Ideology and the Flow of History....

Abstract

In this essay I focus on ideology, defined as representation in the service of sectional interests, and often-times contrary to the evidence, and its social significance in a series of sketches informed by an historical materialist philosophy. Including the Industrial Revolution, in the UK, the trans-Atlantic slave-trade, and slavery in the Americas, the Paris Commune, of 1871, Russia post-1917, Spain post-WWI and 1936-39, Germany post-WWI, and on the Eastern Front during WWII. And contemporarily, post-WWII political economy, the onset of Neo-liberalism, in the early 1980’s, the re-emergence of China as a global economic player, and aspects of mainstream economics and of contemporary social ‘critiques’.