mkmk's bookshelf: all en-US Tue, 01 Jul 2025 06:40:15 -0700 60 mkmk's bookshelf: all 144 41 /images/layout/goodreads_logo_144.jpg <![CDATA[Ain't I a Woman: Black Women and Feminism]]> 250792 Ain't I a Woman examines the impact of sexism on black women during slavery, the historic devaluation of black womanhood, black male sexism, racism within the recent women's movement, and black women's involvement with feminism.]]> 205 bell hooks 089608129X mkmk 0 to-read 4.51 1981 Ain't I a Woman: Black Women and Feminism
author: bell hooks
name: mkmk
average rating: 4.51
book published: 1981
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/07/01
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> <![CDATA[The Land Grabbers: The New Fight over Who Owns the Earth]]> 13147790 “Raises complex and urgent issues.”—Booklist, starred review

How Wall Street, Chinese billionaires, oil sheiks, and agribusiness are buying up huge tracts of land in a hungry, crowded world.

An unprecedented land grab is taking place around the world. Fearing future food shortages or eager to profit from them, the world’s wealthiest and most acquisitive countries, corporations, and individuals have been buying and leasing vast tracts of land around the world. The scale is astounding: parcels the size of small countries are being gobbled up across the plains of Africa, the paddy fields of Southeast Asia, the jungles of South America, and the prairies of Eastern Europe. Veteran science writer Fred Pearce spent a year circling the globe to find out who was doing the buying, whose land was being taken over, and what the effect of these massive land deals seems to be.
 
The Land Grabbers is a first-of-its-kind exposé that reveals the scale and the human costs of the land grab, one of the most profound ethical, environmental, and economic issues facing the globalized world in the twenty-first century. The corporations, speculators, and governments scooping up land cheap in the developing world claim that industrial-scale farming will help local economies. But Pearce’s research reveals a far more troubling reality. While some mega-farms are ethically run, all too often poor farmers and cattle herders are evicted from ancestral lands or cut off from water sources. The good jobs promised by foreign capitalists and home governments alike fail to materialize. Hungry nations are being forced to export their food to the wealthy, and corporate potentates run fiefdoms oblivious to the country beyond their fences.
 
Pearce’s story is populated with larger-than-life characters, from financier George Soros and industry tycoon Richard Branson, to Gulf state sheikhs, Russian oligarchs, British barons, and Burmese generals. We discover why Goldman Sachs is buying up the Chinese poultry industry, what Lord Rothschild and a legendary 1970s asset-stripper are doing in the backwoods of Brazil, and what plans a Saudi oil billionaire has for Ethiopia. Along the way, Pearce introduces us to the people who actually live on, and live off of, the supposedly “empty” land that is being grabbed, from Cambodian peasants, victimized first by the Khmer Rouge and now by crony capitalism, to African pastoralists confined to ever-smaller tracts. 
 
Over the next few decades, land grabbing may matter more, to more of the planet’s people, than even climate change. It will affect who eats and who does not, who gets richer and who gets poorer, and whether agrarian societies can exist outside corporate control. It is the new battle over who owns the planet.]]> 336 Fred Pearce 0807003247 mkmk 0 to-read, phd-agroecology 3.66 2012 The Land Grabbers: The New Fight over Who Owns the Earth
author: Fred Pearce
name: mkmk
average rating: 3.66
book published: 2012
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/06/03
shelves: to-read, phd-agroecology
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Political Ecology of Agriculture: Agroecology and Post-Development]]> 50710009


The book also explores the other side of the coin, describing how, and under what conditions, social movements are responding to the calamities generated by this model. The central thesis is that many ongoing agroecological processes are providing one of the most interesting guidelines at present for visualizing transitions towards post-development, post-extractivism, and the construction of multiple worlds beyond the sphere of capital.



Political ecology of agriculture joins the calls that question the cultural project of modernity and the predatory sense imposed by the globalized food empire, and invites recognition of the importance of agroecology in the context of the end of the fossil-fuel era and the likely collapse of our industry-based civilization.



]]> 169 Omar Felipe Giraldo 3030118231 mkmk 5 5.00 Political Ecology of Agriculture: Agroecology and Post-Development
author: Omar Felipe Giraldo
name: mkmk
average rating: 5.00
book published:
rating: 5
read at: 2025/05/28
date added: 2025/06/02
shelves: phd-agroecology, academic-faves
review:
Life-changing. Basically says that any radical moevement that tries to change the system will never change the system if it's institutionalized under that system. Here it's about food production and agroecology. The point is: you cannot institutionalize agroecology because the point of agroecology is to question the system and institutionalized ways of producing food.
]]> <![CDATA[Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison]]> 80369 Librarian note: an alternate cover for this edition can be found here.

Barely two hundred and fifty years ago a man condemned of attempting to assassinate the King of France was drawn and quartered in a grisly spectacle that suggested an unmediated duel between the violence of the criminal and the violence of the state. This groundbreaking book by the most influential philosopher since Sartre compels us to reevaluate our assumptions about all the ensuing reforms in the penal institutions of the West. For as he examines innovations that range from the abolition of torture to the institution of forced labor and the appearance of the modern penitentiary, Michel Foucault suggests that punishment has shifted its focus from the prisoner's body to the soul — and that our very concern with rehabilitation encourages and refines criminal activity.

Lucidly reasoned and deftly marshaling a vast body of research, Discipline and Punish is a genuinely revolutionary book, whose implications extend beyond the prison to the minute power relations of our society.]]> 333 Michel Foucault 0679752552 mkmk 0 to-read, phd-24-25 4.23 1975 Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison
author: Michel Foucault
name: mkmk
average rating: 4.23
book published: 1975
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/05/24
shelves: to-read, phd-24-25
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Monocultures of the Mind: Perspectives on Biodiversity and Biotechnology]]> 278187
In lucid and accessible fashion, she examines the current threats to the planet's biodiversity and the environmental and human consequences of its erosion and replacement by monocultural production. She shows how the new Biodiversity Convention has been gravely undermined by a mixture of diplomatic dilution during the process of negotiation and Northern hi-tech interests making money out of the new biotechnologies. She explains what these technologies involve and gives examples of their impact in practice. She questions their claims to improving natural species for the good of all and highlights the ethical and environmental problems posed.

Underlying her arguments is the view that the North's particular approach to scientific understanding has led to a system of monoculture in agriculture - a model that is not being foisted on the South, displacing its societies' ecologically sounder, indigenous and age-old experiences of truly sustainable food cultivation, forest management and animal husbandry. This rapidly accelerating process of technology and system transfer is impoverishing huge numbers of people, disrupting the social systems that provide them with security and dignity, and will ultimately result in a sterile planet in both North and South, In a policy intervention of potentially great significance, she calls instead for a halt, at international as well as local level, to the aid and market incentives to both large-scale destruction of habitats where biodiversity thrives and the introduction of centralised, homogenous systems of cultivation.]]> 184 Vandana Shiva 1856492184 mkmk 0 to-read, phd-agroecology 4.11 1993 Monocultures of the Mind: Perspectives on Biodiversity and Biotechnology
author: Vandana Shiva
name: mkmk
average rating: 4.11
book published: 1993
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/05/24
shelves: to-read, phd-agroecology
review:

]]> <![CDATA[There Is No Antimemetics Division]]> 54870256 Antimemes are real. Think of any piece of information which you wouldn't share with anybody, like passwords, taboos and dirty secrets. Or any piece of information which would be difficult to share even if you complex equations, very boring passages of text, large blocks of random numbers, and dreams... But anomalous antimemes are another matter entirely. How do you contain something you can't record or remember? How do you fight a war against an enemy with effortless, perfect camouflage, when you can never even know that you're at war? Welcome to the Antimemetics Division. No, this is not your first day.This ebook is an official release by me, qntm from the SCP Foundation wiki! PM me if you require confirmation. This ebook collects all of my Antimemetics Division SCP-055, SCP-2256 and the complete serials There Is No Antimemetics Division and Five Five Five Five Five.]]> 220 qntm mkmk 0 to-read 4.22 2020 There Is No Antimemetics Division
author: qntm
name: mkmk
average rating: 4.22
book published: 2020
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/05/22
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> <![CDATA[The 카지노싸이트 of Sadness: A New Understanding of Emotion]]> 195830817
The 카지노싸이트 of Sadness proposes an original scientific account of grief, melancholy, and nostalgia, advocating a unique ethological approach to these familiar, woeful emotions. One of the leading scholars in the psychology of music and music cognition, David Huron draws on hundreds of studies from physiology, medicine, neuroscience, psychology, anthropology, and the arts to resolve long-standing problems that have stymied modern emotion research. A careful examination of sadness-related behaviors reveals their biological and social functions, which Huron uses to formulate a new theory about how emotions in general are displayed and interpreted.

We’ve all shed tears of joy, tears of grief, tears of pain. While different emotions often share the same weepy display, Huron identifies the single function that unites them. He suggests how weeping emerged over the course of human evolution, explores the contrasting cultural manifestations of sadness, and chronicles humanity’s changing interpretations of sadness over time. Huron also explains the various ways cultures recruit and reshape involuntary emotional displays for different social purposes, and he offers a compelling narrative of what makes tragic arts so appealing. Though sadness is typically regarded as the very antithesis of happiness, The 카지노싸이트 of Sadness draws attention to the important roles that grief, melancholy, and nostalgia play in human well-being.]]> 408 David Huron 0262547775 mkmk 0 to-read 4.50 The 카지노싸이트 of Sadness: A New Understanding of Emotion
author: David Huron
name: mkmk
average rating: 4.50
book published:
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/05/20
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> Macroeconomics 53633868
Macroeconomics takes a broad perspective on the economy of a country or region; it studies economic changes in the aggregate, collecting data on production, unemployment, inflation, consumption, investment, trade, and other aspects of national and international economic life. Policymakers depend on macroeconomists' knowledge when making decisions about such issues as taxes and the public budget, monetary and exchange rate policies, and trade policies—all of which, in turn, affect decisions made by individuals and businesses. This volume in the MIT Press Essential Knowledge series offers an introduction to the basics of macroeconomics accessible to the noneconomist. Readers will gain the tools to interpret such economic events as the 2008 financial meltdown, the subsequent euro crisis, and the current protectionist dynamics seen in some developed countries.

The author, an academic economist and two-time Chilean Finance Minister, devotes a substantial part of his analysis to economic development, explaining why some countries achieve continuing economic growth while others become stagnant. He discusses the links between economic activity and employment; employment and unemployment rates; factors behind economic growth; money, inflation, and exchange rate systems; fiscal deficits; balance of payment crises; consumption and savings; investment decisions; fiscal policy; and the process of globalization and its macroeconomic implications.]]> Felipe Larraín B. mkmk 0 to-read 3.67 2011 Macroeconomics
author: Felipe Larraín B.
name: mkmk
average rating: 3.67
book published: 2011
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/05/20
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> Quantum Entanglement 51777645 An exploration of quantum entanglement and the ways in which it contradicts our everyday assumptions about the ultimate nature of reality.

Quantum physics is notable for its brazen defiance of common sense. (Think of Schrödinger's Cat, famously both dead and alive.) An especially rigorous form of quantum contradiction occurs in experiments with entangled particles. Our common assumption is that objects have properties whether or not anyone is observing them, and the measurement of one can't affect the other. Quantum entanglement--called by Einstein "spooky action at a distance"--rejects this assumption, offering impeccable reasoning and irrefutable evidence of the opposite. Is quantum entanglement mystical, or just mystifying? In this volume in the MIT Press Essential Knowledge series, Jed Brody equips readers to decide for themselves. He explains how our commonsense assumptions impose constraints--from which entangled particles break free.

Brody explores such concepts as local realism, Bell's inequality, polarization, time dilation, and special relativity. He introduces readers to imaginary physicists Alice and Bob and their photon analyses; points out that it's easier to reject falsehood than establish the truth; and reports that some physicists explain entanglement by arguing that we live in a cross-section of a higher-dimensional reality. He examines a variety of viewpoints held by physicists, including quantum decoherence, Niels Bohr's Copenhagen interpretation, genuine fortuitousness, and QBism. This relatively recent interpretation, an abbreviation of "quantum Bayesianism," holds that there's no such thing as an absolutely accurate, objective probability "out there," that quantum mechanical probabilities are subjective judgments, and there's no "action at a distance," spooky or otherwise.
]]> 184 Jed Brody 026253844X mkmk 0 to-read 3.78 2020 Quantum Entanglement
author: Jed Brody
name: mkmk
average rating: 3.78
book published: 2020
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/05/20
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Happiness (The MIT Press Essential Knowledge series)]]> 59627016
What does it mean to feel happiness? As a state of mind, it’s elusive. As a concept—despite the plethora of pop psychology books on the subject—it’s poorly understood. In this volume in the MIT Press Essential Knowledge series, psychologist Tim Lomas offers a concise and engaging overview of our current understanding of happiness. Lomas explains that although the field of positive psychology, which focuses on happiness, emerged only in the last twenty-five years, interest in the meaning of happiness goes back several millennia. Drawing on a variety of disciplines, from philosophy and sociology to economics and anthropology, Lomas offers an expansive vision of what happiness means, exploring a significant range of experiential territory.

After considering such related concepts as wellbeing and flourishing, Lomas traces ideas of happiness from the ancient Buddhist notions of sukha and nirvana through Aristotle’s distinction between hedonic and eudaemonic happiness to today’s therapeutic and scientific approaches. He discusses current academic perspectives, looking at the breadth of happiness research across disciplines; examines the mechanics of happiness—the physiological, psychological, phenomenological, and sociocultural processes that make up happiness; explores the factors that influence happiness, both individual and social; and discusses the cultivation of happiness.]]> 304 Tim Lomas 0262544202 mkmk 0 to-read 3.42 Happiness (The MIT Press Essential Knowledge series)
author: Tim Lomas
name: mkmk
average rating: 3.42
book published:
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/05/20
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Animal Rights: All That Matters]]> 16476715 160 Mark Rowlands 1444178849 mkmk 0 to-read 3.99 2013 Animal Rights: All That Matters
author: Mark Rowlands
name: mkmk
average rating: 3.99
book published: 2013
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/05/20
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> The Philosopher and the Wolf 5590168 ]]> 256 Mark Rowlands 1605980331 mkmk 0 to-read 4.17 2008 The Philosopher and the Wolf
author: Mark Rowlands
name: mkmk
average rating: 4.17
book published: 2008
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/05/20
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Agroecology: Ecological Processes in Sustainable Agriculture]]> 3449640 Agriculture, Agronomy, Forestry, Horticulture, Soil 카지노싸이트, Environmental 카지노싸이트 (esp. Plant Ecology), Agricultural Chemistry, Agricultural Economics, Natural Resource Economics, Sociology, and Anthropology ***INTERESSENTENGRUPPE*** Of interest to researchers, students, and professionals in the above fields.- Level: Technical Book, Monograph ***URHEBER*** S.R. Gliessman, University of California, Santa Cruz, CA (Ed.) ***TITEL*** Agroecology ***UNTERTITEL*** Researching the Ecological Basis for Sustainable Agriculture ***BIBLIOGRAPHISCHE-ANGABEN*** 1990. XIV, 380 pp. 87 figs. (Ecological Studies. Eds.: W.D. Billings, F. Golley, O.L. Lange, J.S. Olson, H. Remmert. Vol. 78) Hardcover DM 198,- ISBN 3-540-97028-2 ***CONTENTS*** Contents: Part I: Basic Ecological Concepts in Agroecosystems.- Part II: Agroecosystem Design and Management.- Index. ***LANGTEXT*** This book provides an introduction to research approaches in the emerging interdisciplinary field of agroecology. It demonstrates in a series of international case studies how to combine the more production-oriented focus of the agronomist with the more systems-oriented viewpoint of the ecologist. Different methodologies for quantifying and evaluating agroecosystem sustainability are presented and analyzed. Leading researchers in the field provide examples of the diversity and complexity of agroecological research, ranging from archeology to insect ecology, and examine design and management of agroecosystems that span from the humid tropics to temperate regions. This timely overview will be of greatvalue to ecologists, agronomists, geographers, foresters, anthropologists, and others involved in developing a sustainable basis for land use, management, and conservation worldwide. ***RS-ENDE*** RS 11/89 PREX ***RS-NOTIZEN*** NY/Dr. Czeschlik]]> 384 Stephen R. Gliessman 1575040433 mkmk 0 to-read, phd-agroecology 4.42 1997 Agroecology: Ecological Processes in Sustainable Agriculture
author: Stephen R. Gliessman
name: mkmk
average rating: 4.42
book published: 1997
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/05/18
shelves: to-read, phd-agroecology
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Swann’s Way (In Search of Lost Time, #1)]]> 12749 In Search of Lost Time is one of the most entertaining reading experiences in any language and arguably the finest novel of the twentieth century. But since its original prewar translation there has been no completely new version in English. Now, Penguin Classics brings Proust’s masterpiece to new audiences throughout the world, beginning with Lydia Davis’s internationally acclaimed translation of the first volume, Swann’s Way.]]> 468 Marcel Proust 0142437964 mkmk 0 to-read 4.12 1913 Swann’s Way (In Search of Lost Time, #1)
author: Marcel Proust
name: mkmk
average rating: 4.12
book published: 1913
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/05/18
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> The Satanic Verses 12781
From the back cover.]]> 561 Salman Rushdie 0312270828 mkmk 0 to-read 3.73 1988 The Satanic Verses
author: Salman Rushdie
name: mkmk
average rating: 3.73
book published: 1988
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/05/18
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Agroecology: The Scientific Basis Of Alternative Agriculture]]> 3994624 Book by Altieri, Miguel A 236 Miguel A. Altieri 1853390003 mkmk 0 to-read, phd-agroecology 4.00 1987 Agroecology: The Scientific Basis Of Alternative Agriculture
author: Miguel A. Altieri
name: mkmk
average rating: 4.00
book published: 1987
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/05/15
shelves: to-read, phd-agroecology
review:

]]> <![CDATA[The China Study: The Most Comprehensive Study of Nutrition Ever Conducted and the Startling Implications for Diet, Weight Loss, and Long-term Health]]> 178788
In The China Study, Dr. T. Colin Campbell details the connection between nutrition and heart disease, diabetes, and cancer. The report also examines the source of nutritional confusion produced by powerful lobbies, government entities, and opportunistic scientists. The New York Times has recognized the study as the “Grand Prix of epidemiology” and the “most comprehensive large study ever undertaken of the relationship between diet and the risk of developing disease.”

