JUST ISSUED: SOCIALIST UNDERSTANDING A Study of the Thinking of the Socialist Party of Great Britain Available (20p including postage) from [address] from Ideological Commentary 8, November 1980.
It was recently reported in the public prints that the Vestey family had succeeded in avoiding, by legal means, the payment of some improbable amount of tax. Katharine Whitehorn, in the Observer of 26 October, 1980 (I think, but I omitted to date the cutting), makes her resentment plain: Every time the Government announces further… read more »
From The Tragedy of Leon Trotsky, by Leonard Sega1. 1979, p.161. On the 22nd October, 1917, Trotsky addressed a mass meeting. He began by describing the suffering in the trenches: A Soviet regime, he went on, would end that suffering, It would bring peace… And when Trotsky asked the thousands there to join, him in… read more »
In Ideologies & their Functions, on pages 59-401, attention is drawn to certain features of the behaviour of an army. It has now been pointed out (by Geoffrey Clark) that Captain Liddell Hart, one of the foremost military theoreticians, has made statements which go far to support the view there taken. The following passages are… read more »
People who try to understand why society behaves as it does are accustomed to being asked: “Why do you not pay more attention to Eysenck’s work?” The idea behind the question is usually that we ought to pay attention to Dr. Eysenck, more than to other psychologists who concern themselves with political and social behaviour,… read more »
These sentences appear in the August, 1980, issue of the Socialist Standard, official journal of the SPGB: (Rosa Luxemburg) therefore tried to show where Marx had gone wrong, but only succeeded in exposing her own utter confusion about economics. She made the silly mistake of assuming that the level of Market demand was determined exclusively… read more »
A writer in the Ethical Record quotes, apparently without seeing anything odd about it, a statement once made to her: I never make negative statements. (Vol. 05, No. 10, p.16) from Ideological Commentary 8, November 1980.
One economic proposition sometimes thought to be attracting increasing support is the “free market.” It comes in a variety of forms or degrees of intensity, from a mild, Liberalistic preference for less bureaucracy than a Labour government tends to impose, to a near-Anarchist demand that government withdraw, more or less completely from intervention in the… read more »
What we are “familiar-with” is not intelligently known, just for the reason that it is “familiar.” When engaged in the process of knowing, it is the commonest form of self-deception, and a deception of other people as well, to assume something to be familiar, and give assent to it on that very account. Knowledge of… read more »
After generations of effort the Left are no closer to their long-term objectives. The free society – communism, socialism, anarchism – is as far away as it ever was. To say this is to be told: “Yes, this may be so; but the fact, that socialism (or communism, or anarchism) has not yet been established… read more »