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George Walford: Meet Systematic Ideology (54)

April 28, 2014

(Revision of November 1991) 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. Si. starts from observation of the limited success achieved alike… read more »

Beyond Politics Reviews by The Scientific and Medical Network Newsletter

April 23, 2014

George Walford is concerned here to extend the definition and scope of ideology beyond its Marxist identification as “false consciousness” to demonstrate that ideological considerations underlie and dominate political thinking. He begins from what he calls the British political series of conservatism, liberalism, socialism, communism and anarchism, adding that the largest category lying outside these… read more »

George Walford: The (Anarcho-)Socialist Party (52)

April 21, 2014

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 »

George Walford: Trousers Versus Breeches

April 19, 2014

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 »

George Walford: Ideology in Practice

March 23, 2014

Systematic ideology has one feature in common with every other theory covering a wide area: when people start to think about it they usually find the predictions it gives diverging from the results of their own observation. A theory undertakes more than an account of self-evident facts, and its propositions often need analysis before the… read more »

George Walford: Not Stalin Alone

March 6, 2014

REVIEWING a new life of Stalin [1] Robert Service remarks that Trotsky’s contempt, for him as a mediocrity “never explained how such a man could hoodwink and kill millions.” Nobody ever has explained this, and nobody ever will, for it didn’t happen; one only has to envisage those millions lining up for treatment and Stalin… read more »

George Walford: Editorial Notes (52)

February 21, 2014

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 »

George Walford: Doing the Splits (51)

January 14, 2014

Freedom, the anarchist fortnightly (23 February), reported that British opposition to the Gulf War (it came mainly from eidodynamic movements) fell into disarray. A meeting of the umbrella committee “degenerated into a series of bitter disputes and separate meetings,” the leftist groups involved pursued “their private sectarian battles,” and there was no agreed polity nor… read more »

George Walford: The Iron Law

December 23, 2013

Robert Michels’ book, Political Parties, a sociological study of the oligarchical tendencies of modern democracy [1], first appeared in 1911, and quickly became famous [2]. The English translation has been available since 1915 (there were also Italian, German, French and Japanese versions) and in those seventy-five years nobody, so far as I have been able… read more »

George Walford: Ideology in Education

August 21, 2014

Should the school be adapted to the child or the child to the school? An inclination in either direction is notoriously linked with political outlook, and this suggests a connection with the underlying system of major ideologies. Zvi Lamm, a professor of education in the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, has cut across these roundabout associations,… read more »