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George Walford: Ideological Notes

September 3, 2012

SECURING THE BASE Social development renders the earlier ideologies not less but more secure as, with each further advance, the successors who arose in opposition to them undergo division. Expedience became more secure against any threat from Principle with the emergence of Precision. This brought liberalism, drawing into the new movement (which emphasises the rights… read more »

George Walford: Are They Not Anarchists? (53)

September 3, 2012

Anarchism seeks recruits and an intake of six hundred would noticeably strengthen the British movement. Yet an organised group of this size remains detached and receives no encouragement to come closer. “The solution to repressive laws is not better government but no government.” Does that not sound like anarchism? It comes from the Socialist Standard,… read more »

George Walford: Surveying the Surveyors

September 3, 2012

When discussing the relative sizes of the major ideological groups, one commonly encounters the suggestion that an opinion survey would settle the question once for all. Why undertake all this argument? Why not simply count them? The Chair of a MENSA meeting addressed by an s.i. speaker once put this forward. The people who have… read more »

George Walford: The Red and the Green

September 3, 2012

Issue No.3 of Spanner has just arrived. It concentrates on greenism, and since the journal retains its stance in favour of socialism (though preferring to call it a non-market economy) a question of priority arises. Let us agree, to start with, that the greenists have a solid point. We clearly cannot go on treating our… read more »

George Walford: Ideology in the Reviews (53)

September 3, 2012

Systematic ideology presents political movements as expressions of stages in ideological development. In establishing this view it criticises the Marxist view that they arise, fundamentally, from class interest. Daniel Bell reviews Arpad Kadarkay’s George Lukacs: life, thought and politics. [1] Lukacs ranked with Gramsci and Marcuse as a major figure in Western Marxism. His father,… read more »

George Walford: Not Even by Force

May 28, 2012

Pipes R. 1990 The Russian Revolution 1899-1919 London: Collins Harvill. Final judgments about Soviet Russia will remain premature until the authorities there have fully opened their archives and scholars had time to study them, but Richard Pipes does not try to hide his opinions. He sees Lenin as a brutal coward who urged his followers… read more »

George Walford: The Two Freedoms

September 3, 2012

When a conservative government clamps down on people who want to publish books about the security forces, when it restricts demonstrations, strengthen the police and imposes a uniform curriculum on the schools, and does all this while claiming to promote freedom, the reformers and revolutionaries find the combination difficult to accept. When socialists, communists and… read more »

George Walford: Not My Will But Thine

September 4, 2012

Obedience is all around us; has it been imposed upon people yearning for freedom, or volunteered by people who don’t value independence? Everybody interested in social affairs will have an opinion, and most of us are ready to give voice to our belief. Stanley Milgram took a different approach, setting up a series of experiments… read more »

George Walford: The Source of Anarchism

August 21, 2014

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 »

George Walford: First, Second, Third…

September 4, 2012

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 »