As capitalism advanced it divided people, in the main, into two classes; the small number who owned enough (sometimes much more than enough) to be able to live without working and the great numbers who did not; the few lorded it over the many. From the early Nineteenth Century the socialist movement strove to alter… read more »
NIAT: Is it not absolutely true that the earth moves round the sun? ‘There is no privileged position in space. In one sense it is therefore as true to say that the sun moves round the earth, as it is to say that the earth moves round the sun.’ (M. Payne, S&MN Newsletter 51) DEPRESSED… read more »
At last! This issue contains the four extra pages to make up for the shortfall in IC 61. On November 27th last year Freedom, the anarchist fortnightly, started a Good News column, intended to present instances of positive, practical anarchism growing within the capitalist system. So far the instances given have comprised: homeless people getting… read more »
The success attending physical science has won enormous prestige not only for the activity itself but also for the mathematics that plays such a large part in it. So much so that the sciences are sometimes arranged according to their degree of mathematisation, mathematical economics for example being ranked above researches in the same field… read more »
Ideological development is a many-sided process displaying, as one of its main features, the persistence of the modes of behaviour characteristic of the earlier ideologies. As these are transcended modes come to be disvalued and disavowed, but they do not thereby cease to influence action. The person developing the ideology of domination is likely to… read more »
REVIEWING The Dammed by Fred Pearce (Bodley Head) Alex Wilks supports the book’s thesis, that big dams do more harm than good. He argues that a better approach to the problems they are intended to solve would be to ensure that water should be controlled ‘not by governments and companies, but by communities who will… read more »
One might have expected the various movements opposing hierarchy and exploitation – socialism, communism and anarchism – to work together against the common opponents. But most murders take place within families, and each of these movements reserves its bitterest venom for its close predecessors in the series. Here is Trotsky on reformist socialism: Together with… read more »
In calling attention to the persistence of early modes of behaviour we have to think why this should be particularly necessary in social and ideological connections. The answer lies in the complex nature of the process by which thinking advances. Although the development, the horizontal extension, of any ideology proceeds for the most part steadily,… read more »
IC stands committed to the proposition that Nothing Is Absolutely True (giving the acronym NIAT). The journal concerns itself with discussion, with propositions, and NIAT asserts that no one of these is completely true in every sense, at all times, without reservation and under all conditions. It is an instance of the only fully universal… read more »
I Some ways of thinking are more logical than others and this suggests the presence, somewhere in the background, of pure logic, a set of clear, precise and rigid laws which, if only we comply with them, will ensure that our thinking moves as if along rails to the correct conclusion. We seldom in practice… read more »