Letter from Stan Parker: Sir, I have to tell you that I did not like much of IC60. Some 30 years ago I left an intolerant and sectarian but otherwise politically persuasive SPGB, but last year I found it had changed. The 1904 principles are no longer holy writ, although still valid in essence, and… read more »
BACTERIA inhabited the earth by themselves for two billion years. They have not been eliminated in the course of further development. (C. Vita-Finzi) NATURE is an artificial construction. IDEOLOGY plays a larger part in current thinking than sometimes appears, its presence often disguised by coded language. When, for example, the socialists and communists assert that… read more »
Harold Walsby (originator of systematic ideology) once spoke of Hegel as the supreme anarchist. At the time I would have said that an anarchist was the one thing Hegel was most emphatically not, but the conversation moved on and I never did ask Walsby what he had meant. For many years the remark has been… read more »
(Revision of August 1992) IDEOLOGICAL COMMENTARY announces itself as a journal of systematic ideology (s.i.), but it does not claim final knowledge of this theory; the formulation that looked like the ultimate last month needs alteration now, and the account given here undergoes continuing revision. S.I. starts from observation of the limited success achieved alike… read more »
Ideological development is a many-sided process displaying, as one of its main features, the persistence of the modes of behaviour characteristic of the earlier ideologies. As these are transcended modes come to be disvalued and disavowed, but they do not thereby cease to influence action. The person developing the ideology of domination is likely to… read more »
REVIEWING The Dammed by Fred Pearce (Bodley Head) Alex Wilks supports the book’s thesis, that big dams do more harm than good. He argues that a better approach to the problems they are intended to solve would be to ensure that water should be controlled ‘not by governments and companies, but by communities who will… read more »
One might have expected the various movements opposing hierarchy and exploitation – socialism, communism and anarchism – to work together against the common opponents. But most murders take place within families, and each of these movements reserves its bitterest venom for its close predecessors in the series. Here is Trotsky on reformist socialism: Together with… read more »
In calling attention to the persistence of early modes of behaviour we have to think why this should be particularly necessary in social and ideological connections. The answer lies in the complex nature of the process by which thinking advances. Although the development, the horizontal extension, of any ideology proceeds for the most part steadily,… read more »
IC stands committed to the proposition that Nothing Is Absolutely True (giving the acronym NIAT). The journal concerns itself with discussion, with propositions, and NIAT asserts that no one of these is completely true in every sense, at all times, without reservation and under all conditions. It is an instance of the only fully universal… read more »
I Some ways of thinking are more logical than others and this suggests the presence, somewhere in the background, of pure logic, a set of clear, precise and rigid laws which, if only we comply with them, will ensure that our thinking moves as if along rails to the correct conclusion. We seldom in practice… read more »