Over the past months the golden aura of success around the Thatcher government has turned into a grey mist of depression, and Labour has made headway in the opinion polls. At the next election it will have been up to fifteen years since the last Labour government; many voters will have no very clear recollection… read more »
SUBSCRIPTIONS Contrary as usual, IC reduces its subscription charges. Beginning with this number a subscription for one year (six issues) will cost £2 including postage. Subscriptions outstanding at the old rate will be extended to compensate. (No subsidy yet from the CIA, let alone MI5 or MI6, but we keep hoping.) WHY ANARCHISM? When correspondents… read more »
SOME BACKGROUND IC undertakes to print any statement of up to 1,000 words carrying the approval of this party, or one of its branches. Letters from individual members will appear if they are cogent, interesting and concise, and if space permits. If you want your letter to appear unedited or not at all, please say… read more »
Dear Editor, Is it a wise policy on your part to keep on calling the SPGB the (A-)SPGB? If you want co-operation you must do something positive. Karl Marx’s quarrel with the anarchists has affected the SPGB and other socialist parties ever since; why not acknowledge this? In your Introducing IC (Revision of May 1989),… read more »
George Bernard Shaw was perhaps more successful as a character than as a thinker, but he did put the ideas and experiences of the socialist movement of his time with a clarity rare in political writing. He produced no full-dress autobiography but many fragments and contributions to biographies, and Stanley Weintraub assembled some of these… read more »
In IC39, under the title From Politics to Ideology, we saw that each of the main-sequence political movements behaves as it does because of the assumptions its members have in common. It is not only in politics that the assumptions made determine the course of behaviour followed. Every step we take depends upon the assumption… read more »
WORK Is it good or bad? On the one hand, worries about unemployment, and cries of triumph at having got more people back to work. On the other, a report that since 1979 the increasing productivity of car factories has enabled them almost to halve the number of people employed to 289,000 – and that,… read more »
This article follows on from the one entitled THE POLITICAL SERIES in IC34. The six groups spoken of are the main-sequence political movements, those known in Britain as conservatism, liberalism, socialism and communism, with the non-political people preceding conservatism and anarchism (including the (A-)SPGB) following communism. – GW We now have before us six groups… read more »
The latest journal to hit – well, perhaps not the news-stands, but at least the desks of people interested in social reform, is SAMIZDAT. The editorial tells us that “Russian samizdat publications circulated secretly among a small, advanced public in the face of official disapproval. British SAMIZDAT takes its name from that example… ” The… read more »
FEW OVER MANY Those who maintain that society embodies mainly the preferences of the ruling few land themselves with the task of explaining how these manage to impose their will. They sometimes claim that it is done by force, but again, how? In The Politics of Obedience (Montreal, Black Rose Press 1975), Etienne de in… read more »