London’s buses and underground trains are to have computerised ticket machines; experience suggests it will take a while to get the bugs out of these. Several years ago buses were introduced which had automatic ticket machines instead of conductors. Some of them worked properly; the others – well, we ourselves hit the jackpot once, but… read more »
GREEN THUMB-CORNER This is the season for gardening, as defined as: Eleven months of hard work for one month of bitter disappointment. And the one phrase we all know and hate: “A garden is a lovesome thing, God wot!,” is a mistranscription. What he actually wrote was: “A garden is a toilsome thing, God rot… read more »
Ideological Commentary announces itself as “an independent journal of systematic ideology,” but we do not claim final knowledge of this theory; the formulation that looked like the ultimate last month needs alteration now, and the account given here will be subject to continuous revision. The theory was created and largely developed by the late Harold… read more »
In IC18 it was reported that questioning at a branch had elicited the admission that when the party says the capitalists perform no significant role in society it is speaking inaccurately; the capitalist class performs the highly significant function of exploiting the workers. The Socialist Standard for June 85 repeats this inaccuracy: “The social role… read more »
We have had members of this party saying that instead of circulating our criticisms we should put them in a letter to the Socialist Standard, where they would be answered. The editors of that journal have other ideas. We keep trying, but in future letters sent them will appear here. This one was sent them… read more »
IN IC18 we reported Ray Hammond’s comment that the whole of the typesetting industry was being eliminated by the computer in half a decade. Now another industry – admittedly a smaller one – is also about to disappear. For something like a thousand years copyists have produced the musical scores needed by performers, but now… read more »
(This piece is reprinted from an early precursor of IC in the study of Harold Walsby’s theory of ideology: SCIENCE AND IDEOLOGY, edited by Richard Tatham, Nos. 2 and 3, 1948, the year after publication of The Domain of Ideologies. There are passages in it we would now express differently; in 1985 one cannot speak… read more »
Those who believe that the social system of the USSR is substantially different from that found in America sometimes cite, in support of their belief, the frequent refusal of the Russian authorities to allow their citizens to travel abroad. William Hinton is an American citizen; in 1951 he returned home from China intending to write… read more »
(A talk given by Dr. Zvi Lamm,of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, in Highgate, London, on Thursday 28th March, 1985. This talk was delivered informally and at short notice; here it has undergone the editing called for by the transition from speech to writing). My concern with ideology began many years ago, and for some… read more »
In the Introduction to The Messiah and the Mandarins (London, 1982, Weidenfeld and Nicholson), Dennis Bloodworth speaks of Chairman Mao: the characteristics of the hero that enabled him to perform the almost incredible feat of ‘liberating’ all China then prompted him to shatter the society he had created. This is nonsense. The idea that one… read more »