In 1845, in Bayreuth, Johann Kaspar Schmidt published a book. Why should this interest IC? Because he used the pseudonym “Max Stirner” and the book was Der Einziger and sein Eigentum, appearing in English as The Ego and his Own; the Case of the Individual Against Authority. The copy in front of us has been… read more »
Supernatural Powers: “When I wrote Chinese Looking Glass, certain superficial critics in England sneered at me for suggesting that superstitious belief and religious custom had survived Communism in China itself. The Chinese Communists, being rather better acquainted with the subject, have repeatedly admitted that the supernatural has been among their most stubborn ideological foes.” (Dennis… read more »
The Socialist Party of Great Britain is a small organisation which repudiates the gradualism and reformism commonly associated with the term ‘socialist.’ It declares itself ‘determined to wage war against all other political parties,’ but there is one political movement which is not a party and cannot become one. How does the Socialist Party relate… read more »
New readers of IC are often puzzled by the amount of attention devoted to the Socialist Party of Great Britain. Many have never heard of it before, some may confuse it with the Labour Party, and those acquainted with it know it to be little more than a coterie, a group of some five or… read more »
The reformist and revolutionary movements have a strong tendency to think of themselves as rationalistic, and rationalism works on the belief that if only people will divest themselves of prejudice, attend to the evidence and think clearly, they will arrive at the correct solutions to social problems; it implies that for each problem there can… read more »
Mr. Tony Benn has issued a book entitled Arguments for Socialism (Penguin 1980). One of his themes is that some of the changes which have taken place in Britain since the seventeenth century, changes generally regarded as significant advances toward freedom and democracy, are less substantial than is usually thought. They are, he argues, changes… 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 »
Newcomers to systematic ideology are often surprised at the amount of attention paid to the Socialist Party of Great Britain (SPGB). One reason for it is that in this organisation we find fully developed, set out ready for our inspection, the tendencies (in the jargon of s.i. the “eidodynamic” tendencies) which characterise the Left. One… read more »
The article “The Anarchist Police Force” contains the usual inaccuracies and generalisations of articles of this nature. There is an abysmal ignorance of the anarchist anarcho-syndicalist movement in Spain in this, country and its history (pre-organisational; years of struggle; civil war; after; today). But superficial Marxist observers have some flip answers. All agree that in… read more »
This paper is mainly a commentary on David Friedman‘s book The Machinery of Freedom. [1] Where it expands into comments on Anarcho-Capitalism (one name for the social system Mr.Friedman expounds) it is still based wholly on his book. I have heard a talk given by an Anarcho-Capitalist to the Walsby Society, but my recollections of… read more »