Given the ongoing Russian invasion of Ukraine, there is a lot of media commentary on the possible motives of president Vladimir’s motives, including possibly ideological ones. In that context a number of commentators have made the argument that Putin is a fascist. This article examines the thinking behind those arguments…

The idea of “Horseshoe Theory” has been floating around in the English language since at least the 1980s, if not earlier, with ebbs and flows in popularity. …

(Section 9 of Ideology and Practice) “Creeping fascism” and other liberal delusions Fascism never creeps, it marches. In boots. Not sandals, not trainers, not brogues, flip-flops or hush puppies, definitely not high heels, but boots. Boots capable of “stamping on a human face — forever” in Orwell’s nightmare vision. In World War II Britain, the jackboot…

(Section 8 of Ideology and Practice) Many of the conventional approaches to theorising politics relate it to the acquisition of power. An orientation that flows from the common tendency of “protagonistic” ideologies[1] to reduce social power to the single dimension of already-existing “constituted” power. Radical critics of mainstream liberal constitutional…

This was a paper I presented at the 2011 London Historical Materialism Conference. The person chairing the panel suggested I write it up and submit it to HM, but I never got around to developing it further. I leave it here, with all its unedited lacunae and faults, for general…

(Section 7 of Ideology and Practice) Having proposed and given some illustration of the protagonist/antagonist distinction extended from the reading of Marx and Engels’ idiosyncratic and no longer current usage of the term “ideology”, I want to show how it can illuminate our understanding of centrism and what people often…

(Section 6 of Ideology and Practice) Marx and Ideology Revisited In section 3 of this text we looked at the development of a “Marxist theory of ideology” in the period between Engels’ death and the Nazi dictatorship. While doing so I sharply distinguished the views of these Marx-ists of the “classical period” and Marx…

The purpose of this text is to try and tell the story of our current economic situation, how we got here, and what we can expect from the near future, so as to better understand the tasks facing us. This is neither an academic text on history, nor yet, god…

(Section 5 of Ideology and Practice) So far we have introduced the idea of a bimodal concept of ideology, composed of doctrine and doxa. In the process of unfolding the distinction between the two poles and giving examples of both it can seem that this expands the concept of ideology…