Humanity may have arisen from the apes rather than descended from the angels, but some thinkers see its later history as a decline; condemning our present ways of living they look back with nostalgia to the life of the original stateless communities. Engels set the theme with ‘primitive communism’ in his Origin of the Family,… read more »
WHEN people first hear it suggested that the more advanced (eidodynamic) political positions are reached by way of movement along a range of ideologies, they sometimes take this as a claim that every communist must have been a labour-socialist, every labour-socialist a liberal, and so on; seeing that this does not happen they reject the… read more »
NIAT: ‘Perfect co-ordination is achieved only when there is nothing to co-ordinate.’ (C. N. Parkinson). NIAT: Bob Black offers a statement (from Harpo Marx) which is absolutely true, not in any way false, questionable or even conditional: ” .” NOTHING washes whiter than Persil. CAPITALISM causes war? Might as well say that computers cause calculation…. read more »
When accumulated profits from IC reach a sufficient total your Editor sometimes indulges in a Bounty Bar – coconut inside chocolate. Some time ago these turned up in a new style of wrapper lettered, as boldly as its dimensions permitted: NEW PRICE! NEW SIZE! These claims were fully justified; they had increased the price and… read more »
Attendance at lecture-and-discussion meetings of this party often turns out less of a penance than might have been expected. Sometimes a plodding repetition of the same narrow arguments reveals unimagined vistas of boredom, but other speakers display a wit, and rhetorical ability, that turn the occasion into entertainment; one of them used to define truth… read more »
Systematic ideology posits an ideological system in constant change. Different parts of it change at different rates, and for most social purposes its overall form can be taken as stable, but no part of it is permanently fixed and neither is the whole. Studies of particular parts of the system often assume a static condition,… read more »
Reviewed by Jonathan Simcock in Freedom 17 April. George Walford has contributed articles on anarchism and related issues to both Freedom and The Raven, and regularly features in Freedom‘s correspondence columns. Much of his arguments and ideas in these pieces derive from his exposition of ‘systematic ideology,’ which attempts to examine and explain ‘ideology’ and… read more »
Anarchists themselves recognise divisions within the movement, and the greatest of these occurs between the (Anarcho)-Socialist Party of Great Britain (both sections) on the one hand and the other anarchist groups and organisations on the other. Of these, the (A)-SPGB displays the purer repudiation, declaring the futility of attempts to reform capitalism and refusing to… read more »
Neither rulers nor ruling classes impose the political structure; it grows from the ideological system, it is an attempt to provide formal expression for power-relations between the groups attached to the various major ideologies. Once this has been recognised, the development of democracy begins to appear in a different light. Commonly seen as according progressively… read more »
Sir, I think that all Stirner means is ‘That it is not a good thing to tell the truth all the time.’ I think Kant would agree with that. Yours etc. Isaac Barr Sir, I will accept your injunction not to discuss, for the time being, the issues raised so far in the debate on… read more »