The China Study is not a diet book. Dr. Campbell cuts through the haze of misinformation and delivers an insightful message to anyone living with cancer, diabetes, heart disease, obesity, and those concerned with the effects of aging.]]> 419 T. Colin Campbell 1932100660 mkmk 0 to-read 4.22 2004 The China Study: The Most Comprehensive Study of Nutrition Ever Conducted and the Startling Implications for Diet, Weight Loss, and Long-term Health
author: T. Colin Campbell
name: mkmk
average rating: 4.22
book published: 2004
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/05/12
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Regenerative Farming and Sustainable Diets: Human, Animal and Planetary Health (Earthscan Food and Agriculture)]]> 212742170 286 Joyce D'Silva 1032684321 mkmk 0 0.0 Regenerative Farming and Sustainable Diets: Human, Animal and Planetary Health (Earthscan Food and Agriculture)
author: Joyce D'Silva
name: mkmk
average rating: 0.0
book published:
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/05/11
shelves: currently-reading, phd-agroecology
review:

]]> Poverty and Famines 25990661 270 Amartya Sen 0195649540 mkmk 0 to-read, phd-24-25 4.25 1981 Poverty and Famines
author: Amartya Sen
name: mkmk
average rating: 4.25
book published: 1981
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/05/09
shelves: to-read, phd-24-25
review:

]]> <![CDATA[The Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals]]> 3109 What should we have for dinner? For omnivore like ourselves, this simple question has always posed a dilemma. When you can eat just about anything nature (or the supermarket) has to offer, deciding what you should eat will inevitably stir anxiety, especially when some of the foods on offer might shorten your life. Today, buffered by one food fad after another, America is suffering from what can only be described as a national eating disorder. The omnivore’s dilemma has returned with a vengeance, as the cornucopia of the modern American supermarket and fast-food outlet confronts us with a bewildering and treacherous food landscape. What’s at stake in our eating choices is not only our own and our children’s health, but the health of the environment that sustains life on earth.
The Omnivore's Dilemma is groundbreaking book, in which one of America’s most fascinating, original, and elegant writers turns his own omnivorous mind to the seemingly straightforward question of what we should have for dinner. The question has confronted us since man discovered fire, but according to Michael Pollan, the bestselling author of The Botany of Desire, how we answer it today, at the dawn of the twenty-first century, may well determine our very survival as a species. Should we eat a fast-food hamburger? Something organic? Or perhaps something we hunt, gather, or grow ourselves?
To find out, Pollan follows each of the food chains that sustain us—industrial food, organic or alternative food, and food we forage ourselves—from the source to a final meal, and in the process develops a definitive account of the American way of eating. His absorbing narrative takes us from Iowa cornfields to food-science laboratories, from feedlots and fast-food restaurants to organic farms and hunting grounds, always emphasizing our dynamic coevolutionary relationship with the handful of plant and animal species we depend on. Each time Pollan sits down to a meal, he deploys his unique blend of personal and investigative journalism to trace the origins of everything consumed, revealing what we unwittingly ingest and explaining how our taste for particular foods and flavors reflects our evolutionary inheritance.
The surprising answers Pollan offers to the simple question posed by this book have profound political, economic, psychological, and even moral implications for all of us. Ultimately, this is a book as much about visionary solutions as it is about problems, and Pollan contends that, when it comes to food, doing the right thing often turns out to be the tastiest thing an eater can do. Beautifully written and thrillingly argued, The Omnivore’s Dilemma promises to change the way we think about the politics and pleasure of eating. For anyone who reads it, dinner will never again look, or taste, quite the same.]]> 450 Michael Pollan 1594200823 mkmk 0 to-read, phd-24-25 4.18 2006 The Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals
author: Michael Pollan
name: mkmk
average rating: 4.18
book published: 2006
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/05/09
shelves: to-read, phd-24-25
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Uvod v zgodovino političnih idej]]> 18396069
V drugem delu knjige, ki je posvečen predmetu preučevanja, predstavita začetek politične misli, odnos narava-družba-politika, premik od Boga k naravi ter odnos med posameznikom in državo. Posebno mesto dajeta političnim idejam kot ideologiji, vzeti bodisi za sistem idej v pomenu znanstvenega klasificiranja bodisi za lažno zavest, ki reflektira politično stvarnost. To pojasnjujeta na primeru Darwinovega evolucionizma, Stalinovega Kratkega kurza VKP(b), Andersonovih pravljic ter metafor. Knjigo zaključujeta imensko kazalo in izbrana literature.]]> 216 Igor Lukšič 9616294903 mkmk 0 phd-24-25, currently-reading 3.67 2007 Uvod v zgodovino političnih idej
author: Igor Lukšič
name: mkmk
average rating: 3.67
book published: 2007
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/04/28
shelves: phd-24-25, currently-reading
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Designs for the Pluriverse: Radical Interdependence, Autonomy, and the Making of Worlds (New Ecologies for the Twenty-First Century)]]> 34852583 Designs for the Pluriverse Arturo Escobar presents a new vision of design theory and practice aimed at channeling design's world-making capacity toward ways of being and doing that are deeply attuned to justice and the Earth. Noting that most design—from consumer goods and digital technologies to built environments—currently serves capitalist ends, Escobar argues for the development of an “autonomous design” that eschews commercial and modernizing aims in favor of more collaborative and placed-based approaches. Such design attends to questions of environment, experience, and politics while focusing on the production of human experience based on the radical interdependence of all beings. Mapping autonomous design’s principles to the history of decolonial efforts of indigenous and Afro-descended people in Latin America, Escobar shows how refiguring current design practices could lead to the creation of more just and sustainable social orders.]]> 312 Arturo Escobar 0822370905 mkmk 4 phd-24-25 4.25 Designs for the Pluriverse: Radical Interdependence, Autonomy, and the Making of Worlds (New Ecologies for the Twenty-First Century)
author: Arturo Escobar
name: mkmk
average rating: 4.25
book published:
rating: 4
read at: 2025/04/25
date added: 2025/04/25
shelves: phd-24-25
review:

]]> <![CDATA[The Failure of Modern Civilization and the Struggle for a «Deep» Alternative: On «Critical Theory of Patriarchy» as a New Paradigm (Beiträge zur Dissidenz)]]> 15093639 304 Claudia von Werlhof 3631615523 mkmk 0 to-read, phd-24-25 5.00 2010 The Failure of Modern Civilization and the Struggle for a «Deep» Alternative: On «Critical Theory of Patriarchy» as a New Paradigm (Beiträge zur Dissidenz)
author: Claudia von Werlhof
name: mkmk
average rating: 5.00
book published: 2010
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/04/25
shelves: to-read, phd-24-25
review:

]]> <![CDATA[The Great Work: Our Way into the Future]]> 143389 241 Thomas Berry 0609804995 mkmk 0 to-read, phd-24-25 4.03 1999 The Great Work: Our Way into the Future
author: Thomas Berry
name: mkmk
average rating: 4.03
book published: 1999
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/04/22
shelves: to-read, phd-24-25
review:

]]> Becoming Human by Design 16075095
Examining the relation of design to the nature of the human species - where the species came from, how it was created, what it became and its likely future - Fry asserts that current biological and social models of evolution are an insufficient explanation of how 'we humans' became what we are.

Making a case for ontological design as an evolutionary agency, the book posits the relation between the formation of the world of human fabrication and the making of mankind itself as indivisible. It also functions as a provocation to rethink the fate of Homo sapiens, recognising that all species are finite and that the fate of humankind turns on a fundamental Darwinian principle - adapt or die. Fry considers the nature of adaptation, arguing that it will depend on an ability to think and design in new ways.]]> 272 Tony Fry 0857853554 mkmk 0 to-read, phd-24-25 4.33 2012 Becoming Human by Design
author: Tony Fry
name: mkmk
average rating: 4.33
book published: 2012
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/04/21
shelves: to-read, phd-24-25
review:

]]> Tools for Conviviality 253076 110 Ivan Illich 0714509744 mkmk 0 to-read, phd-24-25 4.04 1973 Tools for Conviviality
author: Ivan Illich
name: mkmk
average rating: 4.04
book published: 1973
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/04/16
shelves: to-read, phd-24-25
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Technofeudalism: What Killed Capitalism]]> 75560036
Capitalism is dead. Welcome to technofeudalism. The perfect Christmas gift for the political visionaries in your life.

In his boldest and most far-reaching book, the visionary economist and number-one bestselling author Yanis Varoufakis shows how the owners of big tech became the world's feudal overlords – replacing capitalism with a fundamentally new system that enslaves our minds, defies democracy and rewrite the rules of global power.

But as Varoufakis also reveals, technofeudalism contains new opportunities to thwart and overturn it, bringing into focus more clearly than ever the revolution we need to escape our digital prison.

‘An epochal, once-in-a-millennium shift . . . this isn't just new technology. This is the world grappling with an entirely new economic system and therefore political power’ Observer

‘An urgent demand to seize the means of computation’ CORY DOCTOROW

A FINANCIAL TIMES BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR]]> 224 Yanis Varoufakis mkmk 0 to-read 4.03 2023 Technofeudalism: What Killed Capitalism
author: Yanis Varoufakis
name: mkmk
average rating: 4.03
book published: 2023
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/04/15
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Governing the Commons: The Evolution of Institutions for Collective Action (Political Economy of Institutions and Decisions)]]> 1048424 Congratulations to Elinor Ostrom, Co-Winner of The Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic 카지노싸이트s in Memory of Alfred Nobel 2009!

The governance of natural resources used by many individuals in common is an issue of increasing concern to policy analysts. Both state control and privatization of resources have been advocated, but neither the state nor the market have been uniformly successful in solving common pool resource problems. After critiquing the foundations of policy analysis as applied to natural resources, Elinor Ostrom here provides a unique body of empirical data to explore conditions under which common pool resource problems have been satisfactorily or unsatisfactorily solved. Dr. Ostrom first describes three models most frequently used as the foundation for recommending state or market solutions. She then outlines theoretical and empirical alternatives to these models in order to illustrate the diversity of possible solutions. In the following chapters she uses institutional analysis to examine different ways--both successful and unsuccessful--of governing the commons. In contrast to the proposition of the tragedy of the commons argument, common pool problems sometimes are solved by voluntary organizations rather than by a coercive state. Among the cases considered are communal tenure in meadows and forests, irrigation communities and other water rights, and fisheries.]]> 298 Elinor Ostrom 0521405998 mkmk 5 phd-24-25
The question of the book is: what variables are needed to achieve a community equilibrium where all parties share a common-pool resource.

The book offers a new theoretical concept and a new, albeit still rough, measurement instrument with which we can predict the success of a CPR community.

Brilliant work.]]> 4.20 1990 Governing the Commons: The Evolution of Institutions for Collective Action (Political Economy of Institutions and Decisions)
author: Elinor Ostrom
name: mkmk
average rating: 4.20
book published: 1990
rating: 5
read at: 2025/04/05
date added: 2025/04/13
shelves: phd-24-25
review:
The book criticizes the typical theoretical concepts like the game theory or the tragedy of the commons. Ostrom says and proves that these concepts are theoretical, context-dependent and often untranslatable to the real world.

The question of the book is: what variables are needed to achieve a community equilibrium where all parties share a common-pool resource.

The book offers a new theoretical concept and a new, albeit still rough, measurement instrument with which we can predict the success of a CPR community.

Brilliant work.
]]> <![CDATA[Justice, Society and Nature: An Exploration of Political Ecology]]> 2018126 272 Brendan Gleeson 0415145171 mkmk 5 phd-24-25
some citations:

One can argue over the definition of ‘development’ and ‘sustainable’ but what seems undeniable is the fact that judgements must be made in favour of some forms of development and against others, and further, that those judgements can no longer be left to individualised producers and consumers interacting in markets created and conditioned by national states. (pg 13)

Bauman in Low and Gleeson: Moral responsibility prompts us to care that our children are fed, clad and shod; it cannot offer us much practical advice, however, when faced with a depleted, desiccated and overheated planet which our children and the children of our children will inherit and will have to inhabit in the direct or oblique result of our present collective unconcern. (Bauman, 1993:218). (pg 38)

ABOUT ARGUMENTATIONS: [...] true dialogue requires argument that one positionis better than another. The only reasonable basis for such a claim that one position is better than another would seem to be that one position better expresses the humanness of humans, the transcendent and universal qualities we share between cultures. It will not do to say: ‘Well what you say is right for you, but not for me’. Simply agreeing to differ in this way is merely an avoidance of dialogue. We would be saying in effect: ‘Let us talk about many things but let us avoid talking about what centrally divides us’. In such an artificial and vacuuous interaction no-one learns from anyone and the status quo is forever preserved. (pg 44)

CAPITALISM CREATED NEEDS BY UNNECESSARY PRODUCTION: Capitalism has an almost infinite capacityto develop new objects to possess, and thus to develop consciousness of a certain category of need. But this capacity is limited to objects which can be quantified and purchased: ‘The need to have is that to which all needs are reduced…. It is a need directed towards private property and money in ever increasing quantity’ (Heller, 1974:57). Capitalism is therefore a one-sided mode of production which inhibits the development of a consciousness of those needs which cannot be quantified or marketed. (pg 63)

ABOUT GDP AND GNP: The standards by which economies are evaluated by those who govern them (national governments, the World Bank, the IMF) depend on one type of measure in particular: gross national product or gross domestic product (GNP, GDP, the difference is significant).

--> GNP was never intended as a measure of ‘welfare’ but simply of business activity with a view to determining the national income of a country at war. The wellbeing of a population cannot be and was never intended to be measured by GNP. Moreover GNP was later revised as the primary measure of growth (read ‘economic success’) and replaced by GDP. Whereas GNP is a measure of production that generates money income for a country’s residents, GDP (gross domestic product) measures production that generates income in a nation’s economy ‘whether the resources are owned by that country’s residents or not’ (Waring, 1988:71). Thus income which accrues to non-residents (in the form of profits, interest, etc.) from a given national economy is part of its GDP but not of its GNP. Mining ventures may add to the GDP of a country like Papua New Guinea but may add relatively little to the (unevenly distributed) financial benefit of residents. (pg 74-75)

THEORY OF JUSTICE: What the theory of justice must regulate is the inequalities in life prospects between citizens that arise from social starting positions, natural advantages, and historical contingencies. Even if these inequalities are not in some cases very great, their effect may be great enough so that over time they have significant cumulative consequences. (Rawls in Low and Gleeson, pg 88)

FREEDOM OF SPEECH: Freedom of speech understood simply as the right to express an opinion ‘into the void’, as it were, trivialises communication. Public dialogue is about the freedom to engage in a meaningful two-way process. (pg 92)

TODAY IS PREVALENT THOUGHT THAT THE MARKET IS A TRUE MEASURE FOR PREFERENCE: Especially prevalent is the welfare—utilitarian assumption that all human preferences for social ‘goods’ and ‘bads’ can be measured in money terms (principally as price signals emerging through exchange mechanisms) and can therefore be equated, substituted, and even traded, for distributional purposes. (pg 116)

--> OFC, THE MARKET ONLY REFLECTS THE LACK OF CHOICE TO LEAD A CERTAIN LIFE-STYLE REMOVED FROM PRODUCTION, CONSUMPTION AND EXCHANGE: The aggregate of individual preferences achievable in a market is thus confused with social and political consensus—the market aggregate expedient with political principle. It seems hardly necessary to point out just how far removed such an assumption is from human reality [...] (pg 118)

The importance of this analysis is that it shows that, rather than being a system tending towards equilibrium, as utilitarian economists generally assume, capitalism depends at core on the maintenance of what complexity theorists term a ‘far-from-equilibrium’ condition or, in Marxist terms, ‘uneven development’ (Anderson et al., 1988; Brian, 1990; Smith, 1994:649–50; Fagan and Webber, 1994). (pg 121)

TWO PRINCIPLES OF ECOLOGICAL JUSTICE: 1. The first principle of ecological justice is that every natural entity is entitled to enjoy the fullness of its own form of life. Non-human nature is entitled to moral consideration. [...] 2. The second principle is that all life forms are mutually dependent and dependent on non-life forms. This principle must be considered when any conflict among species occurs. (pg 156)

--> 'moral' rules of thumb: 1. Life has moral precedence over non-life, 2. Individualised life forms have moral precedence over life forms which only exist as communities, 3. Individualised life forms with human consciousness have moral precedence over other life forms. (pg 156-157)

CONCLUSION: [T]he challenge of ecological and environmental justice is nothing less than the transformation of the global institutions of governance, the reinstatement of democracy at a new level, the democratisation of both production and its regulation. (pg 213)]]> 5.00 1998 Justice, Society and Nature: An Exploration of Political Ecology
author: Brendan Gleeson
name: mkmk
average rating: 5.00
book published: 1998
rating: 5
read at: 2025/03/22
date added: 2025/03/22
shelves: phd-24-25
review:
The book talks about how to achieve political and ecological justice for human and non-human world on a global scale. It posits that the only system possible for achieving ecological justice is a cosmopolitan democratic global one. This means global institutions udner which, as the authors assure us, there would be space for cultural diversity and autonomy.

some citations:

One can argue over the definition of ‘development’ and ‘sustainable’ but what seems undeniable is the fact that judgements must be made in favour of some forms of development and against others, and further, that those judgements can no longer be left to individualised producers and consumers interacting in markets created and conditioned by national states. (pg 13)

Bauman in Low and Gleeson: Moral responsibility prompts us to care that our children are fed, clad and shod; it cannot offer us much practical advice, however, when faced with a depleted, desiccated and overheated planet which our children and the children of our children will inherit and will have to inhabit in the direct or oblique result of our present collective unconcern. (Bauman, 1993:218). (pg 38)

ABOUT ARGUMENTATIONS: [...] true dialogue requires argument that one positionis better than another. The only reasonable basis for such a claim that one position is better than another would seem to be that one position better expresses the humanness of humans, the transcendent and universal qualities we share between cultures. It will not do to say: ‘Well what you say is right for you, but not for me’. Simply agreeing to differ in this way is merely an avoidance of dialogue. We would be saying in effect: ‘Let us talk about many things but let us avoid talking about what centrally divides us’. In such an artificial and vacuuous interaction no-one learns from anyone and the status quo is forever preserved. (pg 44)

CAPITALISM CREATED NEEDS BY UNNECESSARY PRODUCTION: Capitalism has an almost infinite capacityto develop new objects to possess, and thus to develop consciousness of a certain category of need. But this capacity is limited to objects which can be quantified and purchased: ‘The need to have is that to which all needs are reduced…. It is a need directed towards private property and money in ever increasing quantity’ (Heller, 1974:57). Capitalism is therefore a one-sided mode of production which inhibits the development of a consciousness of those needs which cannot be quantified or marketed. (pg 63)

ABOUT GDP AND GNP: The standards by which economies are evaluated by those who govern them (national governments, the World Bank, the IMF) depend on one type of measure in particular: gross national product or gross domestic product (GNP, GDP, the difference is significant).

