The founders of communism have been caught with their predictions down. In 1848 Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels declared, in the Communist Manifesto, that the proletariat, being a class, would become a political party, and they clearly meant a party working for communism. What they foretold hasn’t happened, it gives no sign of being about… read more »
Each advance in mass communication gets presented as the step that was going to bring revolutionary social changes, and the cinema forms no exception. The pioneers stressed its enormous power for education, claiming that visual presentation of the realities of war, for example, would help to end it. It did not work out like that…. read more »
It was the first of the big ones, the first to shake the world and the first to be taken as a model; the Bolsheviks acted with one eye cocked back at Marat, Robespierre, the Bastille, the Vendee and the events of Thermidor. It cannot sensibly be seen as an uprising of either the working… read more »
IC has received a printed sheet, undated but evidently recent; bearing no indication of author or source it reports the development, in the USA and the USSR, of radiofrequency weapons. Impressive both in content and in its carefully understated, hysteria-free approach, it ends by speaking of them as “a new kind of weapon the world… read more »
Russia abandons the drive towards communism, America (with a little help) drives Iran out of Kuwait, Mrs. Thatcher resigns the premiership. Great events, all of them. And now, to crown the series (spotlight, roll of drums): IC GOES QUARTERLY. This issue carries the date Summer 1991, to be followed by Autumn, Winter and Spring. The… read more »
(Reprinted from Ethical Record, journal of the South Place Ethical Society, October 1989) May I propose the application of some SPES rationalism to the myth of class politics as displayed, particularly, in The Unsung Heroes of the First Austrian Republic, by Gertrude Elias (ER July/August). This article repeatedly identifies the workers with the left. It… read more »
‘CLASS’ STRUGGLE? “The curious thing was that the closer one came to [Sacco and Vanzetti’s] own stations in society the more virulent was the judgement. The two were merely ‘Reds’ to shop clerks, ‘damn Reds’ in cigar stores, and ‘God-damn Reds’ to taxi drivers.” Those who tried to avert this judicial murder included Sacco’s employer, Mussolini,… read more »
Myths will doubtless always be with us, but the influence of the one which bulks so large in Marxism, presenting class as the fundamental determinant of political affiliation, weakens almost by the day. Reviewing the Cambridge Social History of Britain, 1750-1950, David Cannadine notes that through the 1950s and 60s it flourished among the intellectuals,… read more »
Beyond Politics presents a view of evolution in which the outcome is not merely the final term but the whole system leading to it. Thus the outcome of biological evolution comprises not merely humanity but the whole range of species with their interactions, the outcome of ideological evolution not just any one ideology but the… read more »
WHAT ARE WAGES? Michael Frayn, who used to write a satirical column in the Guardian, reprinted in The Book of Fub (1961) a piece in which a public-relations consultant explains, on behalf of the responsible Ministry, why the various professions get paid at different rates. He starts with the principle that the more devotion a… read more »