Tom Wintringham – How an Oxford Communist Founded the Home Guard

Tom Wintringham returned to the UK after the Spanish Civil War and worked as a journalist. He used his experience of fighting fascism in Spain to call for the establishment of a ‘Home Guard’ in the UK made-up of ordinary people defending the area within which they lived from the threat of armed invasion. He wrote a number of progressive books on modern warfare which emphasized guerrilla fighting but were also critical of the class-based system of the UK military. This Communistic thinking immediately made him unpopular with the rightwing Winston Churchill and the middle class officer corps.

The Philosophical Irrelevancy of the Bourgeois Critique

As the bourgeois process of cultural dominance and oppression is ongoing, the propaganda it produces is designed for one purpose only, and that is the maintenance of its own power and prestige within society. The bourgeois paradigm is presumed to be the only way of viewing and knowing the world that is accepted as ‘true’, ‘worthwhile’, ‘credible’ and ‘useful’, and yet from a logical, reasonable and scientific perspective, the philosophical underpinnings of bourgeois society is premised upon the creation and perpetuation of faulty knowledge.

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