--> GNP was never intended as a measure of ‘welfare’ but simply of business activity with a view to determining the national income of a country at war. The wellbeing of a population cannot be and was never intended to be measured by GNP. Moreover GNP was later revised as the primary measure of growth (read ‘economic success’) and replaced by GDP. Whereas GNP is a measure of production that generates money income for a country’s residents, GDP (gross domestic product) measures production that generates income in a nation’s economy ‘whether the resources are owned by that country’s residents or not’ (Waring, 1988:71). Thus income which accrues to non-residents (in the form of profits, interest, etc.) from a given national economy is part of its GDP but not of its GNP. Mining ventures may add to the GDP of a country like Papua New Guinea but may add relatively little to the (unevenly distributed) financial benefit of residents. (pg 74-75)

THEORY OF JUSTICE: What the theory of justice must regulate is the inequalities in life prospects between citizens that arise from social starting positions, natural advantages, and historical contingencies. Even if these inequalities are not in some cases very great, their effect may be great enough so that over time they have significant cumulative consequences. (Rawls in Low and Gleeson, pg 88)

FREEDOM OF SPEECH: Freedom of speech understood simply as the right to express an opinion ‘into the void’, as it were, trivialises communication. Public dialogue is about the freedom to engage in a meaningful two-way process. (pg 92)

TODAY IS PREVALENT THOUGHT THAT THE MARKET IS A TRUE MEASURE FOR PREFERENCE: Especially prevalent is the welfare—utilitarian assumption that all human preferences for social ‘goods’ and ‘bads’ can be measured in money terms (principally as price signals emerging through exchange mechanisms) and can therefore be equated, substituted, and even traded, for distributional purposes. (pg 116)

--> OFC, THE MARKET ONLY REFLECTS THE LACK OF CHOICE TO LEAD A CERTAIN LIFE-STYLE REMOVED FROM PRODUCTION, CONSUMPTION AND EXCHANGE: The aggregate of individual preferences achievable in a market is thus confused with social and political consensus—the market aggregate expedient with political principle. It seems hardly necessary to point out just how far removed such an assumption is from human reality [...] (pg 118)

The importance of this analysis is that it shows that, rather than being a system tending towards equilibrium, as utilitarian economists generally assume, capitalism depends at core on the maintenance of what complexity theorists term a ‘far-from-equilibrium’ condition or, in Marxist terms, ‘uneven development’ (Anderson et al., 1988; Brian, 1990; Smith, 1994:649–50; Fagan and Webber, 1994). (pg 121)

TWO PRINCIPLES OF ECOLOGICAL JUSTICE: 1. The first principle of ecological justice is that every natural entity is entitled to enjoy the fullness of its own form of life. Non-human nature is entitled to moral consideration. [...] 2. The second principle is that all life forms are mutually dependent and dependent on non-life forms. This principle must be considered when any conflict among species occurs. (pg 156)

--> 'moral' rules of thumb: 1. Life has moral precedence over non-life, 2. Individualised life forms have moral precedence over life forms which only exist as communities, 3. Individualised life forms with human consciousness have moral precedence over other life forms. (pg 156-157)

CONCLUSION: [T]he challenge of ecological and environmental justice is nothing less than the transformation of the global institutions of governance, the reinstatement of democracy at a new level, the democratisation of both production and its regulation. (pg 213)
]]> <![CDATA[Democracy and the Global Order: From the Modern State to Cosmopolitan Governance]]> 656685 336 David Held 0804726876 mkmk 0 to-read, phd-24-25 3.65 1995 Democracy and the Global Order: From the Modern State to Cosmopolitan Governance
author: David Held
name: mkmk
average rating: 3.65
book published: 1995
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/03/22
shelves: to-read, phd-24-25
review:

]]> The Eight Mountains 36709372 224 Paolo Cognetti 1501169890 mkmk 0 to-read 4.12 2016 The Eight Mountains
author: Paolo Cognetti
name: mkmk
average rating: 4.12
book published: 2016
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/03/22
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Dialectic: The Pulse of Freedom]]> 1436060 448 Roy Bhaskar 0860915832 mkmk 0 to-read, phd-24-25 3.92 1993 Dialectic: The Pulse of Freedom
author: Roy Bhaskar
name: mkmk
average rating: 3.92
book published: 1993
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/03/22
shelves: to-read, phd-24-25
review:

]]> Ethics 205218 Ethics is undoubtedly Spinoza's greatest work—an elegant, fully cohesive cosmology derived from first principles, providing a coherent picture of reality, and a guide to the meaning of an ethical life. Following a logical step-by-step format, it defines in turn the nature of God, the mind, the emotions, human bondage to the emotions, and the power of understanding—moving from a consideration of the eternal, to speculate upon humanity's place in the natural order, the nature of freedom and the path to attainable happiness. A powerful work of elegant simplicity, the Ethics is a brilliantly insightful consideration of the possibility of redemption through intense thought and philosophical reflection. The Ethics is presented in the standard translation of the work by Edwin Curley. This edition also includes an introduction by Stuart Hampshire, outlining Spinoza's philosophy and placing it in context.]]> 186 Baruch Spinoza 0140435719 mkmk 0 to-read, phd-24-25 4.10 1677 Ethics
author: Baruch Spinoza
name: mkmk
average rating: 4.10
book published: 1677
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/03/19
shelves: to-read, phd-24-25
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Feminism in the Wild: How Human Biases Shape Our Understanding of Animal Behavior]]> 214274069 How dominant culture—from sexism and homophobia to racism, capitalism, ableism, and more—has limited the science of animal behavior, and how we can free ourselves from these limited perspectives.

In Feminism in the Wild, Ambika Kamath and Melina Packer reveal how scientists studying animal behavior have long projected human norms and values onto animals while seeking to understand them. When scientific studies conclude that these norms and values are natural in animals, it makes it easier to think of them as natural in humans too. And because scientists, historically and to this day, largely belong to elite, powerful segments of society, the norms and values embedded into animal behavior science match those of the already powerful. How can animal behavior science escape this trap of naturalizing dominant culture?

Drawing from decades of feminist, antiracist, queer, disability justice, and Marxist contributions—including those of biologists—Kamath and Packer break down persistent assumptions in the status quo of animal behavior science and offer a multitude of alternative approaches. Core concepts in animal behavior science and evolutionary biology—from sex categories and sexual selection to fitness, adaptation, biological determinism and more—are carefully contextualized and critically reexamined. This unique collaboration between an animal behavior scientist and a feminist science studies scholar is an illuminating and hopeful read for anyone who is curious about how animals behave, and anyone who wants to break free from scientific approaches that perpetuate systems of oppression.]]> 208 Ambika Kamath 0262049635 mkmk 0 to-read 3.97 Feminism in the Wild: How Human Biases Shape Our Understanding of Animal Behavior
author: Ambika Kamath
name: mkmk
average rating: 3.97
book published:
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/03/19
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> History Of Japanese Food 25565990 284 Ishige mkmk 0 non-fiction 4.50 2001 History Of Japanese Food
author: Ishige
name: mkmk
average rating: 4.50
book published: 2001
rating: 0
read at: 2020/02/28
date added: 2025/03/08
shelves: non-fiction
review:

]]> <![CDATA[The Green Economy: Environment, Sustainable Development, And The Politics Of The Future]]> 69912 336 Michael Jacobs 0745303129 mkmk 0 to-read, phd-24-25 3.57 1991 The Green Economy: Environment, Sustainable Development, And The Politics Of The Future
author: Michael Jacobs
name: mkmk
average rating: 3.57
book published: 1991
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/03/08
shelves: to-read, phd-24-25
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed]]> 475 Collapse is destined to take its place as one of the essential books of our time, raising the urgent question: How can our world best avoid committing ecological suicide?

In his million-copy bestseller Guns, Germs, and Steel, Jared Diamond examined how and why Western civilizations developed the technologies and immunities that allowed them to dominate much of the world. Now in this brilliant companion volume, Diamond probes the other side of the equation: What caused some of the great civilizations of the past to collapse into ruin, and what can we learn from their fates?

As in Guns, Germs, and Steel, Diamond weaves an all-encompassing global thesis through a series of fascinating historical-cultural narratives. Moving from the Polynesian cultures on Easter Island to the flourishing American civilizations of the Anasazi and the Maya and finally to the doomed Viking colony on Greenland, Diamond traces the fundamental pattern of catastrophe. Environmental damage, climate change, rapid population growth, and unwise political choices were all factors in the demise of these societies, but other societies found solutions and persisted. Similar problems face us today and have already brought disaster to Rwanda and Haiti, even as China and Australia are trying to cope in innovative ways. Despite our own society's apparently inexhaustible wealth and unrivaled political power, ominous warning signs have begun to emerge even in ecologically robust areas like Montana.

Brilliant, illuminating, and immensely absorbing, Collapse is destined to take its place as one of the essential books of our time, raising the urgent question: How can our world best avoid committing ecological suicide?]]> 608 Jared Diamond 0143036556 mkmk 0 to-read, phd-24-25 3.93 2004 Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed
author: Jared Diamond
name: mkmk
average rating: 3.93
book published: 2004
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/03/06
shelves: to-read, phd-24-25
review:

]]> <![CDATA[The Political Ecology of Agrofuels (Routledge ISS Studies in Rural Livelihoods)]]> 22505852 278 Kristina Dietz 1138013153 mkmk 0 to-read, phd-24-25 0.0 2014 The Political Ecology of Agrofuels (Routledge ISS Studies in Rural Livelihoods)
author: Kristina Dietz
name: mkmk
average rating: 0.0
book published: 2014
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/03/06
shelves: to-read, phd-24-25
review:

]]> <![CDATA[China and the Transformation of Global Capitalism (Themes in Global Social Change)]]> 7355104 224 Ho-fung Hung 0801893089 mkmk 0 to-read, phd-24-25 3.27 2009 China and the Transformation of Global Capitalism (Themes in Global Social Change)
author: Ho-fung Hung
name: mkmk
average rating: 3.27
book published: 2009
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/03/06
shelves: to-read, phd-24-25
review:

]]> <![CDATA[The Imperial Mode of Living: Everyday Life and the Ecological Crisis of Capitalism]]> 56665185 Our Unsustainable Why We Can't Have Everything We WantWith the concept of the Imperial Mode of Living, Brand and Wissen highlight the fact that capitalism implies uneven development as well as a constant and accelerating universalisation of a Western mode of production and living. The logic of liberal markets since the 19thCentury, and especially since World War II, has been inscribed into everyday practices that are usually unconsciously reproduced. The authors show that they are a main driver of the ecological crisis and economic and political instability.The Imperial Mode of Living implies that people's everyday practices, including individual and societal orientations, as well as identities, rely heavily on the unlimited appropriation of resources; a disproportionate claim on global and local ecosystems and sinks; and cheap labour from elsewhere. This availability of commodities is largely organised through the world market, backed by military force and/or the asymmetric relations of forces as they have been inscribed in international institutions. Moreover, the Imperial Mode of Living implies asymmetrical social relations along class, gender and race within the respective countries. Here too, it is driven by the capitalist accumulation imperative, growth-oriented state policies and status consumption. The concrete production conditions of commodities are rendered invisible in the places where the commodities are consumed. The imperialist world order is normalized through the mode of production and living.]]> 256 Ulrich Brand 1788739361 mkmk 4 phd-24-25
ELECTRONIC WASTE: The deepening of the imperial mode of living in the global North is also apparent in the resources of the ‘information age’, which since the 1990s have promised to provide a ‘dematerialized’ or ‘virtual’ economy. But the ‘virtual’ economy still requires material resources that must be extracted. Some examples include rare earth metals that, especially in China, are obtained under highly hazardous conditions that threaten the health of workers and the natural environment. Nor is the disposal of electrical appliances any less problematic than their production: two-thirds of unused appliances in the EU are not properly disposed of. Despite a ban on its export from the EU, electronic waste winds up, via many paths, in countries such as Ghana or China. Thus, for example, before the waste import ban in 2017, every year millions of tonnes of electronic waste were moved through Hong Kong to Guiyu in mainland China (about 250 kilometres away). Eighty per cent of the population there, often migrant workers, had no health protections in the recycling companies: they would take the appliances apart with their bare hands. To identify the types of plastic, ‘the workers hold the pieces over the flame of a cigarette lighter and classify them according to the smell of the burnt plastic, and then sort them into different bins. This work is often carried out by minors who inhale the toxic vapours day in, day out.’ The recent ban on waste imports shows the brutal ambiguity of the imperial mode of living. People who lived from the waste treatment are being impoverished due to the reduction of electronic waste (even though some illegal waste still arrives). (pg 107)]]> 3.85 2017 The Imperial Mode of Living: Everyday Life and the Ecological Crisis of Capitalism
author: Ulrich Brand
name: mkmk
average rating: 3.85
book published: 2017
rating: 4
read at: 2025/03/03
date added: 2025/03/06
shelves: phd-24-25
review:
Good for beginners to the subject.

ELECTRONIC WASTE: The deepening of the imperial mode of living in the global North is also apparent in the resources of the ‘information age’, which since the 1990s have promised to provide a ‘dematerialized’ or ‘virtual’ economy. But the ‘virtual’ economy still requires material resources that must be extracted. Some examples include rare earth metals that, especially in China, are obtained under highly hazardous conditions that threaten the health of workers and the natural environment. Nor is the disposal of electrical appliances any less problematic than their production: two-thirds of unused appliances in the EU are not properly disposed of. Despite a ban on its export from the EU, electronic waste winds up, via many paths, in countries such as Ghana or China. Thus, for example, before the waste import ban in 2017, every year millions of tonnes of electronic waste were moved through Hong Kong to Guiyu in mainland China (about 250 kilometres away). Eighty per cent of the population there, often migrant workers, had no health protections in the recycling companies: they would take the appliances apart with their bare hands. To identify the types of plastic, ‘the workers hold the pieces over the flame of a cigarette lighter and classify them according to the smell of the burnt plastic, and then sort them into different bins. This work is often carried out by minors who inhale the toxic vapours day in, day out.’ The recent ban on waste imports shows the brutal ambiguity of the imperial mode of living. People who lived from the waste treatment are being impoverished due to the reduction of electronic waste (even though some illegal waste still arrives). (pg 107)
]]> <![CDATA[First the Seed: The Political Economy of Plant Biotechnology (카지노싸이트 and Technology in Society)]]> 1428468
1988 Cloth, 1990 Paperback, Cambridge University Press
Winner of the Theodore Saloutos Award of the Agricultural History Society
Winner of the Robert K. Merton Award of the American Sociological Association]]> 468 Jack R. Kloppenburg 029919244X mkmk 0 to-read, phd-24-25 3.89 1988 First the Seed: The Political Economy of Plant Biotechnology (카지노싸이트 and Technology in Society)
author: Jack R. Kloppenburg
name: mkmk
average rating: 3.89
book published: 1988
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/02/25
shelves: to-read, phd-24-25
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Workers of the World, Essays toward a Global Labor History (Studies in Global Social History, 1)]]> 10333583 ▪ What is the nature of the world working class, on which Global Labor History focuses? How can we define and demarcate that class, and which factors determine its composition?
▪ Which forms of collective action did this working class develop in the course of time, and what is the logic in that development?
▪ What can we learn from adjacent disciplines? Which insights from anthropologists, sociologists and other social scientists are useful in the development of Global Labor History?]]> 469 Marcel van der Linden 9004166831 mkmk 0 to-read, phd-24-25 3.60 2008 Workers of the World, Essays toward a Global Labor History (Studies in Global Social History, 1)
author: Marcel van der Linden
name: mkmk
average rating: 3.60
book published: 2008
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/02/25
shelves: to-read, phd-24-25
review:

]]> Work: The Last 1,000 Years 34014855
That gap between common assumptions and reality grows even more pronounced in the case of women and other groups excluded from the labour market.

In this important intervention, Andrea Komlosy demonstrates that popular understandings of work have varied radically in different ages and countries. Looking at labour history around the globe from the thirteenth to the twenty-first centuries, Komlosy sheds light on both discursive concepts as well as the concrete coexistence of multiple forms of labour—paid and unpaid, free and unfree. From the economic structures and ideological mystifications surrounding work in the Middle Ages, all the way to European colonialism and the industrial revolution, Komlosy’s narrative adopts a distinctly global and feminist approach, revealing the hidden forms of unpaid and hyper-exploited labour which often go ignored, yet are key to the functioning of the capitalist world-system.

The Last 1,000 Years will open readers’ eyes to an issue much thornier and more complex than most people imagine, one which will be around as long as basic human needs and desires exist.]]> 265 Andrea Komlosy 1786634104 mkmk 0 to-read, phd-24-25 3.31 2018 Work: The Last 1,000 Years
author: Andrea Komlosy
name: mkmk
average rating: 3.31
book published: 2018
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/02/25
shelves: to-read, phd-24-25
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Capitalism and underdevelopment in Latin America: historical studies of Chile and Brazil (The Pelican Latin American library)]]> 580527 368 André Gunder Frank 0140213341 mkmk 0 to-read, phd-24-25 3.89 1967 Capitalism and underdevelopment in Latin America: historical studies of Chile and Brazil (The Pelican Latin American library)
author: André Gunder Frank
name: mkmk
average rating: 3.89
book published: 1967
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/02/25
shelves: to-read, phd-24-25
review:

]]> For Marx (Radical Thinkers) 85921 A milestone in the development of post-war Marxist thought.

