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 »
IC maintains that Nothing is Absolutely True. The Shorter Oxford gives several meanings for ‘absolute,’ all deriving from the root meaning of detached or disengaged; in religion, for example, absolution detaches from sin. The most explicit of these is the one numbered IV.3: ‘Existing without relation to any other being; self-existent’ and (in the attached… read more »
S.i. identifies the first ideology, originally displayed, by the hunter-gatherers, as expedient and the second (which first appeared together with agriculture, production, civilization and trade) as principled. One ethnographer notes a later appearance of the distinction. After saying that Navaho behave in one way towards fellow-tribesmen and in another towards outsiders, he continues: Under the… read more »
It seems obvious that a major difference between human beings and animals lies in humans having won, or having been granted by biology, freedom from some of the genetic restraints that compel the animals. This has probably been asserted somewhere in the literature of s.i. although a recent search has failed to find it. Its… read more »
Continued from IC54. Under this title IC54 pointed out that although Buddhism, Christianity and Marxism each had its origins in the idiosyncratic vision of a powerful personality, as they have grown to exercise social influence, becoming established and institutionalised, each of them has departed from the intentions of its founder, coming under determination by one… read more »
Reprinted, with minimal revision, from Fourth World Review No. 47. – GW In Fourth World Review 40 / 41 the article ‘Start Preparing Now,’ by Kirkpatrick Sale, speaks of destruction of the environment only in connection with expansive European civilization of the last five centuries. If this be all there is to it we face… read more »
DOMINATION tends to spread, and the universities display this feature as much as do the other authoritarian institutions. Reviewing a clutch of books on the practice and theory of writing fiction, Malcolm Bradbury tells (not with any hostile intent), how the number of Creative Writing courses has increased. Until quite recently, in the time of… read more »