With this issue come copies of a leaflet, entitled EXPLORING IDEOLOGY. It is hoped that readers favouring the theory will distribute these as the occasion offers – passing them to contacts, enclosing them in letters and so on. And those not liking the theory? Perhaps they will distribute them so that its absurdities and enormities… read more »
The major ideologies, outlined on the facing page, have developed through history. Each of them provides the conditions which permit the next one to emerge, and each of them has fewer people attached to it than the one before. The diagram below indicates the outcome, the ideological structure of contemporary society, but the model needs… read more »
(Revision of May 1992) IDEOLOGICAL COMMENTARY announces itself as a journal of systematic ideology (s.i.), but it does not claim final knowledge of this theory; the formulation that looked like the ultimate last month needs alteration now, and the account given here undergoes continuing revision. Si. starts from observation of the limited success achieved alike… read more »
Angles on Anarchism by George Walford with a contribution by Peter Cadogan Angles on Anarchism breaks new ground. Neither history nor polemic, it starts from the observation that the anarchist movement has settled down among the other members of the political cast; accepted, almost respectable, but of mainly theoretical importance. It asks why this has… read more »
BEYOND POLITICS An outline of systematic ideology by George Walford BEYOND POLITICS shows that the influence of ideology extends beyond political parties and movements. In all our purposeful activities, whether playing with the children, practising a trade or profession, fighting a war, cooking, shopping or fox-hunting, we follow a pattern set by one of the… read more »
Any reader of anthropology (or at least any reader not committed to the conventions of the profession) will have been impressed, and perhaps puzzled, by the elaborate detail, precision and complexity of the kinship and marriage practices reported. One encounters phrases like this: ‘of the general type called Iroquois or bifurcate-merging, and of the particular… read more »
DO YOU BELIEVE IN LIFE AFTER WORK? While other things change work persists, grinning at us every Monday morning. Those who have it grumble; those without it want it. We even hear of a right to it. Unlimited education and medical care for everybody, a big detached house, a Rolls and a luxury yacht for… read more »
Readers will recall that in 1991 the (A-)SPGB, following standard procedure for extreme eidodynamic groups, split in two. They had done this often enough before, but this time both fractions were large enough to survive. We now have two (anarcho-) socialist parties, each of them repudiating the other. IC55, differentiating them as SW4 and N12,… read more »
Political movements vary in many ways but all of them, when in power, promote freedom. To meet the inevitable protest head-on: Nazism promoted freedom of action for anti-Semitism. To demand merely freedom, unspecified, is like asking for more without saying of what. For the demand to be capable of realisation we have to specify which… read more »
The indivisible atom, solid and reliable, vanished in the first glimmer from Rutherford’s cathode-ray tubes, and physicists seeking a replacement have found only ghosts wandering in a fog of probability, such dreams as stuff is made on. One ‘fundamental’ particle after another has refused to be pinned down. Among workers at the growth-point of physics… read more »