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Is it advisable for one who is not an expert on economic and social issues to express views on the subject of socialism? I believe for a number of reasons that it is.Let us first consider the question from the point of view of scientific knowledge. It might appear that there are no essential methodological differences between astronomy and economics: scientists in both fields attempt to discover laws of general acceptability for a circumscribed group of phenomena in order to make the interconnection of these phenomena as clearly understandable as possible. But in reality such methodological differences do exist.
The discovery of general laws in the field of economics is made difficult by the circumstance that observed economic phenomena are often affected by many factors which are very hard to evaluate separately. In addition, the experience which has accumulated since the beginning of the so-called civilized period of human history has — as is well known — been largely influenced and limited by causes which are by no means exclusively economic in nature. For example, most of the major states of history owed their existence to conquest. The conquering peoples established themselves, legally and economically, as the privileged class of the conquered country. They seized for themselves a monopoly of the land ownership and appointed a priesthood from among their own ranks. The priests, in control of education, made the class division of society into a permanent institution and created a system of values by which the people were thenceforth, to a large extent unconsciously, guided in their social behavior. (more…)
There once was wee Martin from Derry,
Who played second fiddle to Gerry,
But now we have he, and Big Ian P,
Acting so bloodily merry.
I have a confession to make. I’m infinitely more interested in creating images then I am in writing.In my bored moments I’ll happily trawl the internet looking for clever posters or images of a political slant and I take great joy in ripping off ideas I get from design books (I read them in the shops, they’re damn expensive to buy.) So imagine my joy when I found the Start Propaganda Project. Asides of everything else the anti-capitalist movement of the late nineties and the early years of this decade (I hate the term noughties) produced some fantastic artwork which managed to draw influences from all imaginable quarters. Its not hard to see in some posters (particularly posters) a mash of both soviet realism and New York graffiti of the 70’s. Damn I fell into that pretentious artist nonsense again. I’m off for a pint before my Union meeting. Anyway here’s just one of the many excellent posters from the project. Simple but it tells a great story.
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The text of the poster can be found here.
John Hewitt the inspirational Irish poet, when asked of his politics, described himself as “a man of the left”. Why a man who understood the importance of identity and the precision of words used such a vague term is open to speculation. My take on it is that knowing the false impressions and the misshapen images that political terms can conjure, he chose not to attach himself to presumptions and stereotypes, but rather chose to use the relative innocence of this phrase to allow him to plant the seeds of his ideas in his ‘chosen ground’.
But that’s just my take on it.
Hopefully evoking the terms of such a highly regarded poet in my first post I haven’t given the impression that this will be a artistic, rhythmical or even well written blog. It wont.
I just liked the term is all.
