Annual subscription (6 issues) £2. All back issues from No. 1 (October 1979) are available, two of them in photocopy. The early ones are smaller and thinner than the later, and less elegantly presented. The set £10 post free. The figure in brackets following your name on the envelope is the number of the issue… read more »
At the Islington Branch meeting on Thursday 11 January Phil Kelly, Editor of Tribune, debated with the Party (in the person of Ralph Critchfield) the question: After Thatcher, What? The evening would perhaps be best described as a missing of minds, for they certainly didn’t meet. Mr. Kelly, as a member of the Labour Party… read more »
PRO OR ANTI? This party claims to be propagating socialism but spends nearly all., its time and energy attacking capitalism. The eight Principles, for example, do not mention socialism except, indirectly, in No. 8. It is a tendency which began to appear at an earlier stage of ideological development; Karl Marx’s principal work was not… read more »
The superficiality of much opinion research and of the journalism reporting it, even in the heavier newspapers, sometimes takes one’s breath away. In the Sunday Times (14 Jan 90) Rufus Olins writes up a research project carried out over 18 months by an advertising agency. Studying children aged 12 to 15, the investigators concluded that… read more »
“The notorious sectarianism of the anarchist movement did not appear to be transcended… by any obvious sense of bonhomie, mutual interest or collaboration.” (After noting that the movement is constituted of “half a dozen discrete entities”): “This raises the question of what, analytically, is the common ground between anarchist groups apart from a recalcitrant attitude.”… read more »
FAITH AND EVIDENCE Sir: [Nobody has yet begun a letter to IC with “Sir,” but one needs some standardised way of starting it off as a letter]. Sir: On the back page, of IC43, I wonder whether you are not being unfair to the SS Prod committee in asking them to produce evidence showing something… read more »
The adherents of each major ideology tend to see people holding different basic assumptions as not merely mistaken but wrong, both intellectually and morally. A perception of this has led W. B. Gallie to speak of “essentially contested concepts.” [1] These occur, he says, in aesthetics, political and social philosophy and the philosophy of religion,… read more »
Freedom for South Africa to take a full part in international sport is being sought by Freedom in Sport International, run by Tory MP John Carlisle. In a free-market society, would traders be free to form combinations in restraint of trade? In the free society, would we be free to drive while drunk? “Man [was]… read more »
Ideologists (a term used in IC to mean students of ideology) have to be interested in enquiries into the sources from which knowledge is derived, and in his essay entitled “Logic, Mathematics and Knowledge of Nature,” [1] Hans Hahn distinguishes two possible ones: observation and thinking. Comments are to be made, but first some of… read more »
Recent events in Eastern Europe have led some Western commentators to suggest that revolutionary communism is now on its last legs, the West German Embassy, for example, speaking of Marx and Marxism both being nicely buried. [1] The communists do not agree. Dr. Chater, editor of the Morning Star, still regards the coming of communism… read more »