The founders of communism have been caught with their predictions down. In 1848 Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels declared, in the Communist Manifesto, that the proletariat, being a class, would become a political party, and they clearly meant a party working for communism. What they foretold hasn’t happened, it gives no sign of being about… read more »
Part One: REASON AS ENEMY, by Frank Antosen. (Reprinted from Freedom, 6 April). When asked to imagine the perfect society thinkers come up with many different models, one thing seems to be common though: The perfect society is governed by reason. Even anarchists tend to subscribe to this belief. But what is reason and why… read more »
Are we to submit to the dictionary or to master it? The orthodox view is that only one definition of a word can be correct; the one approved by the dictionary. One person one vote, one word one meaning. But the slightest enquiry reveals complications. The Shorter Oxford defines a triangle as a figure having… read more »
Each advance in mass communication gets presented as the step that was going to bring revolutionary social changes, and the cinema forms no exception. The pioneers stressed its enormous power for education, claiming that visual presentation of the realities of war, for example, would help to end it. It did not work out like that…. read more »
It was the first of the big ones, the first to shake the world and the first to be taken as a model; the Bolsheviks acted with one eye cocked back at Marat, Robespierre, the Bastille, the Vendee and the events of Thermidor. It cannot sensibly be seen as an uprising of either the working… read more »
In his Domain of Ideologies, the foundation document of systematic ideology, Harold Walsby speaks of the work of Jean Piaget. Much of Piaget’s work has been done since Walsby wrote, and here we look at some of his later investigations. Piaget worked as a child psychologist, not an ideologist, and had doubtless never heard of… read more »
Systematic ideology has one feature in common with every other theory covering a wide area: when people start to think about it they usually find the predictions it gives diverging from the results of their own observation. A theory undertakes more than an account of self-evident facts, and its propositions often need analysis before the… read more »
IC has received a printed sheet, undated but evidently recent; bearing no indication of author or source it reports the development, in the USA and the USSR, of radiofrequency weapons. Impressive both in content and in its carefully understated, hysteria-free approach, it ends by speaking of them as “a new kind of weapon the world… read more »
Click to enlarge. Click to enlarge. from Ideological Commentary 52, Summer 1991.
REVIEWING a new life of Stalin [1] Robert Service remarks that Trotsky’s contempt, for him as a mediocrity “never explained how such a man could hoodwink and kill millions.” Nobody ever has explained this, and nobody ever will, for it didn’t happen; one only has to envisage those millions lining up for treatment and Stalin… read more »