likens a novel to a piece of machinery: ‘She wisely omits any reference to Hemingway’s belief that the most efficient part of a story, the part that does the most work, is the part that the author has omitted, since she could hardly point to any actual… read more »
We have commented before on the way themes of s.i. appear in the writings of people who had not heard of it. In IC29 we gave a quotation from Cardinal Newman that brought out neatly some of the distinctions between the ideologies of expedience and of domination. The following quotation comes from “Conflicting Theories of… read more »
Right up to the outbreak of the Great War Karl Kautsky was held generally to be the most prominent disciple and continuator of the ideas, theories and ‘method’ of Marx and Engels. Dick Geary, in a mini-biography of Kautsky (1854-1938) in a series entitled Lives of the Left published by Manchester University Press in 1987,… read more »
I am currently preparing a paper on the life and ideals of Harry Martin, one of the founders of the Socialist Party of Great Britain. He is referred to in Robert Barltrop’s colourful history of the SPGB, The Monument (Pluto Press 1975) on five separate pages. Harry Martin was the first (and last?) prophet of… read more »
Under this title IC conducts a campaign, not against work but against the belief that more or less everybody needs work if they are to lead a satisfactory life. Here we speak of the epoch before the beginning of work, a period, far longer than the time for which work has been among us, when… read more »
It does seem to me that the “old” series of terms for the major ideologies – “protostatic,” “parastatic” and so on – has one big advantage: just because they are so outlandish they force people to stop and think. This is something I noticed also in the context of what Ron Hubbard’s critics used to… read more »
IC26 carried an abridged version of a talk, delivered to the South Place Ethical Society, entitled THE LOGIC OF RELIGION. It set out to show that religion is not, as many humanists maintain, a wholly irrational activity. Classification is the beginning of reasoning and Durkheim has shown, in Elementary Forms of the Religious Life, that… read more »
In IC26, under the heading “The Ideology of a Psychologist,” we printed some comments on “An Experiment in Leisure” by Marion Milner. George Hay has now sent in the following extract from another book by the same author: The Suppressed Madness of Sane Men; Forty-Four Years of Exploring Psycho-Analysis (London & NY, Tavistock Publications, n.d…. read more »
The 229 technicians employed by the TV-am studio went on strike at the end of December 1987. At that time only 60 of them, and those mostly trainees and junior assistants, were expected to earn less than £30,000 during the coming year. 42 were earning at above £35,00, 64 at over £40,000, 34 at over… read more »
Simon Jenkins writes in the Sunday Times (13 Dec 87) of the efforts to save the famine-stricken people of Ethiopia by charity. In 1984 £85m was given, and this winter Bob Geldof and the BBC are putting Ethiopia forward again. Jenkins asks whether the effort already made has helped the starving Ethiopians; doubtless it saved… read more »