In past issues of IC we have drawn attention to recent events in China and Russia indicating that economic individualism had been only suppressed, not eliminated or even much weakened, by the attempted imposition of socialism or communism. As soon as the pressure was relaxed “private enterprise” began to function again, to the benefit of… read more »
One source of opposition to systematic ideology is the theory that, in the words of Karl Marx: “It is not the consciousness of men that determines their existence but, on the contrary, their social existence determines their consciousness.” (1) The view of s.i. as asserting that consciousness determines existence is of course a misconception –… read more »
Systematic ideology claims to deal with practical matters as well as theoretical, and there is nothing much more practical than wages. The limited conception of ideology commonly used, both in everyday discussion and by the academics, occupies a different sphere from wages. Ideology in this sense is “false consciousness,” it belongs to the realm of… read more »
We recently attended a meeting at which a professor of sociology was speaking on ideology. What we have to say about his talk is not intended to be hostile and is not directed only at the ideas held by him personally, but it may be regarded as uncomplimentary, so it is perhaps better not to… read more »
Systematic ideology has a lot to say about ideological groups, and the use of this concept sometimes provokes objections. (In what follows we use personal names but these are to be read as referring in each case to the person’s body of published work; we do not claim knowledge of their private behaviour and cannot… read more »
The events of the Chinese Revolution, even since 1945, are complex, dramatic, and on an enormous scale. Some of them, particularly incidents of the Cultural Revolution, are bizarre; in the course of that upheaval the youth of Peking and other cities smashed monuments, invaded homes, broke records, burnt books – and demanded red as the… read more »
After it had been recognised that Russia was not, after all, on the road toward communism, it was China that took on the revolutionary halo. But after the Hundred Flowers Movement, the Great Leap Forward, the Socialist Education movement and the Cultural Revolution had all collapsed the People’s Democracy of China, like Soviet Russia before… read more »
In the Introduction to The Messiah and the Mandarins (London, 1982, Weidenfeld and Nicholson), Dennis Bloodworth speaks of Chairman Mao: the characteristics of the hero that enabled him to perform the almost incredible feat of ‘liberating’ all China then prompted him to shatter the society he had created. This is nonsense. The idea that one… read more »
In IC14 we spoke of the Socialist Party of Great Britain and the anarchists as being less different from one another than each of them likes to think; we showed reason to believe that they both express the same , major ideology, that those calling themselves the Socialist Party of Great Britain would be better… read more »
In 1845, in Bayreuth, Johann Kaspar Schmidt published a book. Why should this interest IC? Because he used the pseudonym “Max Stirner” and the book was Der Einziger and sein Eigentum, appearing in English as The Ego and his Own; the Case of the Individual Against Authority. The copy in front of us has been… read more »