Author : Kevin Kelly
Publisher : Basic Books
Page : 666 pages
File Size : 15,70 MB
Release : 2009-04-30
Category : Science
ISBN : 078674703X
Out of Control chronicles the dawn of a new era in which the machines and systems that drive our economy are so complex and autonomous as to be indistinguishable from living things.
Author : Jonathan Nitzan
Publisher : Routledge
Page : 853 pages
File Size : 31,38 MB
Release : 2009-06-02
Category : Political Science
ISBN : 1134022298
Conventional theories of capitalism are mired in a deep crisis: after centuries of debate, they are still unable to tell us what capital is. Liberals and Marxists both think of capital as an ‘economic’ entity that they count in universal units of ‘utils’ or ‘abstract labour’, respectively. But these units are totally fictitious. Nobody has ever been able to observe or measure them, and for a good reason: they don’t exist. Since liberalism and Marxism depend on these non-existing units, their theories hang in suspension. They cannot explain the process that matters most – the accumulation of capital. This book offers a radical alternative. According to the authors, capital is not a narrow economic entity, but a symbolic quantification of power. It has little to do with utility or abstract labour, and it extends far beyond machines and production lines. Capital, the authors claim, represents the organized power of dominant capital groups to reshape – or creorder – their society. Written in simple language, accessible to lay readers and experts alike, the book develops a novel political economy. It takes the reader through the history, assumptions and limitations of mainstream economics and its associated theories of politics. It examines the evolution of Marxist thinking on accumulation and the state. And it articulates an innovative theory of ‘capital as power’ and a new history of the ‘capitalist mode of power’.
Author : Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing
Publisher : Princeton University Press
Page : 336 pages
File Size : 32,6 MB
Release : 2011-10-23
Category : Social Science
ISBN : 1400830591
What the struggle over the Indonesian rainforests can teach us about the social frictions that shape the world around us Rubbing two sticks together produces heat and light while one stick alone is just a stick. It is the friction that produces movement, action, and effect. Anthropologist Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing challenges the widespread view that globalization invariably signifies a clash of cultures, developing friction as a metaphor for the diverse and conflicting social interactions that make up our contemporary world. Tsing focuses on the rainforests of Indonesia, where in the 1980s and 1990s capitalist interests increasingly reshaped the landscape not so much through corporate design as through awkward chains of legal and illegal entrepreneurs that wrested the land from previous claimants, creating resources for distant markets. In response, environmental movements arose to defend the rainforests and the communities of people who live in them. Not confined to a village, province, or nation, the social drama of the Indonesian rainforests includes local and national environmentalists, international science, North American investors, advocates for Brazilian rubber tappers, United Nations funding agencies, mountaineers, village elders, and urban students—all drawn into unpredictable, messy misunderstandings, but misunderstandings that sometimes work out. Providing an invaluable portfolio of methods for the study of global interconnections, Friction shows how cultural differences are in the grip of worldly encounter and reveals how much is overlooked in contemporary theories of the global.
Author : Rob Nixon
Publisher : Harvard University Press
Page : 371 pages
File Size : 13,81 MB
Release : 2011-06-01
Category : Nature
ISBN : 067424799X
“Groundbreaking in its call to reconsider our approach to the slow rhythm of time in the very concrete realms of environmental health and social justice.” —Wold Literature Today The violence wrought by climate change, toxic drift, deforestation, oil spills, and the environmental aftermath of war takes place gradually and often invisibly. Using the innovative concept of "slow violence" to describe these threats, Rob Nixon focuses on the inattention we have paid to the attritional lethality of many environmental crises, in contrast with the sensational, spectacle-driven messaging that impels public activism today. Slow violence, because it is so readily ignored by a hard-charging capitalism, exacerbates the vulnerability of ecosystems and of people who are poor, disempowered, and often involuntarily displaced, while fueling social conflicts that arise from desperation as life-sustaining conditions erode. In a book of extraordinary scope, Nixon examines a cluster of writer-activists affiliated with the environmentalism of the poor in the global South. By approaching environmental justice literature from this transnational perspective, he exposes the limitations of the national and local frames that dominate environmental writing. And by skillfully illuminating the strategies these writer-activists deploy to give dramatic visibility to environmental emergencies, Nixon invites his readers to engage with some of the most pressing challenges of our time.
