©1998-2002 The
Voice of the Turtle Collective
Welcome to the fledgling
Dictionary of the Turtle!
This is a new kind
of Power Tool, to refine thought, spread ideas and encourage militancy.
When socialists demand that we Educate! Agitate! Organise!, the
dissemination of radical ideas among the people becomes the first vital
step in the process that culminates in social transformation. The Dictionary
of the Turtle is a small contribution to this heroic narrative.
The dictionary has,
of course, always been a creature of politics. Three hundred and fifty
years ago in his Leviathan, Thomas Hobbes argued that one of
the most important functions of the political sovereign was to prevent
violent civil strife by fixing the definitions of words in order to
stabilise their meanings. This cannot be done -- however much the French
state has tried over the centuries -- and the great modern reference
books have always served to contest the signification of existing terms
and practices as they try to establish new and authoritative interpretations
of them. Three hundred years ago, Pierre Bayle's wonderful Dictionnaire historique et critique was
written as a sustained attack on the religious bigotry of his time and
it is still a captivating read. The Encyclopédie of Denis
Diderot and the philosophes was a vital document of the eighteenth
century Enlightenment; and our own century has seen a rash of classics,
including three editions of the extraordinary Big Soviet Encyclopaedia.
The Turtle salutes
its illustrious predecessors, and, like New Labour, the Dictionary of
the Turtle aims to further these traditional values in a modern setting.
It will be a dictionary of politics and culture, history and science.
Although presentist in orientation, we believe that our contemporary
tasks demand that we possess a comprehensive understanding of the past,
and of the historical process itself.
As we assemble material
for the project, we will slowly progress through the alphabet, and we
hope to post the article on Zinoviev this side of the Millennium [We
didn't get Zinoviev in by Y2K, but did manage Zidane,Zinedine,
which is just as good -- Ed.].
Contributions are
welcome, encouraged, required... If you think the Dictionary fails to
reflect your own progressive concerns, submit the entries and we can
Rectify the Anomaly!
Entries should above
all be concise and original. They should contain a wealth of detail,
but should not be reducible to a mere litany of facts. They should interpret,
analyse, speculate. They must be fun to read. They can be as idiosyncratic
or as controversial as they want to be, for there is no special demand
for strict impartiality or an unattainable objectivity. Remember that
excellent works of reference exist for all the major academic disciplines:
we are not trying to replace these or to reduplicate them, but to produce
a distinctive product of our own that can stand alongside.
Since dialectics
is the science of being, all entries are subject to constant scrutiny
and open to possible revision and adaptation. We hope that entries will
evolve over time, and that as they do so, their roots in their original
formulations will remain clear. If you spot errors or desire to modify
or extend existing entries, please get in touch. Nothing is definitive.
Everything is in flux.
We hope that many
of the readers and subscribers of the Turtle will join us on this enterprise.
For as Turtle-readers have long been aware, The Future Begins
Now!
Go back
to the Dictionary's front page.