This is the work in which Louis Althusser formulated some of his most influential ideas. For Marx, first published in France in 1968, has come to be regarded as the founding text of the school of “structuralist Marxism” which was presided over by the fascinating and enigmatic figure of Louis Althusser. Structuralism constituted an intellectual revolution in the 1960s and 1970s and radically transformed the way philosophy, political and social theory, history, science, and aesthetics were discussed and thought about. For Marx was a key contribution to that process and it fundamentally recast the way in which many people understood Marx and Marxism.

This book contains the classic statements of Althusser's analysis of the young Marx and the importance of Feuerbach during this formative period, of his thesis of the “epistomological break” between the early and the late Marx, and of his conception of dialectics, contradiction and “overdetermination.” Also included is a study of the materialist theater of Bertolazzi and Brecht and the critique of humanist readings of Marxism. Since his death in 1990, Althusser's legacy has come under renewed examination and it is increasingly recognized that the influence of his ideas has been wider and deeper than previously thought: reading For Marx, in its audacity, originality and rigor, will explain why this impact was so significant.]]> 272 Louis Althusser 184467052X mkmk 0 to-read, phd-24-25 3.92 1965 For Marx (Radical Thinkers)
author: Louis Althusser
name: mkmk
average rating: 3.92
book published: 1965
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/02/24
shelves: to-read, phd-24-25
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Security, Territory, Population: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1977-1978]]> 119562 Society Must be Defended and in the first volume of his History of Sexuality, Foucault sets out to study the foundations of this new technology of power over population. Distinct from disciplinary techniques, the mechanisms of power are here finely entwined with technologies of security, and it is to the 18th century developments of these technologies with which the first chapters of the book are concerned. By the fourth lecture however Foucault's attention turns, focusing newly on a history of 'governmentality' from the first centuries of the Christian era through to the emergence of the modern nation state. As Michel Sennerlart explains in his afterword, the effect of this change of direction is to "shift the center of gravity of the lectures from the question of biopower to that of government, to such an extent that the latter almost entirely eclipses the former..." Consequently, in light of Foucault's later work, these lectures represent a radical turning point at which the transition to the problematic of the "government of self and others" begins.]]> 434 Michel Foucault 1403986525 mkmk 0 to-read, phd-24-25 4.31 2004 Security, Territory, Population: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1977-1978
author: Michel Foucault
name: mkmk
average rating: 4.31
book published: 2004
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/02/23
shelves: to-read, phd-24-25
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Prison Notebooks, Volume 2: 1930-1932]]> 85937
Columbia University Press's multivolume Prison Notebooks is the only complete critical edition of Antonio Gramsci's seminal writings in English. The notebooks' integral text gives readers direct access not only to Gramsci's influential ideas but also to the intellectual workshop where those ideas were forged. Extensive notes guide readers through Gramsci's extraordinary series of reflections on an encyclopedic range of topics. Volume 2 contains Gramsci's notebooks 3, 4, and 5, written between 1930 and 1932. Their central themes are popular culture, Italian history, Americanism, and the Catholic Church as a religious institution and formidable politico-ideological force. Gramsci also touches on the Renaissance and Reformation, language and linguistics, military and diplomatic history, and Japanese and Chinese culture. Notebook 4 features an innovative reading of canto 10 from Dante's Inferno and a philosophical analysis of materialism and idealism. It also includes the first draft of Gramsci's famous observations on the history and role of intellectuals in society.]]> 728 Antonio Gramsci 0231105924 mkmk 0 to-read, phd-24-25 4.21 1948 Prison Notebooks, Volume 2: 1930-1932
author: Antonio Gramsci
name: mkmk
average rating: 4.21
book published: 1948
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/02/23
shelves: to-read, phd-24-25
review:

]]> Prison Notebooks: Volume I 85942
Columbia University Press's multivolume Prison Notebooks is the only complete critical edition of Antonio Gramsci's seminal writings in English. The notebooks' integral text gives readers direct access not only to Gramsci's influential ideas but also to the intellectual workshop where those ideas were forged. Extensive notes guide readers through Gramsci's extraordinary series of reflections on an encyclopedic range of topics. Volume 1 opens with an introduction to Gramsci's project, describing the circumstances surrounding the composition of his notebooks and examining his method of inquiry and critical analysis. It is accompanied by a detailed chronology of the author's life. An unparalleled translation of notebooks 1 and 2 follows, which laid the foundations for Gramsci's later writings. Most intriguing are his earliest formulations of the concepts of hegemony, civil society, and passive revolution.]]> 608 Antonio Gramsci 0231060823 mkmk 0 to-read, phd-24-25 4.30 1948 Prison Notebooks: Volume I
author: Antonio Gramsci
name: mkmk
average rating: 4.30
book published: 1948
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/02/23
shelves: to-read, phd-24-25
review:

]]> <![CDATA[The New International Division of Labour: Structural Unemployment in Industrialised Countries and Industrialisation in Developing Countries (Studies in Modern Capitalism)]]> 6126095 444 Folker Fröbel 0521287200 mkmk 0 to-read, phd-24-25 0.0 1980 The New International Division of Labour: Structural Unemployment in Industrialised Countries and Industrialisation in Developing Countries (Studies in Modern Capitalism)
author: Folker Fröbel
name: mkmk
average rating: 0.0
book published: 1980
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/02/23
shelves: to-read, phd-24-25
review:

]]> <![CDATA[The Complete Works of Rosa Luxemburg, Volume II: Economic Writings 2]]> 23012657
The second volume in Rosa Luxemburg’s Complete Works , entitled Economic Writings 2 , contains a new English translation of Luxemburg’s The Accumulation of A Contribution to the Economic Theory of Imperialism , one of the most important works ever composed on capitalism’s incessant drive for self-expansion and the integral connection between capitalism and imperialism. This new translation is the first to present the full work as composed by the author. It also contains her book-length response to her critics, The Accumulation of Capital, Or, What the Epigones Have Made Out of Marx’s Theory—An Anti-Critique . Taken together, these two works represent one of the most important Marxist studies of the globalization of capital.

Also included is an essay on the second and third volumes of Marx’s Capital , which had originally appeared as an unattributed chapter in Franz Mehring’s book Karl Marx .

Thank you to David Gaharia for helping to support the translation of this book.]]> 576 Rosa Luxemburg 1781688524 mkmk 0 to-read, phd-24-25 4.38 2015 The Complete Works of Rosa Luxemburg, Volume II: Economic Writings 2
author: Rosa Luxemburg
name: mkmk
average rating: 4.38
book published: 2015
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/02/23
shelves: to-read, phd-24-25
review:

]]> <![CDATA[The Complete Works of Rosa Luxemburg, Volume I: Economic Writings 1]]> 14451335
In addition to a new translation of her doctoral dissertation, “The Industrial Development of Poland,” Volume I includes the first complete English-language publication of her “Introduction to Political Economy,” which explores (among other issues) the impact of capitalist commodity production and industrialization on noncapitalist social strata in the developing world. Also appearing here are ten recently discovered manuscripts, none of which has ever before been published in English.]]> 620 Rosa Luxemburg 1844679748 mkmk 0 to-read, phd-24-25 4.34 2013 The Complete Works of Rosa Luxemburg, Volume I: Economic Writings 1
author: Rosa Luxemburg
name: mkmk
average rating: 4.34
book published: 2013
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/02/23
shelves: to-read, phd-24-25
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Climate Capitalism: Global Warming and the Transformation of the Global Economy]]> 9562327 218 Peter Newell 0521127289 mkmk 0 to-read, phd-24-25 3.45 2010 Climate Capitalism: Global Warming and the Transformation of the Global Economy
author: Peter Newell
name: mkmk
average rating: 3.45
book published: 2010
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/02/23
shelves: to-read, phd-24-25
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Revolution at Point Zero: Housework, Reproduction, and Feminist Struggle (Common Notions)]]> 13218904 208 Silvia Federici 1604863331 mkmk 0 to-read, phd-24-25 4.36 2012 Revolution at Point Zero: Housework, Reproduction, and Feminist Struggle (Common Notions)
author: Silvia Federici
name: mkmk
average rating: 4.36
book published: 2012
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/02/22
shelves: to-read, phd-24-25
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Living Well at Others' Expense: The Hidden Costs of Western Prosperity]]> 40579087 140 Stephan Lessenich 1509525629 mkmk 0 to-read, phd-24-25 4.10 Living Well at Others' Expense: The Hidden Costs of Western Prosperity
author: Stephan Lessenich
name: mkmk
average rating: 4.10
book published:
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/02/22
shelves: to-read, phd-24-25
review:

]]> <![CDATA[The Green State: Rethinking Democracy and Sovereignty]]> 1331034 348 Robyn Eckersley 0262550563 mkmk 4 phd-24-25
citations from the book:

By “green state” I do not simply mean a liberal democratic state that is managed by a green party government with a set of programmatic environmental goals, although one might anticipate that such a state is most likely to evolve from liberal or social democratic states. Rather, I mean a democratic state whose regulatory ideals and democratic procedures are informed by ecological democracy rather than liberal democracy. Such a state may be understood as a postliberal state insofar as it emerges from an immanent (ecological) critique, rather than from an outright rejection, of liberal democracy. (pg 2)

ECO-MARXIST CRITIQUE: As early as the 1970s, neo-Marxist theorists drew attention to the “fiscal crisis” of the welfare state stemming from the state’s contradictory imperatives to facilitate capital accumulation, on the one hand, and to iron out the harmful social and ecological consequences of capital accumulation by providing an expanding menu of protective welfare (and environmental) services, on the other hand. Now, in the new millennium, the growing intensity of economic regionalization and globalization is making it increasingly difficult for governments to solve a range of social and ecological problems within their territory and beyond. (pg 54)

PROBLEMS WITH 'ECOLOGICAL MODERNIZATION': […] the technical case for ecological modernization is primarily concerned with means (how to pursue greener growth) rather than with ultimate ends. As Christoff has argued, it is concerned with mere “technological adjustments” toward greater eco-efficiency at the level of the firm. This is essentially an economistic understanding that does not challenge existing institutions or dominant neoliberal economic policies. (pg 74)

POST-CAPITALIST ECONOMY: It is the character of the system (the mutual dependencies of the capitalist economy and the liberal capitalist state) that that set limits to the effectiveness of such state interventions. A deep and lasting resolution to ecological problems can therefore only be anticipated in a postcapitalist economy and postliberal democratic state. (pg 81)

GREEN CRITIQUE OF LIBERAL CAPITALISM: There is now an extensive and growing body of green political scholarship that argues that liberal democracy is not especially conducive to protecting long-range, public environmental interests (e.g., biodiversity and ecosystem integrity). This green critique also enlists and builds upon the longstanding critique of liberal democracy waged by social democrats, democratic socialists, and feminists to the effect that the class and gender inequalities generated by capitalism systematically undermine the conditions for the full enjoyment by all citizens of the political equality promised by the liberal democratic state. Thus the green critique adds further weight to the argument that the promise of liberal democracy is a false promise; while proclaiming to be universal, liberal democracy can be shown to be exclusionary in a variety of ways. (pg 87)

PRO-STATE ARGUMENT: Yet such an anti-statist posture cannot withstand critical scrutiny from a critical ecological perspective. The problem seems to be that while states have been associated with violence, insecurity, bureaucratic domination, injustice, and ecological degradation, there is no reason to assume that any alternatives we might imagine or develop will necessarily be free of, or less burdened by, such problems. As Hedley Bull warns, violence, insecurity, injustice, and ecological degradation pre-date the state system, and we cannot rule out the possibility that they are likely to survive the demise of the state system, regardless of what new political structures may arise.
→ Given the seriousness and urgency of many ecological problems (e.g., global warming), building on the state governance structures that already exist seems to be a more fruitful path to take than any attempt to move beyond or around states in the quest for environmental sustainability. Moreover, as a matter of principle, it can be argued that environmental benefits are public goods that ought best be managed by democratically organized public power, and not by private power. (pg 91)

DELIBERATIVE DEMOCRACY: all those potentially affected by a risk should have some meaningful opportunity to participate or otherwise be represented in the making of the policies or decisions that generate the risk. (pg 111)

PUBLIC DELIBERATION: Public spirited political deliberation is the process by which we learn of our dependence on others (and the environment) and the process by which we learn to recognize and respect differently situated others (including nonhuman others and future generations). It is the activity through which citizens consciously create a common life and a common future together, including the ecosystem health and integrity that literally sustain us all. (pg 115)

ABOUT LIBERALISM: [...] the inability of the liberal democratic state to provide systematic environmental protection can be traced to the bourgeois origins of liberalism’s conception of autonomy and to a range of associated “liberal dogmas” that would not survive the critical scrutiny of a genuinely unconstrained and inclusive communication community in the contemporary, deeply interconnected world. Liberalism’s atomistic ontology of the self, its quest for mastery of the external world through the application of instrumental reason, and its corresponding denial of any noninstrumental dependency on the social and biological world have ultimately imperiled rather than enhanced human autonomy for many and environmental integrity for all. By sheltering these articles of faith from further critical questioning, liberalism has lost sight of the dependence of autonomy on critique and thwarted the realization of autonomy for a much wider constituency than is currently the case. (pg 242)





]]> 3.70 2004 The Green State: Rethinking Democracy and Sovereignty
author: Robyn Eckersley
name: mkmk
average rating: 3.70
book published: 2004
rating: 4
read at: 2025/02/20
date added: 2025/02/21
shelves: phd-24-25
review:
Eckersley claims that we can achieve a green future through the state. In other words, the author claims that we must not dissolve states but reform them in a way that serves the environment. I was very anti-establishment before but Eckersley has managed to pick my interest. I don't know if I'm convinced yet.

citations from the book:

By “green state” I do not simply mean a liberal democratic state that is managed by a green party government with a set of programmatic environmental goals, although one might anticipate that such a state is most likely to evolve from liberal or social democratic states. Rather, I mean a democratic state whose regulatory ideals and democratic procedures are informed by ecological democracy rather than liberal democracy. Such a state may be understood as a postliberal state insofar as it emerges from an immanent (ecological) critique, rather than from an outright rejection, of liberal democracy. (pg 2)

ECO-MARXIST CRITIQUE: As early as the 1970s, neo-Marxist theorists drew attention to the “fiscal crisis” of the welfare state stemming from the state’s contradictory imperatives to facilitate capital accumulation, on the one hand, and to iron out the harmful social and ecological consequences of capital accumulation by providing an expanding menu of protective welfare (and environmental) services, on the other hand. Now, in the new millennium, the growing intensity of economic regionalization and globalization is making it increasingly difficult for governments to solve a range of social and ecological problems within their territory and beyond. (pg 54)

PROBLEMS WITH 'ECOLOGICAL MODERNIZATION': […] the technical case for ecological modernization is primarily concerned with means (how to pursue greener growth) rather than with ultimate ends. As Christoff has argued, it is concerned with mere “technological adjustments” toward greater eco-efficiency at the level of the firm. This is essentially an economistic understanding that does not challenge existing institutions or dominant neoliberal economic policies. (pg 74)

POST-CAPITALIST ECONOMY: It is the character of the system (the mutual dependencies of the capitalist economy and the liberal capitalist state) that that set limits to the effectiveness of such state interventions. A deep and lasting resolution to ecological problems can therefore only be anticipated in a postcapitalist economy and postliberal democratic state. (pg 81)

GREEN CRITIQUE OF LIBERAL CAPITALISM: There is now an extensive and growing body of green political scholarship that argues that liberal democracy is not especially conducive to protecting long-range, public environmental interests (e.g., biodiversity and ecosystem integrity). This green critique also enlists and builds upon the longstanding critique of liberal democracy waged by social democrats, democratic socialists, and feminists to the effect that the class and gender inequalities generated by capitalism systematically undermine the conditions for the full enjoyment by all citizens of the political equality promised by the liberal democratic state. Thus the green critique adds further weight to the argument that the promise of liberal democracy is a false promise; while proclaiming to be universal, liberal democracy can be shown to be exclusionary in a variety of ways. (pg 87)

PRO-STATE ARGUMENT: Yet such an anti-statist posture cannot withstand critical scrutiny from a critical ecological perspective. The problem seems to be that while states have been associated with violence, insecurity, bureaucratic domination, injustice, and ecological degradation, there is no reason to assume that any alternatives we might imagine or develop will necessarily be free of, or less burdened by, such problems. As Hedley Bull warns, violence, insecurity, injustice, and ecological degradation pre-date the state system, and we cannot rule out the possibility that they are likely to survive the demise of the state system, regardless of what new political structures may arise.
→ Given the seriousness and urgency of many ecological problems (e.g., global warming), building on the state governance structures that already exist seems to be a more fruitful path to take than any attempt to move beyond or around states in the quest for environmental sustainability. Moreover, as a matter of principle, it can be argued that environmental benefits are public goods that ought best be managed by democratically organized public power, and not by private power. (pg 91)

DELIBERATIVE DEMOCRACY: all those potentially affected by a risk should have some meaningful opportunity to participate or otherwise be represented in the making of the policies or decisions that generate the risk. (pg 111)

PUBLIC DELIBERATION: Public spirited political deliberation is the process by which we learn of our dependence on others (and the environment) and the process by which we learn to recognize and respect differently situated others (including nonhuman others and future generations). It is the activity through which citizens consciously create a common life and a common future together, including the ecosystem health and integrity that literally sustain us all. (pg 115)

ABOUT LIBERALISM: [...] the inability of the liberal democratic state to provide systematic environmental protection can be traced to the bourgeois origins of liberalism’s conception of autonomy and to a range of associated “liberal dogmas” that would not survive the critical scrutiny of a genuinely unconstrained and inclusive communication community in the contemporary, deeply interconnected world. Liberalism’s atomistic ontology of the self, its quest for mastery of the external world through the application of instrumental reason, and its corresponding denial of any noninstrumental dependency on the social and biological world have ultimately imperiled rather than enhanced human autonomy for many and environmental integrity for all. By sheltering these articles of faith from further critical questioning, liberalism has lost sight of the dependence of autonomy on critique and thwarted the realization of autonomy for a much wider constituency than is currently the case. (pg 242)






