This article is reprinted from Raven, the anarchist quarterly, Volume 2, No. 1, June 1988. [1] It has been slightly revised, clarifying the argument. How do people come to be anarchists? At first sight this seems to be an easy one to answer. There may be a few original minds who work it out for… read more »
Readers who think IC worth paying for are invited to subscribe. The standard annual subscription is £5; smaller amounts at your discretion. Subscribers will receive six issues, normally covering twelve months. Subscriptions paid during 1988 will remain valid until each subscriber has received six issues. If your name on the envelope is followed by “X”… read more »
In a piece entitled Canon to the Left of Them, IC 32 spoke of: … the enduring absorptive power of the ediostatic ideologies, of the Establishment… the process that turned Darwin, Newton, Galileo and Copernicus, each of them a revolutionary in his time, into heroes of orthodoxy, the process that is not far from having… read more »
This passage by Friedrich Engels goes to the roots of Marxism: The materialist conception of history starts from the proposition that the production of the means to support human life… is the basis of all social structure; that in every society… the manner in which wealth is distributed and society divided into classes or orders… read more »
“Pinochet’s Poll Defeat Could Reinforce his Position, as Chile’s Splintered Opposition Proves Powerless.” So runs the subhead to an article by Emiliano Magon in NS&S for 19 Oct 88, and the article develops the theme: “A thoroughly divided opposition, made up of 16 warring parties, was more an ally than a threat.” Magon writes as… read more »
The noble savages did not live the sort of life Rousseau imagined for them. Far from being free to live as they wished they were immovably bound by custom; what seems to be freedom is better understood as an unawareness of restrictions, arising from their inability to conceive of any life other than that of… read more »
IC 36 included (on page 12) a note on Sir Isaac Newton and his religion. It remarked that systematic ideology goes against the tendency, common among the more extreme left, to posit a necessary connection between sound science and atheism, finding the search for precision to be constant rather with the types of religion, known… read more »
As the years and the decades go by, and now the centuries begin to pass, it becomes increasingly evident that neither socialism, communism nor anarchism embodies the first restless movements of an oppressed majority about to grasp its freedom. Although each of them claims to work for the great body of the people each of… read more »
Readers will be almost as grateful as we are ourselves for a respite from Marxism. In At the Dawn of Tyranny, the Origin of Individualism, Political Oppression and the State (New York, Alfred A. Knopf, 1985), Eli Sagen presents the most substantial attempt we have yet encountered at a psychoanalytical interpretation of the development of… read more »
Most of the people who think about ideology at all think of it in politics. Its influence appears more clearly here than elsewhere and the transition, from observation of the facts of social life to a grasp of the underlying ideological structure, is most effectively accomplished by way of a study of political movements and… read more »