Struggle or cooperation? Darwin and Spencer on one side, Kropotkin on the other. Well, not quite. Although the title of his book, Mutual Aid gets read as suggesting otherwise, Kropotkin, too, recognised that life means struggle, and a struggle in which the fittest survive: No naturalist will doubt that the idea of a struggle for… read more »
George Orwell produced this deliberate distortion of which familiar Bible passage? (Answer below): Objective consideration of contemporary phenomena compels the conclusion that success or failure in competitive activities exhibits no tendency to be commensurate with innate capacity, but that a considerable element of the unpredictable must invariably be taken into account. HYMNS REFORMED For vegetarians:… read more »
One early tendency that persists through later developments, coming to be disapproved of yet continuing to affect behaviour, is a high valuation of economic independence, the attitude: ‘it’s mine so I should be free to do as I like with it.’ Ken Livingstone is reported as saying that many potential Labour voters in the South… read more »
Each major ideology consists of broad, general, enduring assumptions, while that of each member of the group identified with it comprises also assumptions peculiar to place, time and circumstance; no member holds exactly the ideology of the group. Each of them stands closer to that than to the ideology of any other group, but every… read more »
Every now and again one of the masters shows us how to write about ideological features. Here is Tolstoy, in War and Peace, on expediency: [Napoleon has invaded Russia.] With half of Russia in enemy hands, and the inhabitants of Moscow fleeing to distant provinces, with one levy after another being raised for the defence… read more »
In Russia after 1917 the communist ideology seemed to be taking over from all the others; it frightened the establishment even in the USA. We now see the dwarf behind the giant’s mask; in Russia as elsewhere communists have remained a small minority. As each new ideology first appears on the world scene, and as… read more »
These quotations come from Freedom, the oldest anarchist journal: The Western industrialized world has been purged of smallpox, malaria, tuberculosis and leprosy; its crop fertility has been quadrupled within this century; our urban poor rarely die of hunger. (Michael Duane 2 May 92) The war of 1939-45 convinced [the capitalists] that wars were no longer… read more »
The major ideologies have emerged in sequence, each of them more highly developed, and having fewer people identified with it, than the previous one. Each of them has persisted to support the next, giving the ideological pyramid. An inverse ratio obtains, between the level of ideological development and the number of people attaining it. The… read more »
Startling figures continue to be given for the prevalence of poverty in Britain. One recent report, from the National Children’s Home, has a quarter of our children suffering this condition, 3.5m of them severely. Consternation diminishes when one learns that ‘poverty’ here means living in a family with less than half the national average expenditure… read more »
Social science has had a bad press. The wits use it as a target: ‘Forgive me Father, for I have committed sociology’; ‘It may not be dead, but the reports of its birth have been very much exaggerated.’ Ted Lewellen calls political anthropology ‘a potpourri of unrelated theories and ethnographic analyses’ [1] John Gray declares… read more »