]]> <![CDATA[The Inclusion of the Other: Studies in Political Theory (Studies in Contemporary German Social Thought)]]> 227177 338 Jürgen Habermas 0262581868 mkmk 0 to-read, phd-24-25 4.02 1996 The Inclusion of the Other: Studies in Political Theory (Studies in Contemporary German Social Thought)
author: Jürgen Habermas
name: mkmk
average rating: 4.02
book published: 1996
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/02/17
shelves: to-read, phd-24-25
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Justification and Application: Remarks on Discourse Ethics (Studies in Contemporary German Social Thought)]]> 63494 229 Jürgen Habermas 0262581361 mkmk 0 to-read, phd-24-25 3.88 1993 Justification and Application: Remarks on Discourse Ethics (Studies in Contemporary German Social Thought)
author: Jürgen Habermas
name: mkmk
average rating: 3.88
book published: 1993
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/02/17
shelves: to-read, phd-24-25
review:

]]> <![CDATA[The Theory of Communicative Action, Vol 2: Lifeworld & System: A Critique of Functionalist Reason]]> 345506 457 Jürgen Habermas 080701401X mkmk 0 to-read, phd-24-25 3.96 1981 The Theory of Communicative Action, Vol 2: Lifeworld & System: A Critique of Functionalist Reason
author: Jürgen Habermas
name: mkmk
average rating: 3.96
book published: 1981
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/02/17
shelves: to-read, phd-24-25
review:

]]> <![CDATA[The Promise of Green Politics: Environmentalism and the Public Sphere]]> 1077811 Arguing that the environmental movement has the potential to contribute to contemporary developments in political theory and social action by changing discursive practices both at the grassroots level and along the corridors of power, Torgerson draws on the theories of Hannah Arendt and others to advocate a performative type of political debate that values multiple opinions and is not always oriented toward reaching a single conclusion. Torgerson argues that in a world stuck in administrative and scientific gridlock, the theatrical, comic aspects of green politics are as important as other, more goal-oriented, aspects. Gestures of the carnivalesque—such as protestors sleeping in hammocks slung from trees targeted for destruction or funeral processions held for dying rivers—could be the key to the creation of what Torgerson refers to as a “green public sphere,” one that promises a reconfiguration of the relationship between human creativity and the natural world. While offering a number of concrete policy suggestions, his focus remains on the complexity and heterogeneity of green thinking and on the transformative promise implicit in green politics. In creating new ways to speak about the environment, Torgerson argues, the green movement offers a creative way to reconsider many larger issues of political theory and action.
The Promise of Green Politics will serve as a gateway to new thinking about green politics and the emerging possibilities of a diverse and vital green public sphere. As such, it will be valued by those interested in environmental and public policy, political theory, social activism, and the future of political action.]]> 240 Douglas Torgerson 0822323702 mkmk 0 to-read, phd-24-25 4.00 1999 The Promise of Green Politics: Environmentalism and the Public Sphere
author: Douglas Torgerson
name: mkmk
average rating: 4.00
book published: 1999
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/02/17
shelves: to-read, phd-24-25
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Environment and Global Modernity (SAGE Studies in International Sociology)]]> 7794496 272 Gert Spaargaren 0761967664 mkmk 0 to-read, phd-24-25 4.00 2000 Environment and Global Modernity (SAGE Studies in International Sociology)
author: Gert Spaargaren
name: mkmk
average rating: 4.00
book published: 2000
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/02/16
shelves: to-read, phd-24-25
review:

]]> Martin Krpan 12195798 60 Fran Levstik 8611167627 mkmk 4 3.70 1917 Martin Krpan
author: Fran Levstik
name: mkmk
average rating: 3.70
book published: 1917
rating: 4
read at:
date added: 2025/02/12
shelves:
review:

]]> <![CDATA[The Politics of the Earth: Environmental Discourses]]> 773744 and which are likely to be influential in the future. These perspectives range from faith in unlimited economic growth to radical green politics. The history, interplay, and impact of these perspectives are analyzed and assessed, concluding with a plea for ecological democracy.]]> 280 John S. Dryzek 0199277397 mkmk 5 phd-24-25, academic-faves
CITATIONS:

HOW CAPITALIST MARKET CANNOT SELF-REGULATE TO FIX CLIMATE CHANGE: Conversely, if the price of a good falls, then demand relative to supply is falling. This logic can be applied to the goods we call natural resources. Barnett and Morse gathered long-term trend data for the prices of a number of "extractive goods": agricultural products, minerals, fisheries products, and timber. In every case except forest products the story was the same. Barnett and Morse showed that since at east the beginning of the twentieth century, the real price (i.e., after adjusting for inflation) of natural resources had been falling. If price measures scarcity, this means natural resources are becoming more abundant with time. (pg 53-54)

--> of course, natural resources are not becoming more abundant with time, ergo, the market logic is only destroying the earth even more

ABOUT CLIMATE CHANGE DENIERS AND "SCEPTICS": The term "skeptic" is sometimes used to describe those who think anthropogenic (human-caused) climate change does not exist, but that is a misnomer. A true skeptic is someone who takes nothing on trust, requiring evidence and argument to be convinced. In this sense, Bjorn Lomborg is a true skeptic; but organized deniers are not. In subordinating science to politics, truth for the organized deniers becomes a subcategory of power. The organized denial movement therefore embodies extreme postmodernism, destabilizing the idea that there can be any such thing as scientific truth that is not driven by a political agenda. The whole Enlightenment ideal of a society guided by reason is lost. There is no reason, no truth-only a fight between political positions, which the organized denial movement is determined to win. (pg 68-69)

--> conclusion: no point in arguing with climate change deniers

PROMETHEANS BELIEVE TECHNOLOGY WILL SOVLE THE CRISIS, THE BOUNDARIES PEOPLE BELIEVE THAT NATURE HAS LIMITS AND IF THOSE LIMITS ARE CROSSED, BAD THINGS ARE GOING TO HAPPEN, SO ASK YOURSELF: One way to resolve this issue might be to compare the answers to two questions. First, if we believe the Prometheans and they are wrong, what are the consequences? Second, if we believe there are limits or boundaries and that proves wrong, what are the consequences? (pg 72)

--> what is the price to pay if we change our political and economic system so we live as if the Earth has boundaries? what if we make a better world for ourselves and then it turns out we didn't have to? this is the real question to those who want to maintain the status quo on the basis that everything is fine and technology solves all.

PARTICIPATION PROMOTES CARING ABOUT THE ISSUES: Gundersen believes the very act of discussion or deliberation about issues activates commitment to environmental values, or, more precisely, "collective, holistic, and long term thinking:' Gundersen's evidence is a series of forty-six "deliberative interviews" he conducted with a variety of people who did not in the beginning identify as environmentalists. By the end of these discussions, all espoused environmental values more strongly. On this account, everyone has latent positive dispositions which only need to be activated into specific policy commitments. Discussion in democratic settings forces people to scrutinize their own dispositions in a way that promotes such activation. (pg 113)

--> we should promote participative democracy!

CAPITALISM IS THE PROBLEM: Still, so long as the structural status quo of the capitalist market economy is taken as given, business has a "privileged" position in policy making, for government relies greatly upon business to carry out basic functions such as employing people and organizing the economy (Lindblom, 1977: 171-5). Any measures for environmental protection, conservation, or pollution control which threaten to undermine business confidence will be automatically punished by disinvestment. This possibility casts along shadow over policy deliberations, however democratic they may be (see Press, 1994). And once business publicists realize this, they can make good strategic use of the disinvestment threat, even when there is no real intention to disinvest. (pg 120)

GREEN PROJECTS: In this light, the fact that greens do not have any well-defined blueprint for a new society twinned with a coordinated strategy for achieving it is actually a point in their favor. What greens do have in abundance are ideas that can be pressed into a decentered approach to the achievement of a greener society, where there is room for a variety of experiments whose general orientation is given by green discourse, but whose specifics can vary quite substantially. Such variety is the essence of the green public sphere (Torgerson, 1999). Bioregional projects, networks of community activists, oppositional political forums, experiments in local grassroots democracy, social ecology's radical municipalism, transition towns, and attempts to radicalize democratic pragmatist initiatives of the sort discussed in Chapter 5 can all fit in here. (pg 229)

--> we simply cannot afford not to think of alternatives to this neoliberal system we are a part of right now. what do we have to lose? making a better home for ourselves on this planet for nothing?
]]> 3.82 1997 The Politics of the Earth: Environmental Discourses
author: John S. Dryzek
name: mkmk
average rating: 3.82
book published: 1997
rating: 5
read at: 2025/02/05
date added: 2025/02/10
shelves: phd-24-25, academic-faves
review:
The book discusses a few discourses around environmentalism, from Prometheans (who believe technology will solve climate crisis) to radical greens (who believe a change in how we think about nature will solve the crisis). It's a very enlightening look at many movements as a reply to climate crisis. It even has a section on "gray environmentalism" (climate crisis denial).

CITATIONS:

HOW CAPITALIST MARKET CANNOT SELF-REGULATE TO FIX CLIMATE CHANGE: Conversely, if the price of a good falls, then demand relative to supply is falling. This logic can be applied to the goods we call natural resources. Barnett and Morse gathered long-term trend data for the prices of a number of "extractive goods": agricultural products, minerals, fisheries products, and timber. In every case except forest products the story was the same. Barnett and Morse showed that since at east the beginning of the twentieth century, the real price (i.e., after adjusting for inflation) of natural resources had been falling. If price measures scarcity, this means natural resources are becoming more abundant with time. (pg 53-54)

--> of course, natural resources are not becoming more abundant with time, ergo, the market logic is only destroying the earth even more

ABOUT CLIMATE CHANGE DENIERS AND "SCEPTICS": The term "skeptic" is sometimes used to describe those who think anthropogenic (human-caused) climate change does not exist, but that is a misnomer. A true skeptic is someone who takes nothing on trust, requiring evidence and argument to be convinced. In this sense, Bjorn Lomborg is a true skeptic; but organized deniers are not. In subordinating science to politics, truth for the organized deniers becomes a subcategory of power. The organized denial movement therefore embodies extreme postmodernism, destabilizing the idea that there can be any such thing as scientific truth that is not driven by a political agenda. The whole Enlightenment ideal of a society guided by reason is lost. There is no reason, no truth-only a fight between political positions, which the organized denial movement is determined to win. (pg 68-69)

--> conclusion: no point in arguing with climate change deniers

PROMETHEANS BELIEVE TECHNOLOGY WILL SOVLE THE CRISIS, THE BOUNDARIES PEOPLE BELIEVE THAT NATURE HAS LIMITS AND IF THOSE LIMITS ARE CROSSED, BAD THINGS ARE GOING TO HAPPEN, SO ASK YOURSELF: One way to resolve this issue might be to compare the answers to two questions. First, if we believe the Prometheans and they are wrong, what are the consequences? Second, if we believe there are limits or boundaries and that proves wrong, what are the consequences? (pg 72)

--> what is the price to pay if we change our political and economic system so we live as if the Earth has boundaries? what if we make a better world for ourselves and then it turns out we didn't have to? this is the real question to those who want to maintain the status quo on the basis that everything is fine and technology solves all.

PARTICIPATION PROMOTES CARING ABOUT THE ISSUES: Gundersen believes the very act of discussion or deliberation about issues activates commitment to environmental values, or, more precisely, "collective, holistic, and long term thinking:' Gundersen's evidence is a series of forty-six "deliberative interviews" he conducted with a variety of people who did not in the beginning identify as environmentalists. By the end of these discussions, all espoused environmental values more strongly. On this account, everyone has latent positive dispositions which only need to be activated into specific policy commitments. Discussion in democratic settings forces people to scrutinize their own dispositions in a way that promotes such activation. (pg 113)

--> we should promote participative democracy!

CAPITALISM IS THE PROBLEM: Still, so long as the structural status quo of the capitalist market economy is taken as given, business has a "privileged" position in policy making, for government relies greatly upon business to carry out basic functions such as employing people and organizing the economy (Lindblom, 1977: 171-5). Any measures for environmental protection, conservation, or pollution control which threaten to undermine business confidence will be automatically punished by disinvestment. This possibility casts along shadow over policy deliberations, however democratic they may be (see Press, 1994). And once business publicists realize this, they can make good strategic use of the disinvestment threat, even when there is no real intention to disinvest. (pg 120)

GREEN PROJECTS: In this light, the fact that greens do not have any well-defined blueprint for a new society twinned with a coordinated strategy for achieving it is actually a point in their favor. What greens do have in abundance are ideas that can be pressed into a decentered approach to the achievement of a greener society, where there is room for a variety of experiments whose general orientation is given by green discourse, but whose specifics can vary quite substantially. Such variety is the essence of the green public sphere (Torgerson, 1999). Bioregional projects, networks of community activists, oppositional political forums, experiments in local grassroots democracy, social ecology's radical municipalism, transition towns, and attempts to radicalize democratic pragmatist initiatives of the sort discussed in Chapter 5 can all fit in here. (pg 229)

--> we simply cannot afford not to think of alternatives to this neoliberal system we are a part of right now. what do we have to lose? making a better home for ourselves on this planet for nothing?

]]> <![CDATA[The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity]]> 56269264
For generations, our remote ancestors have been cast as primitive and childlike—either free and equal innocents, or thuggish and warlike. Civilization, we are told, could be achieved only by sacrificing those original freedoms or, alternatively, by taming our baser instincts. David Graeber and David Wengrow show how such theories first emerged in the eighteenth century as a conservative reaction to powerful critiques of European society posed by Indigenous observers and intellectuals. Revisiting this encounter has startling implications for how we make sense of human history today, including the origins of farming, property, cities, democracy, slavery, and civilization itself.

Drawing on pathbreaking research in archaeology and anthropology, the authors show how history becomes a far more interesting place once we learn to throw off our conceptual shackles and perceive what’s really there. If humans did not spend 95 percent of their evolutionary past in tiny bands of hunter-gatherers, what were they doing all that time? If agriculture, and cities, did not mean a plunge into hierarchy and domination, then what kinds of social and economic organization did they lead to? The answers are often unexpected, and suggest that the course of human history may be less set in stone, and more full of playful, hopeful possibilities, than we tend to assume.

The Dawn of Everything fundamentally transforms our understanding of the human past and offers a path toward imagining new forms of freedom, new ways of organizing society. This is a monumental book of formidable intellectual range, animated by curiosity, moral vision, and a faith in the power of direct action.]]> 692 David Graeber 0374157359 mkmk 0 4.20 2021 The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity
author: David Graeber
name: mkmk
average rating: 4.20
book published: 2021
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/02/05
shelves: non-fiction, currently-reading, favourites
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Environmental Culture: The Ecological Crisis of Reason (Environmental Philosophies)]]> 618306 300 Val Plumwood 0415178789 mkmk 0 to-read, phd-24-25 4.18 2001 Environmental Culture: The Ecological Crisis of Reason (Environmental Philosophies)
author: Val Plumwood
name: mkmk
average rating: 4.18
book published: 2001
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/02/04
shelves: to-read, phd-24-25
review:

]]> <![CDATA[The Monkey Wrench Gang (Monkey Wrench Gang, #1)]]> 99208 The Monkey Wrench Gang, his 1975 novel, a "comic extravaganza." Some readers have remarked that the book is more a comic book than a real novel, and it's true that reading this incendiary call to protect the American wilderness requires more than a little of the old willing suspension of disbelief.

The story centers on Vietnam veteran George Washington Hayduke III, who returns to the desert to find his beloved canyons and rivers threatened by industrial development. On a rafting trip down the Colorado River, Hayduke joins forces with feminist saboteur Bonnie Abbzug, wilderness guide Seldom Seen Smith, and billboard torcher Doc Sarvis, M.D., and together they wander off to wage war on the big yellow machines, on dam builders and road builders and strip miners. As they do, his characters voice Abbey's concerns about wilderness preservation ("Hell of a place to lose a cow," Smith thinks to himself while roaming through the canyonlands of southern Utah. "Hell of a place to lose your heart. Hell of a place... to lose. Period").

Moving from one improbable situation to the next, packing more adventure into the space of a few weeks than most real people do in a lifetime, the motley gang puts fear into the hearts of their enemies, laughing all the while. It's comic, yes, and required reading for anyone who has come to love the desert.]]> 421 Edward Abbey 0061129763 mkmk 0 to-read 4.09 1975 The Monkey Wrench Gang (Monkey Wrench Gang, #1)
author: Edward Abbey
name: mkmk
average rating: 4.09
book published: 1975
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/02/04
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Islam and the Future of Tolerance: A Dialogue]]> 25151238 jihadism and fundamentalism really mean? In a world riven by misunderstanding and violence, Sam Harris--a famous atheist--and Maajid Nawaz--a former radical--demonstrate how two people with very different religious views can find common ground and invite you to join in an urgently needed conversation.]]> 138 Sam Harris 0674088700 mkmk 0 to-read 4.01 2015 Islam and the Future of Tolerance: A Dialogue
author: Sam Harris
name: mkmk
average rating: 4.01
book published: 2015
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/02/03
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Neo-Abolitionism: Abolishing Human Rentals in Favor of Workplace Democracy]]> 55496445 The author repositions the political and economic debate in the lineage of abolitionism - against the owning of other people - which in its modern version of neo-abolitionism would also abolish the renting, or hiring, employing, or leasing of other people.
The overall argument is based on three recovered theories, each one of which is sufficient to yield the neo-abolitionist conclusion. These three rights-based theories are developed throughout the book. The three theories are 1) inalienable rights theory, 2) the natural rights or labor theory of property, and 3) democratic theory as based on a democratic constitution that only delegates governance rights versus a non-democratic constitution that alienates governance rights. 
The book, therefore, is a must-read for everybody interested in a better understanding of the political economy, workplace democracy, rights-based theories, and the employment system. ]]> 155 David Ellerman 303062675X mkmk 0 4.60 Neo-Abolitionism: Abolishing Human Rentals in Favor of Workplace Democracy
author: David Ellerman
name: mkmk
average rating: 4.60
book published:
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/02/01
shelves: phd-24-25, to-read, academic-faves
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Democracy without Journalism?: Confronting the Misinformation Society]]> 52949973
In Democracy Without Journalism? Victor Pickard argues that we're overlooking the core roots of the crisis. By uncovering degradations caused by run-amok commercialism, he brings into focus the historical antecedents, market failures, and policy inaction that led to the implosion of commercial journalism and the proliferation of misinformation through both social media and mainstream news. The problem isn't just the loss of journalism or irresponsibility of Facebook, but the very structure upon which our profit-driven media system is built. The rise of a "misinformation society" is symptomatic of historical and endemic weaknesses in the American media system tracing back to the early commercialization of the press in the 1800s. While professionalization was meant to resolve tensions between journalism's public service and profit imperatives, Pickard argues that it merely camouflaged deeper structural maladies. Journalism has always been in crisis. The market never supported the levels of journalism--especially local, international, policy, and investigative reporting--that a healthy democracy requires. Today these long-term defects have metastasized.

