The Virtual Stoa

Melanie Phillips, over here (and do read the original post).

John Reed, Oregonian, journalist and witness to the Bolshevik seizure of power; author of the instant classic, Ten Days That Shook The World. Born 22 October 1887; died of typhus, 19 October 1920.

A highly recommended new website is the Barry Amiel and Norman Melburn Trust Internet Archive, which contains a complete archive of three important British leftist publications, the Universities and Left Review and the New Reasoner from the second half of the 1950s, which merged and the end of the decade to form the New Left Review that survives down to the present; and Marxism Today from the 1980s, which is less interesting, but by no means uninteresting, and which may very well have a lot to answer for.

From ULR, you can get pieces by Lindsay Anderson, David Marquand, Charles Taylor, Ralph Miliband, Isaac Deutscher, Stuart Hall, Alasdair MacIntyre, Derek Walcott and E. P. Thompson.

From the New Reasoner, there’s stuff by some of the above, as well as by Doris Lessing, Bertolt Brecht, G D H Cole, Christopher Logue, Dorothy Thompson and Iris Murdoch.

And from Marxism Today I imagine there’s an awful lot of Martin Jacques, but I’m finding the interface a bit fiddly, so I won’t be trawling the contents pages on your behalf just yet. (Probably quite a lot by Stuart Hall that’s well worth going after, though.)

Fun for all the family. [Thanks, MMcI.]

Goodwyn Barmby, English utopian socialist, and, just possibly, the first to use the word “communism” in English writing on social organisation. A Chartist, the founder of the Communist Propaganda Society and the Universal Communitarian Association,  he also wrote for The Educational Circular and Communist Apostle, the Promethean, or Communitarian Apostle, and the Communist Chronicle. After 1848, disillusioned with communism, he became a unitarian minister, but he kept his radicalism alive through his support for women’s suffrage, parliamentary reform, and freedom for Poland, Italy and Hungary. His first wife was the utopian socialist Catherine Barmby. Born 1820, died 18 October 1881.

As you read former Home Secretary David Blunkett’s thoughts about machine-gunning prisoners at Lincoln jail in today’s Times, don’t forget the unlimited supply of social policies available at the click of a mouse over at the classic Blunkett Policy Generator.

Karl Kautsky, the “Pope of Marxism”. Born 16 October 1850, died 17 October 1938. Various Kautsky texts are available here, including The Class Struggle, his commentary on the 1891 Erfurt Programme and one of the most widely-read works of Second International Marxism.

We’ve just had the 200th anniversary of the battle of Jena, and I’m trying to remember whether history ended with that battle or with Hegel’s completion of The Phenomenology of Spirit around the same time. Anyway, if we have just had the 200th anniversary of the end of history, the mass media seem to have pretty much ignored it completely (except, apparently, in Ottawa).

Guy Aldred, anarchist, conscientious objector, communist, propagandist, militant, etc., born 5 November 1886, died 16 October 1963.

[Wikipedia and the page I've linked to say he died on 17 October; the ODNB says 16, and that, right now, is good enough for me.]

Thomas Sankara, prime minister and President of Upper Volta / Burkina Faso. Born 21 December 1949, killed in a coup, 15 October 1987.

Benny Lévy, aka Pierre Victor, French militant, leading ideologist for La Gauche Prolétarienne, later Jean-Paul Sartre’s secretary, and convert to Judaism. Died 15 October 2003, aged 58.

Gillo Pontecorvo, director of The Battle of Algiers, born 19 November 1919, died 12 October 2006.

Julius Nyerere, President of Tanzania, born 13 April 1922, died 14 October 1999.

The Stroppyblog has prominently displayed on its front page Rebcca West‘s famous remark that “I myself have never been able to find out what feminism is; I only know that people call me a feminist whenever I express sentiments that differentiate me from a doormat.” I’ve been reading her short biography of Augustine today, and I rather liked this [from p.101]:

“Involuntary episcopacy is one of the few perils which man has been able to eradicate since the time of Augustine, and it is hard for us to realise that it was then a hovering terror, almost as the press-gang once was in England.”

I think there should probably be more Rebecca West-themed blogging, but that may not be a widely shared opinion.

Sidney Webb, Fabian socialist, born 13 July 1859, died 13 October 1947, and, as it turned out, the last beardie in the Cabinet for over sixty-five years.

I’m very pleased to learn of the existence of the Luxuriant Flowing Hair Club for Scientistsâ„¢, from the same people who bring us the annual Ig Nobel Prizes.

Jim Cairns, Australian socialist politician, and, briefly, Deputy Prime Minister under Gough Whitlam; born 4 October 1914, died 12 October 2003.