From time to time IC draws attention to confirmation of parts of s.i. appearing in independent sources, often unexpected ones. Here we offer a small collection. Andrew Rutherford has written Criminal Justice and the Pursuit of Decency (OUP). It reports three ways of treating criminals, favoured by different groups working in the criminal justice system:… read more »
IC has pointed out that every political movement, not only anarchism, places a high value on freedom; even the Nazis valued freedom of action for anti-Semites. To the list of freedom-lovers we now have to add the Bible: GAL. 5:1 It was for freedom that Christ has set us free. JOHN 8:36 If the Son… read more »
Whiteway Colony, the social history of a Tolstoyan community, by Joy Thacker. Published by Joy Thacker, Fairhaven, Whiteway, Stroud, Glos. 13.99 pounds. Reviewed by George Walford. This community has a particular interest for IC. The early members included Francis Sedlak, escapee from Czechoslovakia via the Foreign Legion, and partner of Nellie Shaw (herself a founder-member)…. read more »
As capitalism advanced it divided people, in the main, into two classes; the small number who owned enough (sometimes much more than enough) to be able to live without working and the great numbers who did not; the few lorded it over the many. From the early Nineteenth Century the socialist movement strove to alter… read more »
NIAT: Is it not absolutely true that the earth moves round the sun? ‘There is no privileged position in space. In one sense it is therefore as true to say that the sun moves round the earth, as it is to say that the earth moves round the sun.’ (M. Payne, S&MN Newsletter 51) DEPRESSED… read more »
At last! This issue contains the four extra pages to make up for the shortfall in IC 61. On November 27th last year Freedom, the anarchist fortnightly, started a Good News column, intended to present instances of positive, practical anarchism growing within the capitalist system. So far the instances given have comprised: homeless people getting… read more »
The success attending physical science has won enormous prestige not only for the activity itself but also for the mathematics that plays such a large part in it. So much so that the sciences are sometimes arranged according to their degree of mathematisation, mathematical economics for example being ranked above researches in the same field… read more »
Ideological development is a many-sided process displaying, as one of its main features, the persistence of the modes of behaviour characteristic of the earlier ideologies. As these are transcended modes come to be disvalued and disavowed, but they do not thereby cease to influence action. The person developing the ideology of domination is likely to… read more »
REVIEWING The Dammed by Fred Pearce (Bodley Head) Alex Wilks supports the book’s thesis, that big dams do more harm than good. He argues that a better approach to the problems they are intended to solve would be to ensure that water should be controlled ‘not by governments and companies, but by communities who will… read more »
One might have expected the various movements opposing hierarchy and exploitation – socialism, communism and anarchism – to work together against the common opponents. But most murders take place within families, and each of these movements reserves its bitterest venom for its close predecessors in the series. Here is Trotsky on reformist socialism: Together with… read more »