In this book, Pickard presents a counter-narrative that shows how the modern journalism crisis stems from media's historical over-reliance on advertising revenue, the ascendance of media monopolies, and a lack of public oversight. He draws attention to the perils of monopoly control over digital infrastructures and the rise of platform monopolies, especially the "Facebook problem." He looks to experiments from the Progressive and New Deal Eras--as well as public media models around the world--to imagine a more reliable and democratic information system. The book envisions what a new kind of journalism might look like, emphasizing the need for a publicly owned and democratically governed media system. Amid growing scrutiny of unaccountable monopoly control over media institutions and concerns about the consequences to democracy, now is an opportune moment to address fundamental flaws in US news and information systems and push for alternatives. Ultimately, the goal is to reinvent journalism.]]> 264 Victor Pickard 019094675X mkmk 5 phd-24-25, academic-faves
FROM THE BOOK:

This book operates from the assumption that most democratic theories presuppose the existence of healthy information and communication systems. Without a viable news media system, democracy is reduced to an unattainable ideal. (pg 9)


NERVOUS LIBERALS: This recurring pattern of policy failure recalls the phrase “nervous liberals” featured in media historian Brett Gary’s book of the same title.
--> Over the decades, liberal policymakers and intellectuals have consistently applied classical democratic theories—the stuff of “public spheres” and “marketplaces of ideas”—to a commercial media system that systematically underserves these ideals. In theorizing this failure, liberal thinkers sometimes arrive at a structural critique of a market-driven media system. However, once they find themselves arriving at the kinds of social democratic conclusions that would necessitate government intervention in media markets, they tend to retreat to extolling the comfortable sanctities of the market and its propensity for innovation and efficiency. Any concession that government may need to intervene in the face of overt market failure must be accompanied with sufficient caveats and qualifiers that dissuade accusations of statism, authoritarianism, and anti-capitalism. These are the nervous liberals—liberals made nervous by their own conclusions. (pg 57)

A healthy media system requires content defined by three overlapping characteristics: pluralism, variety, and diversity. Pluralism refers to the range of ideas and views available in a media system, variety to the mix of genres and types of media content, and diversity to difference in characteristics and form. Media ownership concentration threatens all three. Most democratic nations promote media diversity in all its forms to ensure access to a wide variety of information sources. (pg 120)

HARMS OF FACEBOOK: It is difficult to overstate the social harms of Facebook’s monopoly power, especially to the integrity of our news and information systems. As an algorithm-driven global editor and news gatekeeper for over two billion users, Facebook wields unprecedented power over much of the world’s information system. In the United States, where Americans increasingly access news through the platform, Facebook’s role in the 2016 presidential election has drawn well-deserved scrutiny. Moreover, along with Google, Facebook is devouring the lion’s share of digital advertising revenue and starving the institutions that provide quality news and information— the same struggling news organizations that it expects to help fact-check against misinformation. Journalism in general, and local news in particular, are increasingly threatened by the Facebook-Google duopoly, which in recent years took a combined 85 percent of all new US digital advertising revenue growth, leaving only scraps for news publishers. According to one study, these two companies control 73 percent of the total online advertising market. Meanwhile, these same companies play an outsized role in proliferating misinformation. (pg 125-126)

The historical record shows that press subsidies are completely compatible with democratic society in both the United States and around the globe— in fact, they positively correlate with stronger democracies. (pg 157-158)

Commercial journalism’s collapse is now indisputable. But as a society we have yet to face up to what this means. No new business model that can save journalism is waiting to be discovered. No purely profit-driven model can address the growing news deserts that are sprouting up all over the United States. It is questionable whether commercial news media ever fully aligned with society’s democratic needs, but now it is abundantly clear the market cannot support the level of journalism—especially local, international, policy, and investigative reporting—that democracy requires. (pg 164)

There are five general approaches conducive to such a project:
• Establishing “public options” (i.e., noncommercial/nonprofit, supported by public subsidies), such as well-funded public media institutions and municipal broadband networks.
• Breaking up/preventing media monopolies and oligopolies to encourage diversity and to curtail profit-maximizing behavior.
• Regulating news outlets via public interest protections and public service obligations such as ascertainment of society’s information needs.
• Enabling worker control by unionizing newsrooms, facilitating employee-owned institutions and cooperatives, and maintaining professional codes that shield journalism from business operations.
• Fostering community ownership, oversight, and governance of newsrooms, and mandating accountability to diverse constituencies. (pg 168-169)

The author has been arguing throughout this book that media subsidies are not a slippery slope toward totalitarianism. Indeed, democratic nations around the globe have somehow figured out how to create strong public media systems while enjoying democratic benefits that put the United States to shame. Nonetheless, independence from government capture is certainly a legitimate concern. An ironclad prerequisite for any public media system is that it must be firewalled from government (as well as from other powerful influences). Regardless of the funding source, a key requirement is severing all previous ties once money enters the trust. All donations must be cleansed of any institutional or personal attachments to ensure that journalism retains complete independence from any funder or government entity. These donations should follow the “double-blind” process mentioned earlier: No one will know exactly what kind of journalism their money is funding, and no grantee will know from whence their funding came. This political autonomy must be tethered to economic independence—in other words, adequate funding and resources—otherwise this new system would simply reenact the earlier errors of public broadcasting and create another weak system susceptible to political and economic pressures. (pg 169)]]> 4.06 Democracy without Journalism?: Confronting the Misinformation Society
author: Victor Pickard
name: mkmk
average rating: 4.06
book published:
rating: 5
read at: 2025/01/16
date added: 2025/02/01
shelves: phd-24-25, academic-faves
review:
Perfect! Talks about the problem of journalism (misinformation, huge monopolies, commercial media) in depth. A very insightful book that concludes that the only way we can save journalism is if we adopt a social democratic model, in other words: journalism must not be commercial, it must be public.

FROM THE BOOK:

This book operates from the assumption that most democratic theories presuppose the existence of healthy information and communication systems. Without a viable news media system, democracy is reduced to an unattainable ideal. (pg 9)


NERVOUS LIBERALS: This recurring pattern of policy failure recalls the phrase “nervous liberals” featured in media historian Brett Gary’s book of the same title.
--> Over the decades, liberal policymakers and intellectuals have consistently applied classical democratic theories—the stuff of “public spheres” and “marketplaces of ideas”—to a commercial media system that systematically underserves these ideals. In theorizing this failure, liberal thinkers sometimes arrive at a structural critique of a market-driven media system. However, once they find themselves arriving at the kinds of social democratic conclusions that would necessitate government intervention in media markets, they tend to retreat to extolling the comfortable sanctities of the market and its propensity for innovation and efficiency. Any concession that government may need to intervene in the face of overt market failure must be accompanied with sufficient caveats and qualifiers that dissuade accusations of statism, authoritarianism, and anti-capitalism. These are the nervous liberals—liberals made nervous by their own conclusions. (pg 57)

A healthy media system requires content defined by three overlapping characteristics: pluralism, variety, and diversity. Pluralism refers to the range of ideas and views available in a media system, variety to the mix of genres and types of media content, and diversity to difference in characteristics and form. Media ownership concentration threatens all three. Most democratic nations promote media diversity in all its forms to ensure access to a wide variety of information sources. (pg 120)

HARMS OF FACEBOOK: It is difficult to overstate the social harms of Facebook’s monopoly power, especially to the integrity of our news and information systems. As an algorithm-driven global editor and news gatekeeper for over two billion users, Facebook wields unprecedented power over much of the world’s information system. In the United States, where Americans increasingly access news through the platform, Facebook’s role in the 2016 presidential election has drawn well-deserved scrutiny. Moreover, along with Google, Facebook is devouring the lion’s share of digital advertising revenue and starving the institutions that provide quality news and information— the same struggling news organizations that it expects to help fact-check against misinformation. Journalism in general, and local news in particular, are increasingly threatened by the Facebook-Google duopoly, which in recent years took a combined 85 percent of all new US digital advertising revenue growth, leaving only scraps for news publishers. According to one study, these two companies control 73 percent of the total online advertising market. Meanwhile, these same companies play an outsized role in proliferating misinformation. (pg 125-126)

The historical record shows that press subsidies are completely compatible with democratic society in both the United States and around the globe— in fact, they positively correlate with stronger democracies. (pg 157-158)

Commercial journalism’s collapse is now indisputable. But as a society we have yet to face up to what this means. No new business model that can save journalism is waiting to be discovered. No purely profit-driven model can address the growing news deserts that are sprouting up all over the United States. It is questionable whether commercial news media ever fully aligned with society’s democratic needs, but now it is abundantly clear the market cannot support the level of journalism—especially local, international, policy, and investigative reporting—that democracy requires. (pg 164)

There are five general approaches conducive to such a project:
• Establishing “public options” (i.e., noncommercial/nonprofit, supported by public subsidies), such as well-funded public media institutions and municipal broadband networks.
• Breaking up/preventing media monopolies and oligopolies to encourage diversity and to curtail profit-maximizing behavior.
• Regulating news outlets via public interest protections and public service obligations such as ascertainment of society’s information needs.
• Enabling worker control by unionizing newsrooms, facilitating employee-owned institutions and cooperatives, and maintaining professional codes that shield journalism from business operations.
• Fostering community ownership, oversight, and governance of newsrooms, and mandating accountability to diverse constituencies. (pg 168-169)

The author has been arguing throughout this book that media subsidies are not a slippery slope toward totalitarianism. Indeed, democratic nations around the globe have somehow figured out how to create strong public media systems while enjoying democratic benefits that put the United States to shame. Nonetheless, independence from government capture is certainly a legitimate concern. An ironclad prerequisite for any public media system is that it must be firewalled from government (as well as from other powerful influences). Regardless of the funding source, a key requirement is severing all previous ties once money enters the trust. All donations must be cleansed of any institutional or personal attachments to ensure that journalism retains complete independence from any funder or government entity. These donations should follow the “double-blind” process mentioned earlier: No one will know exactly what kind of journalism their money is funding, and no grantee will know from whence their funding came. This political autonomy must be tethered to economic independence—in other words, adequate funding and resources—otherwise this new system would simply reenact the earlier errors of public broadcasting and create another weak system susceptible to political and economic pressures. (pg 169)
]]> Green Political Thought 2131846 This highly acclaimed introduction to green political thought is now available in a new edition, having been fully revised and updated to take into account the areas which have grown in importance since the third edition was published.

Andrew Dobson describes and assesses the political ideology of `ecologism', and compares this radical view of remedies for the environmental crisis with the `environmentalism' of mainstream politics. He examines the relationship between ecologism and other political ideologies, the philosophical basis of ecological thinking, the potential shape of a sustainable society, and the means at hand for achieving it.

New to this edition:

analysis of an intellectual and political 'anti-environment' backlash an account of sustainability in ecological thought the effect of globalization on ecologism ecological citizenship expanded bibliography.

Green Political Thought remains the starting point for all students,academics and activists who want an introduction to green political theory.

]]> 248 Andrew P. Dobson 0415222044 mkmk 5 Green Political Thought talked me off socialism (socialism in its entirety of definition) and into ecologism (deep or radical ecology political movement). Its main premise is that ecologism is a political ideology, different from liberalism, socialism, ecofeminism, etc. This is because ecologism goes against industrialism, which is the foundation of liberalism and socialism. Socialism has many good aspects to its name but the main one that goes against ecologism is its belief in industrial growth and its belief that growth can be "green". This goes against ecologism which posits that growth can never be green and that if we want to save our Earth and all that lives on her, we must leave this growth mindset behind.

Green Political Thought is very persuasive and gives intelligent arguments for its position.

CITATIONS:
A third faultline between socialists and political ecologists may befound in disputes over the issue of ‘limits to growth’. Indeed, the most instructive test to carry out on would-be green socialists is to see how far they have accepted the fundamental green position that there are material limits to productive growth. Some have done so completely, and in the process would appear significantly to have reassessed the content of their socialism. Rudolf Bahro, for example, commented when he was still a socialist that he found it ‘quite atrocious that thereare Marxists who contest the finite scope of the earth’s exploitable crust’ (1982, p. 60). We now know that Bahro’s dwelling on thoughts like this led him to abandon socialism entirely. (pg 172)

I do not believe that anyone can read the extensive literature on the ecology crisis without concluding that its impact will oblige us to make changes in production and consumption of a kind, and on a scale, which will entail a break with the lifestyles and expectations that have become habitual in industrialized countries. (Ryle, 1988, p. 6) (pg 172)

WE MUST NOT TRY TO PERSUADE PEOPLE WITH HUMAN-CENTRIC ARGUMENTS (such as, if we don't save Earth, humans will not survive) BUT INSTEAD WE MUST TALK OF NATURE'S INTRISIC VALUE (because this will teach people to think differently and remove themselves as the centre of the world): The whole point of developing a perspective which goes beyond (what I have defined as) a strong anthropocentric principle is that such a principle only serves to reinforce the attitude which radical greens are concerned to invalidate – that which has the universe revolving around the human being. Warwick Fox’s argument is that only the development of an ecological consciousness will turn the tables in favour of the environment, such that the onus of persuasion is on those who want to destroy, rather than on those who want to preserve. The best that may be said of humanprudentialists, from the point of view of the deep ecologists, is that they will get some of if not the entire job done. (pg 46)

The centrality of citizenship to green arguments for democracy comes from the belief that the achievement of sustainability will require more than institutional restructuring of contemporary Western liberal democracies. Such institutional changes are necessary, but not sufficient, from a green point of view. The green contention is that macro- and micro-level reorganization needs to be supplemented with changes in general values and practices. In short, institutional change must be complemented by wider cultural-level changes. (J. Barry, 1999, p. 228) (pg 200-201)]]> 3.84 1990 Green Political Thought
author: Andrew P. Dobson
name: mkmk
average rating: 3.84
book published: 1990
rating: 5
read at: 2025/01/25
date added: 2025/02/01
shelves: oxford-ept-rec, phd-24-25, academic-faves
review:
Green Political Thought talked me off socialism (socialism in its entirety of definition) and into ecologism (deep or radical ecology political movement). Its main premise is that ecologism is a political ideology, different from liberalism, socialism, ecofeminism, etc. This is because ecologism goes against industrialism, which is the foundation of liberalism and socialism. Socialism has many good aspects to its name but the main one that goes against ecologism is its belief in industrial growth and its belief that growth can be "green". This goes against ecologism which posits that growth can never be green and that if we want to save our Earth and all that lives on her, we must leave this growth mindset behind.

Green Political Thought is very persuasive and gives intelligent arguments for its position.

CITATIONS:
A third faultline between socialists and political ecologists may befound in disputes over the issue of ‘limits to growth’. Indeed, the most instructive test to carry out on would-be green socialists is to see how far they have accepted the fundamental green position that there are material limits to productive growth. Some have done so completely, and in the process would appear significantly to have reassessed the content of their socialism. Rudolf Bahro, for example, commented when he was still a socialist that he found it ‘quite atrocious that thereare Marxists who contest the finite scope of the earth’s exploitable crust’ (1982, p. 60). We now know that Bahro’s dwelling on thoughts like this led him to abandon socialism entirely. (pg 172)

I do not believe that anyone can read the extensive literature on the ecology crisis without concluding that its impact will oblige us to make changes in production and consumption of a kind, and on a scale, which will entail a break with the lifestyles and expectations that have become habitual in industrialized countries. (Ryle, 1988, p. 6) (pg 172)

WE MUST NOT TRY TO PERSUADE PEOPLE WITH HUMAN-CENTRIC ARGUMENTS (such as, if we don't save Earth, humans will not survive) BUT INSTEAD WE MUST TALK OF NATURE'S INTRISIC VALUE (because this will teach people to think differently and remove themselves as the centre of the world): The whole point of developing a perspective which goes beyond (what I have defined as) a strong anthropocentric principle is that such a principle only serves to reinforce the attitude which radical greens are concerned to invalidate – that which has the universe revolving around the human being. Warwick Fox’s argument is that only the development of an ecological consciousness will turn the tables in favour of the environment, such that the onus of persuasion is on those who want to destroy, rather than on those who want to preserve. The best that may be said of humanprudentialists, from the point of view of the deep ecologists, is that they will get some of if not the entire job done. (pg 46)

The centrality of citizenship to green arguments for democracy comes from the belief that the achievement of sustainability will require more than institutional restructuring of contemporary Western liberal democracies. Such institutional changes are necessary, but not sufficient, from a green point of view. The green contention is that macro- and micro-level reorganization needs to be supplemented with changes in general values and practices. In short, institutional change must be complemented by wider cultural-level changes. (J. Barry, 1999, p. 228) (pg 200-201)
]]> <![CDATA[Not That Bad: Dispatches from Rape Culture]]> 35068524 368 Roxane Gay 0062413503 mkmk 4 non-fiction 4.43 2018 Not That Bad: Dispatches from Rape Culture
author: Roxane Gay
name: mkmk
average rating: 4.43
book published: 2018
rating: 4
read at: 2025/01/30
date added: 2025/01/30
shelves: non-fiction
review:

]]> Rumpelstiltsken 6726629 32 Bernadette Watts 0735822794 mkmk 0 3.92 Rumpelstiltsken
author: Bernadette Watts
name: mkmk
average rating: 3.92
book published:
rating: 0
read at: 2017/01/01
date added: 2025/01/29
shelves:
review:

]]> Making Sense of Nature 17624432 374 Noel Castree 041554548X mkmk 0 3.60 2013 Making Sense of Nature
author: Noel Castree
name: mkmk
average rating: 3.60
book published: 2013
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/01/29
shelves: to-read, further-reading-politics-earth
review:

]]> <![CDATA[The Politics of Environmental Discourse: Ecological Modernization and the Policy Process]]> 4899905 344 Maarten A. Hajer 0198279698 mkmk 0 3.74 1995 The Politics of Environmental Discourse: Ecological Modernization and the Policy Process
author: Maarten A. Hajer
name: mkmk
average rating: 3.74
book published: 1995
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/01/29
shelves: to-read, further-reading-politics-earth
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Risk Society: Towards a New Modernity (Published in association with Theory, Culture & Society)]]> 134443
Underpinning the analysis is the notion of the `risk society′. The changing nature of society′s relation to production and distribution is related to the environmental impact as a totalizing, globalizing economy based on scientific and technical knowledge becomes more central to social organization and social conflict.]]> 272 Ulrich Beck 0803983468 mkmk 0 to-read, essentials-to-read-x 3.85 1986 Risk Society: Towards a New Modernity (Published in association with Theory, Culture & Society)
author: Ulrich Beck
name: mkmk
average rating: 3.85
book published: 1986
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/01/29
shelves: to-read, essentials-to-read-x
review:

]]> The Case for Degrowth 52592751 151 Giorgos Kallis 1509535640 mkmk 5 phd-24-25 3.92 2020 The Case for Degrowth
author: Giorgos Kallis
name: mkmk
average rating: 3.92
book published: 2020
rating: 5
read at: 2025/01/28
date added: 2025/01/28
shelves: phd-24-25
review:
Excellent and short read; a great introduction to degrowth! It offers real policy and reform ideas and presents arguments against growth, all based on research and common sense.
]]> The Burnout Society 25490360
]]> 60 Byung-Chul Han 0804795096 mkmk 0 to-read 3.87 2010 The Burnout Society
author: Byung-Chul Han
name: mkmk
average rating: 3.87
book published: 2010
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/01/21
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Making Sense of Cultural Studies: Central Problems and Critical Debates (Theory, Culture & Society (Paperback))]]> 2764347 244 Chris Barker 0761968962 mkmk 3 phd-24-25
From the globalist perspective, his dismissal of Marxism was not persuasive. Barker claimed that we can dismiss Marxism because there was no class revolution that Marx had promised. I find this reasoning faulty. We need to look globally to find the answer. The working class is not found within the global North countries anymore. The working class is the whole of global South that the global North exploits. In the global South, revolutions happen every day. The western military complex tries hard to stop those revolutions but it doesn't mean they aren't happening. The best part? These revolutions are a direct answer to capitalism. Just like Marx promised.

There are other aspects of Barker's arguments that I disagree with, such as his dismissal of ideology and his emphasis on men's problems while disregarding women in the chapter talking about feminism. There are other things too, such as his use of literary language to explain academic terms which only made the explanations convoluted and impenetrable.
]]> 3.14 2002 Making Sense of Cultural Studies: Central Problems and Critical Debates (Theory, Culture & Society (Paperback))
author: Chris Barker
name: mkmk
average rating: 3.14
book published: 2002
rating: 3
read at: 2025/01/09
date added: 2025/01/09
shelves: phd-24-25
review:
Uf, I disliked a lot about this one. For one, Barker rejected almost every aspect of what cultural studies and social sciences rest on -- from Marxism, to ideology, to even feminism, to a degree. He tried very hard to sound smart, he used many metaphors from natural sciences, and he tried to cite genetics to explain gender differences (such as, that women are monogamous and men are not!) I find this disturbing and what's even more -- UNCONNECTED TO CULTURAL STUDIES! If you study culture, don't mind genetics, it's not your field!

From the globalist perspective, his dismissal of Marxism was not persuasive. Barker claimed that we can dismiss Marxism because there was no class revolution that Marx had promised. I find this reasoning faulty. We need to look globally to find the answer. The working class is not found within the global North countries anymore. The working class is the whole of global South that the global North exploits. In the global South, revolutions happen every day. The western military complex tries hard to stop those revolutions but it doesn't mean they aren't happening. The best part? These revolutions are a direct answer to capitalism. Just like Marx promised.

There are other aspects of Barker's arguments that I disagree with, such as his dismissal of ideology and his emphasis on men's problems while disregarding women in the chapter talking about feminism. There are other things too, such as his use of literary language to explain academic terms which only made the explanations convoluted and impenetrable.

]]> <![CDATA[Moriarty the Patriot, Vol. 1 (Moriarty the Patriot, #1)]]> 51323320
In the late 19th century, Great Britain rules over a quarter of the world. Nobles sit in their fancy homes in comfort and luxury, while the working class slaves away at their jobs. When young Albert James Moriarty’s upper-class family adopts two lower-class orphans, the cruelty the boys experience at his family’s hands cements Albert’s hatred of the nobility he was born into. He asks the older of the two boys—who has a genius mind and a killer instinct—to help him rid the world of evil, starting with Albert’s own family!]]> 216 Ryōsuke Takeuchi 1974717151 mkmk 3 average 4.34 2016 Moriarty the Patriot, Vol. 1 (Moriarty the Patriot, #1)
author: Ryōsuke Takeuchi
name: mkmk
average rating: 4.34
book published: 2016
rating: 3
read at: 2025/01/06
date added: 2025/01/06
shelves: average
review:

]]> <![CDATA[All Art is Propaganda: Critical Essays]]> 3339527 All Art Is Propaganda follows Orwell as he demonstrates in piece after piece how intent analysis of a work or body of work gives rise to trenchant aesthetic and philosophical commentary."how to be interesting, line after line."

Contents:
Charles Dickens
Boys' Weeklies
Inside the Whale
Drama Reviews: The Tempest, The Peaceful Inn
Film Review: The Great Dictator
Wells, Hitler and the World State
The Art of Donald McGill
No, Not One
Rudyard Kipling
T.S. Eliot
Can Socialists Be Happy?
Benefit of Clergy: Some Notes on Salvador Dali
Propaganda and Demotic Speech
Raffles and Miss Blandish
Good Bad Books
The Prevention of Literature
Politics and the English Language
Confessions of a Book Reviewer
Politics vs. Literature: An Examination of Gulliver's Travels
Lear, Tolstoy and the Fool
Writers and Leviathan
Review of The Heart of the Matter by Graham Greene
Reflections on Gandhi]]> 374 George Orwell 0151013551 mkmk 0 to-read 4.20 1941 All Art is Propaganda: Critical Essays
author: George Orwell
name: mkmk
average rating: 4.20
book published: 1941
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/01/05
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> No Country for Old Men 12497 Alternate Cover Edition for ISBN 9780375706677

In his blistering new novel, Cormac McCarthy returns to the Texas-Mexico border, the setting of his famed Border Trilogy. The time is our own, when rustlers have given way to drug-runners and small towns have become free-fire zones.

One day, Llewellyn Moss finds a pickup truck surrounded by a bodyguard of dead men. A load of heroin and two million dollars in cash are still in the back. When Moss takes the money, he sets off a chain reaction of catastrophic violence that not even the law–in the person of aging, disillusioned Sheriff Bell–can contain.

As Moss tries to evade his pursuers–in particular a mysterious mastermind who flips coins for human lives–McCarthy simultaneously strips down the American crime novel and broadens its concerns to encompass themes as ancient as the Bible and as bloodily contemporary as this morning’s headlines.
No Country for Old Men is a triumph.]]> 309 Cormac McCarthy mkmk 0 to-read 4.15 2005 No Country for Old Men
author: Cormac McCarthy
name: mkmk
average rating: 4.15
book published: 2005
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/01/05
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Compulsory (The Murderbot Diaries, #0.5)]]> 195264190
While trying to watch episode 44 of The Rise and Fall of Sanctuary Moon, Murderbot is—again, what is it with humans?—distracted by something that is technically outside its purview. A miner is suddenly in danger following a pointless (to Murderbot’s way of thinking) argument, and the choice is to risk discovery and leap into action, which would require hitting the pause button during a very exciting part of SanctuaryMoon, or to follow orders and stay still.

This is a tougher choice than it seems. But then, when has Murderbot ever been faced with an easy choice?

A shorter version of this story originally appeared in Wired magazine.]]> 8 Martha Wells 1645241726 mkmk 5 4.32 2018 Compulsory (The Murderbot Diaries, #0.5)
author: Martha Wells
name: mkmk
average rating: 4.32
book published: 2018
rating: 5
read at: 2025/01/04
date added: 2025/01/04
shelves:
review:

]]> Take Us to a Better Place 50538328
Take Us to a Better Place is a collection of powerful, perceptive, and seamlessly crafted fiction that tells multiple truths about the realities of our health and the world in which we live. Roxane Gay writes: “These stories are at once hopeful and cautionary tales. They are, above all, a call to action, offering all of us the opportunity to rise to the occasion of contributing, in ways we can, to a world where a healthier life is possible for all.” Conjuring a future that is at once vivid and hopeful, as well as heartbreaking and perilous, these deeply human stories will linger long after you finish. The stories may also spark new ideas about what a healthy future might hold—and how we might get there.

The book features the literary talents of
Hannah Lillith Assadi (finalist, PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize),
Calvin Baker,
Frank Bill,
Mike McClelland,
and Achy Obejas (finalist, PEN/Faulkner);

the bold visual storytelling of David Robertson and Selena Goulding;

and the searing science fiction/future fiction writing of
New York Times best-selling author Yoon Ha Lee (winner, Locus Award),
Karen Lord (finalist, Locus Award),
futurist Madeline Ashby,
and New York Times best-selling author Martha Wells (winner of the Nebula, Hugo and Locus Awards).

The stories explore issues such as health care, climate change, immigration, gentrification, and post-traumatic stress disorder with keen observations, fully-drawn characters, and haunting narratives.

Robert Wood Johnson Foundation is the nation's largest philanthropy dedicated solely to health. The Foundation is working alongside others toward its vision of a Culture of Health, where everyone has a fair and just opportunity for health and well-being. It is in this spirit that the Foundation invited ten authors to write a story about what a Culture of Health means to them. This book is the result.]]> 306 Madeline Ashby 159591028X mkmk 0 to-read 3.49 2020 Take Us to a Better Place
author: Madeline Ashby
name: mkmk
average rating: 3.49
book published: 2020
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/01/04
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> <![CDATA[My Favorite Thing Is Monsters, Vol. 2 (My Favorite Thing Is Monsters, #2)]]> 32191885 My Favorite Thing Is Monsters: Book Two is the eagerly awaited conclusion to one of the most acclaimed graphic novels of the past decade. Presented as the fictional graphic diary of 10-year-old Karen Reyes as she tries to solve the murder of her beloved and enigmatic upstairs neighbor, Anka Silverberg, a holocaust survivor, while the interconnected stories of those around her unfold. In Book Two, dark mysteries past and present continue to abound in the tumultuous and violent Chicago summer of 1968. Young Karen attends the Yippie-organized Festival of Life in Grant Park and finds herself swept up in a police stomping. Privately, she continues to investigate Anka’s recent death and discovers one last cassette tape that sheds light upon Anka's heroic activities in Nazi Germany. She wrestles with her own sexual identity, the death of her mother, and the secrets she suspects her brother Deez of hiding. Ferris’s exhilarating cast of characters experience revelations and epiphanies that both resolve and deepen the mysteries visited upon them earlier. Visually, the story is told in Ferris's inimitable style that breathtakingly and seamlessly combines panel-to-panel storytelling and cartoon montages filled with B-movie horror and pulp monster mag iconography. Full-color illustrations throughout]]> 304 Emil Ferris 168396019X mkmk 0 to-read 4.22 2024 My Favorite Thing Is Monsters, Vol. 2 (My Favorite Thing Is Monsters, #2)
author: Emil Ferris
name: mkmk
average rating: 4.22
book published: 2024
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/01/03
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> The Lesser Bohemians 28363987 A Girl Is a Half-formed Thing.

Upon her arrival in London, an 18-year-old Irish girl begins anew as a drama student, with all the hopes of any young actress searching for the fame she’s always dreamed of. She struggles to fit in—she’s young and unexotic, a naive new girl—but soon she forges friendships and finds a place for herself in the big city.

Then she meets an attractive older man. He’s an established actor, 20 years older, and the inevitable clamorous relationship that ensues is one that will change her forever.

A redemptive, captivating story of passion and innocence set across the bedsits of mid-1990s London, McBride holds new love under her fierce gaze, giving us all a chance to remember what it’s like to fall hard for another.]]> 320 Eimear McBride 1101903481 mkmk 0 to-read 3.84 2016 The Lesser Bohemians
author: Eimear McBride
name: mkmk
average rating: 3.84
book published: 2016
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/01/01
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Opening the Door Of Your Heart]]> 33281672 240 Ajahn Brahm 0733635032 mkmk 4 non-fiction a good book to enter 2025 4.46 Opening the Door Of Your Heart
author: Ajahn Brahm
name: mkmk
average rating: 4.46
book published:
rating: 4
read at: 2025/01/01
date added: 2025/01/01
shelves: non-fiction
review:
a good book to enter 2025
]]> <![CDATA[The Wild Robot (The Wild Robot, #1)]]> 26030734
When robot Roz opens her eyes for the first time, she discovers that she is all alone on a remote, wild island. She has no idea how she got there or what her purpose is—but she knows she needs to survive. After battling a violent storm and escaping a vicious bear attack, she realizes that her only hope for survival is to adapt to her surroundings and learn from the island's unwelcoming animal inhabitants.

As Roz slowly befriends the animals, the island starts to feel like home—until, one day, the robot's mysterious past comes back to haunt her.

From bestselling and award-winning author and illustrator Peter Brown comes a heartwarming and action-packed novel about what happens when nature and technology collide.]]> 282 Peter Brown 0316381993 mkmk 0 to-read 4.19 2016 The Wild Robot (The Wild Robot, #1)
author: Peter Brown
name: mkmk
average rating: 4.19
book published: 2016
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/12/31
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays]]> 85925 This classic work, which to date has sold more than 30,000 copies, covers the range of Louis Althusser's interests and contributions in philosophy, economics, psychology, aesthetics, and political science.
Marx, in Althusser's view, was subject in his earlier writings to the ruling ideology of his day. Thus for Althusser, the interpretation of Marx involves a repudiation of all efforts to draw from Marx's early writings a view of Marx as a "humanist" and "historicist."
Lenin and Philosophy also contains Althusser's essay on Lenin's study of Hegel; a major essay on the state, "Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses," "Freud and A letter on Art in Reply to André Daspre," and "Cremonini, Painter of the Abstract." The book opens with a 1968 interview in which Althusser discusses his personal, political, and intellectual history.]]> 272 Louis Althusser 1583670394 mkmk 0 to-read, phd-24-25 3.93 1968 Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays
author: Louis Althusser
name: mkmk
average rating: 3.93
book published: 1968
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/12/27
shelves: to-read, phd-24-25
review:

]]> Cats in the Belfry 1379946 155 Doreen Tovey 1840244526 mkmk 3 average 4.12 1957 Cats in the Belfry
author: Doreen Tovey
name: mkmk
average rating: 4.12
book published: 1957
rating: 3
read at: 2024/12/21
date added: 2024/12/21
shelves: average
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Counter-Democracy: Politics in an Age of Distrust]]> 9292609 Pierre Rosanvallon 0511736916 mkmk 5 phd-24-25, academic-faves
Favourite citations:

a hard truth about democracy at the dawn of the twenty-first century: an age of weak negative politics has begun. Today’s “rejectionists” cannot be compared with the rebels and dissidents of old. Their refusal to participate in the system contains no implicit image of the future. They offer no critique of the existing system as a prelude to further action. Their position lacks a prophetic dimension. In a chaotic and angry way they give voice only to their own inability to make sense of things and find their place in the world. In order to exist they therefore believe that they must vent their wrath on a variety of “rejects”: foreigners, immigrants, “the system.” Their only hope lies in hate. Counter-democracy has thus been transformed into a banal form of opposition to democracy itself. Instead of oversight and criticism as ways of increasing citizen activity, today’s negative politics marks a painful and energy-sapping shrinkage of that activity. (pg 190)

populism and counter-democracy: Populism radicalizes the three forms of counter-democracy: democracy of oversight, negative sovereignty, and politics of judgement.

1. populism as a pathology of oversight and vigilance: An active, positive urge to inspect what the government is doing, to subject it to scrutiny and criticism, becomes a compulsive and permanent stigmatization of the ruling authorities, to the point where these authorities are seen as radically alien enemy powers.

2. populism as preventive sovereignty: “anti-system” parties with revolutionary sentiment whose sole purpose was to oppose the government. Populism knows how to stoke anger and stir protest in the streets and voting booths. Populism’s rising power reflects the fact that negative sovereignty finds itself imprisoned in the immediate: it is a force radically bereft of ideas, incapable of active criticism, and reduced to the expression of resigned violence.

3. populism and people as judge: the very essence of power has been criminalized and ridiculed. All civic activity is reduced to accusation, thus alienating the citizen from government almost as a matter of structural necessity. The state is reduced to its prosecutorial and law-enforcement function, as if this were its only democratic manifestation. The vindictive populist people-as-judge shows little concern for distributive justice, for weighing the various feasible means of achieving greater equality. It suspects the beneficiaries of the welfare state of fraud and lumps them together with immigrants, both legal and illegal. The only justice in which it is interested is the justice of repression, punishment, and stigmatization of those whom it condemns as “undesirables” and “parasites. (pg 267-272)

HOW TO RESTORE THE POLITICAL FUNCTION – REPOLITICIZING DEMOCRACY (because there’s a tendency toward depoliticization, what author calls the political): Counter-democracy has its dark side: the unpolitical. This depoliticization has given rise to a vague but persistent feeling of malaise, which paradoxically has grown even as civil society has become more active, better informed, and more capable of intervening in political decisions than ever before. The solution to this problem has to begin by restoring a vision of a common world, a sense that it is possible to overcome fragmentation and disintegration. A sense of helplessness has reinforced the notion of a crisis of meaning and vice versa. The problem today is an absence of meaning rather than an absence of will. What is lacking is reflexive social action: action by society on itself. Democracy is defined by its works, and not simply by its institutions. It involves a whole range of conflicts and negotiations, a whole set of interpretations of the rules that govern collective life.

