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Following a remarkable epoch of greater dispersion of wealth and opportunity, we are inexorably returning towards a more feudal era marked by greater concentration of wealth and property, reduced upward mobility, demographic stagnation, and increased dogmatism. If the last seventy years saw a massive expansion of the middle class, not only in America but in much of the developed world, today that class is declining and a new, more hierarchical society is emerging. The new class structure resembles that of Medieval times. At the apex of the new order are two classes—a reborn clerical elite, the clerisy, which dominates the upper part of the professional ranks, universities, media and culture, and a new aristocracy led by tech oligarchs with unprecedented wealth and growing control of information. These two classes correspond to the old French First and Second Estates. Below these two classes lies what was once called the Third Estate. This includes the yeomanry, which is made up largely of small businesspeople, minor property owners, skilled workers and private-sector oriented professionals. Ascendant for much of modern history, this class is in decline while those below them, the new Serfs, grow in numbers—a vast, expanding property-less population. The trends are mounting, but we can still reverse them—if people understand what is actually occurring and have the capability to oppose them.
In the blink of an eye, vast economic forces have created new types of communities and reinvented old ones. In The New Geography, acclaimed forecaster Joel Kotkin decodes the changes, and provides the first clear road map for where Americans will live and work in the decades to come, and why. He examines the new role of cities in America and takes us into the new American neighborhood. The New Geography is a brilliant and indispensable guidebook to a fundamentally new landscape.
Feudal America by Vladimir Shlapentokh,Joshua Woods Pdf
"Uses a feudal model to analyze contemporary American society, comparing its essential characteristics to those of medieval European societies"--Provided by publisher.
The author of The Coming of Neo-Feudalism and The New Class Conflict challenges conventions of urban planning. Around the globe, most new urban development has adhered to similar tenets: tall structures, small units, and high density. In The Human City, Joel Kotkin―called “America’s uber-geographer” by David Brooks of the New York Times―questions these nearly ubiquitous practices, suggesting that they do not consider the needs and desires of the vast majority of people. Built environments, Kotkin argues, must reflect the preferences of most people―even if that means lower-density development. The Human City ponders the purpose of the city and investigates the factors that drive most urban development today. Armed with his own astute research, a deep-seated knowledge of urban history, and a sound grasp of economic, political, and social trends, Kotkin pokes holes in what he calls the “retro-urbanist” ideology and offers a refreshing case for dispersion centered on human values. This book is not anti-urban, but it does advocate a greater range of options for people to live the way they want at all stages of their lives. Praise for The Human City “Kotkin . . . presents the most cogent, evidence-based and clear-headed exposition of the pro-suburban argument . . . . In pithy, readable sections, each addressing a single issue, he debunks one attack on the suburbs after another. But he does more than that. He weaves an impressive array of original observations about cities into his arguments, enriching our understanding of what cities are about and what they can and must become.” —Shlomo Angel, Wall Street Journal “The most eloquent expression of urbanism since Jane Jacobs’s The Death and Life of Great American Cities. Kotkin writes with a strong sense of place; he recognizes that the geography and traditions of a city create the contours of its urbanity.” —Ronnie Wachter, Chicago Tribune
Old Media and the Medieval Concept by Thora Brylowe,Yeager Stephen Pdf
The so-called "Middle Ages" (media æva) were the mediating ages of European intellectual history, whose commentaries, protocols, palimpsests, and marginalia anticipated the forms and practices of digital media. This ground-breaking collection of essays calls for a new, intermedial approach to old media periodizations and challenges the epochs of "medieval," "modern," and "digital" with the goal of enabling new modes of historical imagining. Essays in this volume explore the prehistory of digital computation; the ideology of media periodization; global media ecologies; the technics of manuscript tagging; the haptic negotiations of authority in medieval epistularity; charisma; pedagogy; and more. Old Media and the Medieval Concept forges new paths for traversing the broad networks that connect medieval and contemporary media in both the popular and the scholarly imagination. By illuminating these relationships, it brings the fields of digital humanities, media studies, and medieval studies into closer alignment and provides opportunities for re-evaluating the media ecologies in which we live and work now.
