Latest EntryJun 27, 2009 City Leave a comment
Pulitzer Prize winning New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman speaks on the MIT campus to discuss the 2007 update to his bestseller The World is Flat. He also provides a preview of his latest book, Hot, Flat, and Crowded.
Jun 27, 2009 Politics Leave a comment
In the text that follows we argue that the basic Marxian ideas concerning the type of society supposed to follow the demise of capitalism are contained in the Manifesto in a condensed form.
Accordingly, the first section offers an outline of what type of society the Manifesto envisages for the future as well as the conditions necessary for its appearance while the second section relates these ideas to Marx’s other texts.
In this paper post-capitalist society signifies what Marx calls a “Society of free and associated producers” “” also, indifferently, “communism” or “socialism”[1] “” based on the “associated mode of production.” This “union of free individuals,” the crowning point of the self-emancipation of the immediate producers, where individuals are subject neither to personal dependence, as in pre-capitalism, nor to material dependence, as in commodity-capitalist society, excludes, by definition, state, private ownership of the conditions of production, commodity production and wage labour. The Manifesto indicates, in a condensed and concise fashion, the essential elements of the envisaged new society as well as the objective and the subjective conditions of its realization. Read More..
Jun 25, 2009 Economy Leave a comment
Two very contradictory stories about British capitalism are told today. The first is that the State is eating up more and more of the private sector. The sudden increase of public shares in the major banks and the falling of the railways into receivership is evidence of a return to the nationalisations of the 1970s. Some on the left even take heart from this, and urge the government to go the whole way and nationalise the banks. The Sunday Times runs stories warning of ‘Soviet Britain’, to show that in many towns in Britain (and especially in Scotland and Northern Ireland) state spending is a majority of output. Read More..
Jun 25, 2009 Economy 1 Comment
Magazine issue 2711. New Scientist
More: Can science reinvent the economy?
Can we pack an entire economy, with all its complex human and political interactions, into a computer? Physicist Dirk Helbing of ETH thinks so – as long as we’re bold enough in going about it.
He points out that financial systems aren’t the only monsters we’ve let out of the box. How traffic flows in and around huge cities simply cannot be grasped by mathematical analysis, but computer models let millions of virtual vehicles interact on realistic road patterns – and often discover potential problems before they occur in reality.
The complexity of today’s economy, Helbing suggests, demands a similar approach. “We’re not currently using the best capabilities of science,” he says. “We need to bring together scientists from different fields and put together tools that can be used as a kind of wind tunnel for testing out social and economic policies.” Read More..
May 22, 2009 Politics Leave a comment
What is a revolutionary? The writings of Marx and Engels both use the metaphor of revolution as the “locomotive of history”. Is, then, the revolutionary a standard bearer of progress, a pace setter, a frontrunner?
None of the above, because in a world ruled by a turbo “devaluation” where only the new has market value, where commodity production spirals out of control, the “train of time” is a deadly trend. Alexander Kluge instead opts for Walter Benjamin’s idea of the revolution as mankind “pulling the emergency brake“. We must hold up the torch of reason to the problems at hand, and the true revolutionary is therefore the one who can unite future and past, merging two times, two societies, the artist who montages stories and history. And so we come to Alexander Kluge and his art. Read More..
May 22, 2009 Economy Leave a comment
17.04.2009 – Joana Gorjão Henriques
Depois desta crise com contornos de dilúvio, o que se abre à cultura? Há cenários que já podemos desenhar
Em época de crise, o melhor mesmo é ir às compras na própria casa. Desenterrem-se leituras eternamente adiadas, leia-se finalmente o “Ulisses” de James Joyce que anda por ali há séculos. Os livros podem ser caros, mas ler ainda continua a não ser assim tanto. Até porque um livro pode sempre passar por muitas mãos. E há as bibliotecas, a “forma de entretenimento mais barata de todas”, lembra John Carey, professor de Inglês em Oxford, ao “Guardian”. Por esta lógica, a leitura – não o mercado dos livros – será uma das actividades que menos sofrerá com a crise económica mundial. Mas nem tudo é lógico e nem tudo se pode prever. O podemos esperar, então, dos próximos anos? Read More..
May 22, 2009 City Leave a comment
By Carla Bodo
It is by now widely recognised that connecting culture and employment as a promising job reservoir in our post industrial countries (Delors, 1992) is not at all automatic. It is rather the outcome of robust and well devised cultural policies – with a clever mix of regulations and financial incentives in support of cultural activities and the cultural industries – carried out at the different levels of government: national, regional, local, as well as European. Read More..
May 18, 2009 City Leave a comment
Digital Library of Slovenia: Developing Cultural Digital Content, Interconnectind Digital Sources and Enabling Free Access to Knowledge
Zoran Krstulović
May 18, 2009 Politics Leave a comment
Noam Chomsky Lecture
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=4054523048548733881Speech at Harvard University about America’s war on terror.