Author : Max Horkheimer
Publisher :
Page : 260 pages
File Size : 42,37 MB
Release : 1978
Category : History
ISBN :
Author : Phil Masters
Publisher : Steve Jackson Games
Page : 244 pages
File Size : 50,76 MB
Release : 2018-02-05
Category : Games & Activities
ISBN : 9781556348259
Welcome to the land of Yrth, a magical realm of incredibly varied races and monsters - including people snatched from our Earth and other worlds by the cataclysmic Banestorm! Whole villages were transported - from such diverse locales as medieval England, France, Germany, and the Far East. Now humans struggle with dwarves, elves, and each other. The Crusades aren't ancient history here - they're current events! Characters can journey from the windswept plains of the Nomad Lands - where fierce Nordic warriors seek a valiant death to earn a seat in Valhalla - to Megalos, the ancient empire where magic and political intrigue go hand in hand. Or trek south to the Muslim lands of al-Wazif and al-Haz to explore the forbidden city of Geb'al-Din. This book updates the original Yrth of GURPS Third Edition Fantasy and Fantasy Adventures. It provides GMs with a complete world background - history, religion, culture, politics, races, and a detailed map - everything needed to start a GURPS campaign. Phil Masters (Discworld and Hellboy RPGs) and Jonathan Woodward (Hellboy and GURPS Ogre) have added new peoples, places, and plots, as well as lots more on magic and mysticism, all of which conforms to GURPS Fantasy and GURPS Magic. So prepare to make your own mark on Yrth. Plunder elven ruins while evading the desert natives. Play a peasant-born hero . . . an orcish pirate . . . a Muslim double agent commanded to infiltrate the Hospitallers. Yrth awaits the legend of you!
Author : Richard Peet
Publisher : Routledge
Page : 655 pages
File Size : 38,72 MB
Release : 2010-12-17
Category : Nature
ISBN : 1136904328
The world is caught in the mesh of a series of environmental crises. So far attempts at resolving the deep basis of these have been superficial and disorganized. Global Political Ecology links the political economy of global capitalism with the political ecology of a series of environmental disasters and failed attempts at environmental policies. This critical volume draws together contributions from twenty-five leading intellectuals in the field. It begins with an introductory chapter that introduces the readers to political ecology and summarizes the books main findings. The following seven sections cover topics on the political ecology of war and the disaster state; fuelling capitalism: energy scarcity and abundance; global governance of health, bodies, and genomics; the contradictions of global food; capital’s marginal product: effluents, waste, and garbage; water as a commodity, a human right, and power; the functions and dysfunctions of the global green economy; political ecology of the global climate, and carbon emissions. This book contains accounts of the main currents of thought in each area that bring the topics completely up-to-date. The individual chapters contain a theoretical introduction linking in with the main themes of political ecology, as well as empirical information and case material. Global Political Ecology serves as a valuable reference for students interested in political ecology, environmental justice, and geography.
Author : Thomas Grunewald
Publisher : Routledge
Page : 241 pages
File Size : 46,55 MB
Release : 2004-07-31
Category : History
ISBN : 1134337582
The book studies how the concept of the bandit was taken up and manipulated during the Late Roman Republic and early Empire (2nd c.BC - 3rd c. AD.)
Author : Walter Rinderle
Publisher : University Press of Kentucky
Page : 293 pages
File Size : 37,30 MB
Release : 2014-07-11
Category : History
ISBN : 081314888X
Many scholars have tried to assess Adolf Hitler's influence on the German people, usually focusing on university towns and industrial communities, most of them predominately Protestant or religiously mixed. This work by Walter Rinderle and Bernard Norling, however, deals with the impact of the Nazis on Oberschopfheim, a small, rural, overwhelmingly Catholic village in Baden-Wuerttemberg in southwestern Germany. This incisively written book raises fundamental questions about the nature of the Third Reich. The authors portray the Nazi regime as considerably less "totalitarian" than is commonly assumed, hardly an exemplar of the efficiency for which Germany is known, and neither revered nor condemned by most of its inhabitants. The authors suggest that Oberschopfheim merely accepted Nazi rule with the same resignation with which so many ordinary people have regarded their governments throughout history. Based on village and county records and on the direct testimony of Oberschopfheimers, this book will interest anyone concerned with contemporary Germany as a growing economic power and will appeal to the descendants of German immigrants to the United States because of its depiction of several generations of life in a German village.
Author : Henri Lefebvre
Publisher : Verso Books
Page : 417 pages
File Size : 44,20 MB
Release : 2012-01-16
Category : Philosophy
ISBN : 1844677834
Originally published in 1962, when Lefebvre was beginning his career as a lecturer in sociology at the University of Strasbourg, it established his position in the vanguard of a movement which was to culminate in the events of May 1968. A classic analysis of the modern world using Marxist dialectic, it is a book which supersedes the conventional divisions between academic disciplines. With dazzling skill, Lefebvre moves from philosophy to sociology, from literature to history, to present a profound analysis of the social, political and cultural forces at work in France and the world in the aftermath of Stalin’s death—an analysis in which the contours of our own “postmodernity” appear with startling clarity.
