Religion

George Walford: Letter to an Anarchist

Dear John, I read Barclay, People Without Government, spluttering and fuming at the things he was saying, to find at the end I agreed with his final position. I was saying, at the meeting last Friday, that the prospect of a society running wholly or mainly on anarchist lines is probably an illusion. Barclay says,… read more »

George Walford: Anarchy and an Anarch

From time to time we have discussed the group favouring extension of the principles and methods of the market. In IC 20 there was a piece entitled Friedman or Free Men? which discussed some of the ideas put forward by Milton Friedman, and in 1976 there was issued The Ideology of Freedom, a paper based… read more »

George Walford: Some Notes on the Ideology of Religion

Ideology affects all our volitional behaviour, but there are large areas of volitional activity, occupying much of the attention of a great many people, to which ideological theory has hardly been applied at all. One of these is religion. To treat this very extensive and difficult subject with any great depth will be a massive… read more »

George Walford: The Conventional Artist

From Byron onward the rebellious artist has appeared as a stock figure in the social drama, joined later by the revolutionary worker. The one character stands on no better ground than the other. Some artists have rebelled as some workers have taken part in revolutions, but artists as a group, like workers as a group,… read more »

Peter Cadogan: Gnostics as Anarchists of Old

The Gnostics were the arch-rebels of Christian society from the second to the Fourth Century. The Pauline Christians of Rome set out to crush them and to hand over an obedient and conformist church to the Roman Emperor. These things they did, as Constantine is our witness. In those early days there were some 80… read more »

George Walford: Why So Few?

Anarchism offers a society in which everybody will be able to do what they want, provided only that they don’t interfere with the freedom of others. Yet most people do not support it. Anarchism claims to fight for the free spirit of humanity against oppression and coercion, but it remains a small movement of protest,… read more »

George Walford: Class Politics, an Exhausted Myth

Erect upon the barricade, sledgehammer in one hand, Das Kapital in the other, Red Flag whipping overhead, the classic figure of communist revolution wears overalls. Anarchism flies the Black Flag and repudiates all dictatorship, even that of the proletariat, but it, also, sees itself as a movement of the oppressed; the idea that those on… read more »

Harold Walsby: Development and Repression

We are now able to apply some of the results of the foregoing pages and describe in brief outline the main stages in the typical course of ideological development. In order to do this it will be convenient to choose the typical course of ontogenetic development, that is to say, the course of development pursued… read more »

Harold Walsby: Political Collectivism

Paradoxically enough, it is to fascism that we have to turn in order to find the political movement and expression most exclusively representative of the real masses – to find, in other words, the mass movement par excellence, the supreme example of political collectivism. This curious paradox was well expressed by Goebbels when he declared… read more »

George Walford: Steam Engine Time (54)

Thinking people have mostly discarded the hero theory of history. They agree that Alexander, Julius Caesar, Napoleon and the others appearing as makers and shakers of the world owe their prominence less to personal qualities than to coincidence between their abilities – admittedly exceptional – and the conditions of place and time. But when a… read more »

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