Primitivism |

George Walford: Primitive Private Enterprise

August 22, 2012

Few professionals like having amateurs trespass on their territory, and L.S.Mair, an anthropologist, sets about one group of intruders. In her paper entitled The Growth of Economic Individualism in African Society [1] she mounts a strong attack on people advancing ideas, about the attitudes to property appearing in peasant communities, which do not agree with… read more »

George Walford: History in Brief

August 25, 2012

UNLESS we assume extra-terrestrial influence, authoritarian society must have grown out of the non-hierarchical foraging communities; there was nowhere else for it to come from. Archaeology shows this to have happened not just once but six times independently (in Mesopotamia, Egypt, the Indus and Yellow river valleys, Mesoamerica and Peru), producing the ‘primary’ states, those… read more »

George Walford: The Corporation Hunter

August 25, 2012

Supermarkets displace corner shops, multi-nationals squeeze out local enterprises, mergers and takeovers reduce the number of independents. The great corporations are absorbing industrial and commercial life, and in doing this they stifle enterprise and suppress initiative. Head Office issues the orders while those below have only to carry them out. People who once worked and… read more »

George Walford: Ideology in Anthropology

August 25, 2012

THE new series, One World Archaeology, presents the proceedings of the World Archaeological Congress held at Southampton (UK) in 1986. It has provided Robin Fox, University Professor of Social Anthropology at Rutgers, with the occasion for an article raising several issues of interest to IC. [1] All quotations here come from that source. Professor Fox… read more »

George Walford: Forward to Nature

August 27, 2012

Humanity may have arisen from the apes rather than descended from the angels, but some thinkers see its later history as a decline; condemning our present ways of living they look back with nostalgia to the life of the original stateless communities. Engels set the theme with ‘primitive communism’ in his Origin of the Family,… read more »

George Walford: Ideology in Theory

August 27, 2012

WHEN people first hear it suggested that the more advanced (eidodynamic) political positions are reached by way of movement along a range of ideologies, they sometimes take this as a claim that every communist must have been a labour-socialist, every labour-socialist a liberal, and so on; seeing that this does not happen they reject the… read more »

George Walford: Democracy

August 27, 2012

Neither rulers nor ruling classes impose the political structure; it grows from the ideological system, it is an attempt to provide formal expression for power-relations between the groups attached to the various major ideologies. Once this has been recognised, the development of democracy begins to appear in a different light. Commonly seen as according progressively… read more »

George Walford: Togetherness

May 28, 2012

I The diagram known as the ideological pyramid, now appearing in each issue of IC, offers only a crude graphical memnonic for an immensely complex developmental process. Serious understanding of this has to start from a grasp of its beginnings, and here we look at a feature prominent in the first, expedient, stage of ideological… read more »

George Walford: The Birth of the Gods

September 3, 2012

Studies in systematic ideology tend to centre around politics. There have been forays into wider fields, and Beyond Politics [1] justifies its title by an attempt at tracing the influence of ideology in society at large, but broad areas remain unexplored. Here we take up one feature of the ideology of religion, a subject hardly… read more »

George Walford: Ideology in the Reviews (53)

September 3, 2012

Systematic ideology presents political movements as expressions of stages in ideological development. In establishing this view it criticises the Marxist view that they arise, fundamentally, from class interest. Daniel Bell reviews Arpad Kadarkay’s George Lukacs: life, thought and politics. [1] Lukacs ranked with Gramsci and Marcuse as a major figure in Western Marxism. His father,… read more »