These “democratic works,” which define the way in which democracy institutes society, can be grouped under three heads: the production of a legible world, the symbolization of collective power, and the testing of social differences. (pg 306-7)

1. THE PRODUCTION OF A LEGIBLE WORLD: the very definition of political action depends on legibility, which marks the dividing line between mere technical administration and the art of governing. To govern is not simply to solve problems of organization, allocate resources rationally, or set forth a sequential plan of action. To govern means to make the world intelligible, to provide citizens with analytic and interpretive tools to help them make decisions and act effectively. (pg 307)
→ It takes work to develop an objective representation of the world in which political subjects can recognize themselves and act accordingly. The work of John Dewey offers a brilliant example of how such concerns can be accommodated. Dewey encourages us to ask why a gap has opened up between the expert and the citizen. (pg 308) Robert B. Westbrook, John Dewey and Democracy (1991)

2. THE SYMBOLIZATION OF COLLECTIVE POWER: If politics is to be made more visible, we need to remind ourselves constantly of the purpose it is meant to accomplish: to take a people that is nowhere to be found and transform it into a vibrant political community. Symbolization is collective reflection. It is reaffirmation of the decision to write a common history. It is a clear and sober narrative of the failures and hopes that constitute that enterprise. It is the history and memory of the struggles of men and women to institute a society of equals, despite all the difficulties. (pg 312)

3. THE TESTING OF SOCIAL DIFFERENCES: The goal is to define a community in terms of rules of redistributive justice, principles for expanding the limits of possibility, and clearly delineated norms governing the relation between the individual and the community. Conflict is inevitable in such a project, because debate brings to light the actual transfer of resources that takes place among individuals, groups, and regions, reveals hidden legacies of the past, and discloses implicit regulations. Such a debate has nothing in common with the calm, almost technical kind of discussion envisioned by certain theorists of deliberative democracy. However difficult the exercise, it is nevertheless essential as a way of gaining practical experience of the general will. It is a way of ensuring that generalization is not just a deceptive ideal or pious wish but the result of a series of arbitrages and compromises as well as a decisive choice as to the nature of the social bond. The choices to be made involve such things as old-age insurance and the bond between generations; questions of social and occupational security; the allocation of taxes; the measurement and indemnification of unemployment; and issues of long-term development. These practices must, of course, always be related to the type of regime which, taken together, they define. The goal is to expose the reality of the way people live in order to identify problems and then correct them. Restoring substance and meaning to politics does not imply finding a collective redeemer, be it the people, a class, or the masses. It is rather a matter of figuring out how the system that creates social differences and cleavages actually works and finding ways to overcome the obstacles to creating a political system based on reciprocal commitments. (pg 312-313)

HOW THE DEMOCRATIC SYSTEM COULD WORK: Electoral-representative government, counter-democracy, and political reflection and deliberation are the three pillars of democratic experience. Each contributes to the organization of the political system. Electoral-representative government provides the system’s institutional underpinnings; counter-democracy challenges the rules and injects vitality; political reflection and deliberation offer historical and social density. Yet each of these elements can also suffer from certain pathologies and generate certain perverse consequences. Left to its own devices, electoral-representative government tends to transform itself into elective aristocracy, into a governing machine. The specter of populism and of antipolitics hovers over counter-democracy. Political theory tends to be drawn toward the simplifications of decisionism on the one hand and the formalism of deliberative democracy on the other. If the three elements can be brought together in a system, however, they can work together to create a positive dynamic and lay their various demons to rest. The idea of a mixed constitution arose in the Middle Ages in the course of the search for a regime that would combine the best features of aristocracy, democracy, and monarchy to create a polity as generous as it was rational. The idea of a mixed constitution is worth revisiting today, but with a somewhat different twist: democracy itself needs to be understood as a mixed regime, not as the result of a compromise between rival principles, such as liberty and equality, but rather as a composite of the three elements described above. (pg 313-314)






]]> 3.75 2006 Counter-Democracy: Politics in an Age of Distrust
author: Pierre Rosanvallon
name: mkmk
average rating: 3.75
book published: 2006
rating: 5
read at: 2024/12/15
date added: 2024/12/15
shelves: phd-24-25, academic-faves
review:
The book discusses ways in which people use counter-democratic powers to surveil the government (vigilance, denunciation, and evaluation). It starts with a historical account of counter-democracy and finishes with what counter-democracy means today and how we can reshape counter-democratic powers into effective institutions that would help democracy and bring this unpolitical world back to politics.

Favourite citations:

a hard truth about democracy at the dawn of the twenty-first century: an age of weak negative politics has begun. Today’s “rejectionists” cannot be compared with the rebels and dissidents of old. Their refusal to participate in the system contains no implicit image of the future. They offer no critique of the existing system as a prelude to further action. Their position lacks a prophetic dimension. In a chaotic and angry way they give voice only to their own inability to make sense of things and find their place in the world. In order to exist they therefore believe that they must vent their wrath on a variety of “rejects”: foreigners, immigrants, “the system.” Their only hope lies in hate. Counter-democracy has thus been transformed into a banal form of opposition to democracy itself. Instead of oversight and criticism as ways of increasing citizen activity, today’s negative politics marks a painful and energy-sapping shrinkage of that activity. (pg 190)

populism and counter-democracy: Populism radicalizes the three forms of counter-democracy: democracy of oversight, negative sovereignty, and politics of judgement.

1. populism as a pathology of oversight and vigilance: An active, positive urge to inspect what the government is doing, to subject it to scrutiny and criticism, becomes a compulsive and permanent stigmatization of the ruling authorities, to the point where these authorities are seen as radically alien enemy powers.

2. populism as preventive sovereignty: “anti-system” parties with revolutionary sentiment whose sole purpose was to oppose the government. Populism knows how to stoke anger and stir protest in the streets and voting booths. Populism’s rising power reflects the fact that negative sovereignty finds itself imprisoned in the immediate: it is a force radically bereft of ideas, incapable of active criticism, and reduced to the expression of resigned violence.

3. populism and people as judge: the very essence of power has been criminalized and ridiculed. All civic activity is reduced to accusation, thus alienating the citizen from government almost as a matter of structural necessity. The state is reduced to its prosecutorial and law-enforcement function, as if this were its only democratic manifestation. The vindictive populist people-as-judge shows little concern for distributive justice, for weighing the various feasible means of achieving greater equality. It suspects the beneficiaries of the welfare state of fraud and lumps them together with immigrants, both legal and illegal. The only justice in which it is interested is the justice of repression, punishment, and stigmatization of those whom it condemns as “undesirables” and “parasites. (pg 267-272)

HOW TO RESTORE THE POLITICAL FUNCTION – REPOLITICIZING DEMOCRACY (because there’s a tendency toward depoliticization, what author calls the political): Counter-democracy has its dark side: the unpolitical. This depoliticization has given rise to a vague but persistent feeling of malaise, which paradoxically has grown even as civil society has become more active, better informed, and more capable of intervening in political decisions than ever before. The solution to this problem has to begin by restoring a vision of a common world, a sense that it is possible to overcome fragmentation and disintegration. A sense of helplessness has reinforced the notion of a crisis of meaning and vice versa. The problem today is an absence of meaning rather than an absence of will. What is lacking is reflexive social action: action by society on itself. Democracy is defined by its works, and not simply by its institutions. It involves a whole range of conflicts and negotiations, a whole set of interpretations of the rules that govern collective life.

These “democratic works,” which define the way in which democracy institutes society, can be grouped under three heads: the production of a legible world, the symbolization of collective power, and the testing of social differences. (pg 306-7)

1. THE PRODUCTION OF A LEGIBLE WORLD: the very definition of political action depends on legibility, which marks the dividing line between mere technical administration and the art of governing. To govern is not simply to solve problems of organization, allocate resources rationally, or set forth a sequential plan of action. To govern means to make the world intelligible, to provide citizens with analytic and interpretive tools to help them make decisions and act effectively. (pg 307)
→ It takes work to develop an objective representation of the world in which political subjects can recognize themselves and act accordingly. The work of John Dewey offers a brilliant example of how such concerns can be accommodated. Dewey encourages us to ask why a gap has opened up between the expert and the citizen. (pg 308) Robert B. Westbrook, John Dewey and Democracy (1991)

2. THE SYMBOLIZATION OF COLLECTIVE POWER: If politics is to be made more visible, we need to remind ourselves constantly of the purpose it is meant to accomplish: to take a people that is nowhere to be found and transform it into a vibrant political community. Symbolization is collective reflection. It is reaffirmation of the decision to write a common history. It is a clear and sober narrative of the failures and hopes that constitute that enterprise. It is the history and memory of the struggles of men and women to institute a society of equals, despite all the difficulties. (pg 312)

3. THE TESTING OF SOCIAL DIFFERENCES: The goal is to define a community in terms of rules of redistributive justice, principles for expanding the limits of possibility, and clearly delineated norms governing the relation between the individual and the community. Conflict is inevitable in such a project, because debate brings to light the actual transfer of resources that takes place among individuals, groups, and regions, reveals hidden legacies of the past, and discloses implicit regulations. Such a debate has nothing in common with the calm, almost technical kind of discussion envisioned by certain theorists of deliberative democracy. However difficult the exercise, it is nevertheless essential as a way of gaining practical experience of the general will. It is a way of ensuring that generalization is not just a deceptive ideal or pious wish but the result of a series of arbitrages and compromises as well as a decisive choice as to the nature of the social bond. The choices to be made involve such things as old-age insurance and the bond between generations; questions of social and occupational security; the allocation of taxes; the measurement and indemnification of unemployment; and issues of long-term development. These practices must, of course, always be related to the type of regime which, taken together, they define. The goal is to expose the reality of the way people live in order to identify problems and then correct them. Restoring substance and meaning to politics does not imply finding a collective redeemer, be it the people, a class, or the masses. It is rather a matter of figuring out how the system that creates social differences and cleavages actually works and finding ways to overcome the obstacles to creating a political system based on reciprocal commitments. (pg 312-313)

HOW THE DEMOCRATIC SYSTEM COULD WORK: Electoral-representative government, counter-democracy, and political reflection and deliberation are the three pillars of democratic experience. Each contributes to the organization of the political system. Electoral-representative government provides the system’s institutional underpinnings; counter-democracy challenges the rules and injects vitality; political reflection and deliberation offer historical and social density. Yet each of these elements can also suffer from certain pathologies and generate certain perverse consequences. Left to its own devices, electoral-representative government tends to transform itself into elective aristocracy, into a governing machine. The specter of populism and of antipolitics hovers over counter-democracy. Political theory tends to be drawn toward the simplifications of decisionism on the one hand and the formalism of deliberative democracy on the other. If the three elements can be brought together in a system, however, they can work together to create a positive dynamic and lay their various demons to rest. The idea of a mixed constitution arose in the Middle Ages in the course of the search for a regime that would combine the best features of aristocracy, democracy, and monarchy to create a polity as generous as it was rational. The idea of a mixed constitution is worth revisiting today, but with a somewhat different twist: democracy itself needs to be understood as a mixed regime, not as the result of a compromise between rival principles, such as liberty and equality, but rather as a composite of the three elements described above. (pg 313-314)







]]> <![CDATA[John Dewey and American Democracy]]> 78373 592 Robert B. Westbrook 0801481112 mkmk 0 to-read, phd-24-25 4.22 1991 John Dewey and American Democracy
author: Robert B. Westbrook
name: mkmk
average rating: 4.22
book published: 1991
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/12/15
shelves: to-read, phd-24-25
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Marx Beyond Marx: Lessons on the Grundrisse]]> 129704 256 Antonio Negri 093675625X mkmk 0 to-read, phd-24-25 3.71 1979 Marx Beyond Marx: Lessons on the Grundrisse
author: Antonio Negri
name: mkmk
average rating: 3.71
book published: 1979
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/12/15
shelves: to-read, phd-24-25
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire]]> 67012 Empire, Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri presented a grand unified vision of a world in which the old forms of imperialism are no longer effective. But what of Empire in an age of “American empire”? Has fear become our permanent condition and democracy an impossible dream? Such pessimism is profoundly mistaken, the authors argue. Empire, by interconnecting more areas of life, is actually creating the possibility for a new kind of democracy, allowing different groups to form a multitude, with the power to forge a democratic alternative to the present world order.Exhilarating in its optimism and depth of insight, Multitude consolidates Hardt and Negri’s stature as two of the most important political philosophers at work in the world today.]]> 448 Michael Hardt 0143035592 mkmk 0 to-read, phd-24-25 3.83 2004 Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire
author: Michael Hardt
name: mkmk
average rating: 3.83
book published: 2004
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/12/15
shelves: to-read, phd-24-25
review:

]]> The Message 210943364
The first of the book’s three intertwining essays is set in Dakar, Senegal. Despite being raised as a strict Afrocentrist, Coates had never set foot on the African continent until now. He roams the “steampunk” city of “old traditions and new machinery,” but everywhere he goes he feels as if he’s in two places at once: a modern city in Senegal and a mythic kingdom in his mind. Finally he travels to the slave castles off the coast and has his own reckoning with the legacy of the Afrocentric dream.

He takes readers along with him to Columbia, South Carolina, where he meets an educator whose job is threatened for teaching one of Coates’s own books. There he discovers a community of mostly white supporters who were transformed by the “racial reckoning” of 2020. But he also explores the backlash to this reckoning and the deeper myths of the community—a capital of the confederacy with statues of segregationists looming over its public squares.

And in Palestine, Coates discovers the devastating gap between the narratives we’ve accepted and the clashing reality of life on the ground. He meets with activists and dissidents, Israelis and Palestinians—the old, who remember their dispossessions on two continents, and the young, who have only known struggle and disillusionment. He travels into Jerusalem, the heart of Zionist mythology, and to the occupied territories, where he sees the reality the myth is meant to hide. It is this hidden story that draws him in and profoundly changes him—and makes the war that would soon come all the more devastating.

Written at a dramatic moment in American and global life, this work from one of the country’s most important writers is about the urgent need to untangle ourselves from the destructive nationalist myths that shape our world—and our own souls—and embrace the liberating power of even the most difficult truths.]]> 232 Ta-Nehisi Coates 0593230388 mkmk 0 to-read 4.50 2024 The Message
author: Ta-Nehisi Coates
name: mkmk
average rating: 4.50
book published: 2024
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/12/12
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> The State and Revolution 179612 116 Vladimir Lenin 1419183478 mkmk 0 to-read, essential-revolution 4.27 1917 The State and Revolution
author: Vladimir Lenin
name: mkmk
average rating: 4.27
book published: 1917
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/12/11
shelves: to-read, essential-revolution
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Killing Hope: U.S. Military and C.I.A. Interventions Since World War II]]> 78130 Is the United States a force for democracy?

From China in the 1940s to Iraq today, William Blum provides the most comprehensive study of the ongoing American holocaust.]]> 469 William Blum 1567512526 mkmk 0 to-read, essential-revolution 4.25 1995 Killing Hope: U.S. Military and C.I.A. Interventions Since World War II
author: William Blum
name: mkmk
average rating: 4.25
book published: 1995
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/12/10
shelves: to-read, essential-revolution
review:

]]> And the Ass Saw the Angel 68682 320 Nick Cave 1880985721 mkmk 0 to-read 3.87 1989 And the Ass Saw the Angel
author: Nick Cave
name: mkmk
average rating: 3.87
book published: 1989
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/12/07
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Change the World Without Taking Power: The Meaning of Revolution Today]]> 182864 256 John Holloway 0745318630 mkmk 0 to-read, phd-24-25 3.88 2002 Change the World Without Taking Power: The Meaning of Revolution Today
author: John Holloway
name: mkmk
average rating: 3.88
book published: 2002
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/12/04
shelves: to-read, phd-24-25
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Democratic Phoenix: Reinventing Political Activism]]> 1184168 308 Pippa Norris 0521010535 mkmk 0 to-read, phd-24-25 3.17 2002 Democratic Phoenix: Reinventing Political Activism
author: Pippa Norris
name: mkmk
average rating: 3.17
book published: 2002
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/12/04
shelves: to-read, phd-24-25
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Human Values and Beliefs: A Cross-Cultural Sourcebook]]> 3133444 This book provides a wealth of data that will appeal to social scientists, journalists, people in international business, and policy makers interested in understanding social, political, or cultural attitudes in different countries.
Ronald Inglehart is Professor of Political 카지노싸이트, University of Michigan, and coauthor of Value Change in Global Perspective , as well as many other books and articles. Miguel Basanez is Professor of Political 카지노싸이트, Institutio Tecnologico Autonomo de Mexico, and director of MORI de Mexico. Alejandro Moreno is Professor of Political 카지노싸이트, Institutio Tecnologico Autonomo de Mexico.]]> 534 Ronald Inglehart 0472108336 mkmk 0 to-read, phd-24-25 4.00 1998 Human Values and Beliefs: A Cross-Cultural Sourcebook
author: Ronald Inglehart
name: mkmk
average rating: 4.00
book published: 1998
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/12/04
shelves: to-read, phd-24-25
review:

]]> <![CDATA[The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism]]> 1237300 The Shock Doctrine retells the story of the most dominant ideology of our time, Milton Friedman's free market economic revolution. In contrast to the popular myth of this movement's peaceful global victory, Klein shows how it has exploited moments of shock and extreme violence in order to implement its economic policies in so many parts of the world from Latin America and Eastern Europe to South Africa, Russia, and Iraq. At the core of disaster capitalism is the use of cataclysmic events to advance radical privatization combined with the privatization of the disaster response itself. By capitalizing on crises, created by nature or war, Klein argues that the disaster capitalism complex now exists as a booming new economy, and is the violent culmination of a radical economic project that has been incubating for fifty years.]]> 558 Naomi Klein 0805079831 mkmk 0 to-read, essentials-to-read-x 4.28 2007 The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism
author: Naomi Klein
name: mkmk
average rating: 4.28
book published: 2007
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/12/03
shelves: to-read, essentials-to-read-x
review:

]]>