Techno-Capitalist-Feudalism by Michel Luc Bellemare Pdf
With blunt unvarnished realism, it is high-time anarchist-communism steps out from amongst the shadows and finally asserts itself as the most viable revolutionary option and antithesis to totalitarian-capitalism, that is, techno-capitalist-feudalism. After its 150 year long-march, through dense theoretical jungles, voluminous analyses, and multiple pragmatic interventions, anarchist-communism has reached the point where it is now able to throw-off the theoretical muck and political chains of past eras and assertively establish itself on firm ground. Its own firm revolutionary ground, devoid of any crutch. Despite many historical detours, anarchist-communism can now affirm with confidence its own political economy, possessing its own rules, its own logic, and its own terrain of study and method of attack, separate of Marxism. In short, scientific anarchist-communism is the vanguard of radical political economy. That is, scientific anarchist-communism is the new cudgel and information-bomb of the new post-industrial, post-modern anarcho-proletariat, namely, those post-industrial, post-modern proletarians dying on the front-lines of socio-economic transience, poverty, and unrecognition. No longer beaten-down, scientific anarchist-communism now takes its first steps into the new world, dodging bullets, criticisms, and the old clichés. Knowing it can always bend thought and action from now on, it blasts away any counterpoints on its own terms with rigor and certain iron will, since it is today the real proletarian revolutionary force. It is the anarchist power to be reckoned with, structural-anarchism. Make no mistake, we are inescapably immersed in granular trench-warfare against totalitarian-capitalism in and across a litany of micro-fronts. These granular power-struggles are constant, disorderly, and continuously changing their stripes and/or constructs. Consequently, workers have to adapt and change plans, since totalitarian-capitalism is well-equipped to absorb direct conflict into its logic of operation, which always invariably guarantees the accumulation, extraction, and centralization of profit, power, wealth, and private property in service of a ruling capitalist aristocracy. In consequence, we must fight, fight conceptually and fight materially, fight any way we can, since we are fighting for our lives, regardless of the ballot box. Thus, we attack. We attack from the polarities of theory and praxis forever locked in power-struggles. Now open, now hidden, we are caught in a long drawn-out war of attrition, trench-warfare against the logic of capitalism, ad infinitum. This is our destiny. Power resides on the streets. And there on the streets, power is found, picked up, and dusted-off when the ruling aristocracy drops it in haste when it is inadvertently forced into a calculated retreat by the strategic onslaught of the general strike and rampant demolition. Subsequently, this text is a power-tool able to shred through the complex entanglements of capitalist ideology. The text unburdens the reader of the heavy ideological baggage and workload crushing him or her into a lifetime of subservient obedience and docile compliance. Capitalism is totalitarian. It inundates everyday life like 1930's fascism. Thus, the capitalist aristocracy will not give up its ruling supremacy willy-nilly, without firing a shot. The capitalist aristocracy will have to be dismantled piece by piece, street by street. And only the purifying benediction of anarchist revolution, universal and permanent, can exorcize the demon pestilence called, totalitarian-capitalism. Tearing it out finally from the sickened womb of socio-economic existence, so as to cast it down from where it came, pure nothingness. Capitalism does not need workers. It is its own gravedigger. And already, it digs its own baroque grave, six feet deep. All it requires now is a bullet to the head. And it falls in.
Shakespeare’s Influence on Karl Marx by Christian A. Smith Pdf
This volume presents a close reading of instances of Shakespearean quotations, allusions, imagery and rhetoric found in Karl Marx’s collected works and letters, which provides evidence that Shakespeare’s writings exerted a formative influence on Marx and the development of his work. Through a methodology of intertextual and interlingual close-reading, this study provides evidence of the extent to which Shakespeare influenced Marx and to which Marxism has Shakespearean roots. As a child, Marx was home-schooled in Ludwig von Westphalen’s little academy, as it were, which was Shakespeare- and literary-focused. The group included von Westphalen’s daughter, who later became Marx’s wife, Jenny. The influence of Shakespeare in Marx’s writings shows up as early as his school essays and love letters. He modelled his early journalism partly on ideas and rhetoric found in Shakespeare’s plays. Each turn in the development of Marx’s thought—from Romantic to Left Hegelian and then to Communist—is achieved in part through his use of literature, especially Shakespeare. Marx’s mature texts on history, politics and economics—including the famous first volume of Das Kapital—are laden with Shakespearean allusions and quotations. Marx's engagement with Shakespeare resulted in the development of a framework of characters and imagery he used to stand for and anchor the different concepts in his political critique. Marx’s prose style uses a conceit in which politics are depicted as performative. Later, the Marx family—Marx, Jenny and their children—was central in the late-19th-century revival of Shakespeare on the London stage, and in the growth of academic Shakespeare scholarship. Through providing evidence for a formative role of Shakespeare in the development of Marxism, the present study suggests a formative role for literature in the history of ideas.
This explosive and controversial examination of business, history, and ethnicity shows how "global tribes" have shaped the world's economy in the past--and how they will dominate its future. "From the Trade Paperback edition.
From bestselling writer David Graeber—“a master of opening up thought and stimulating debate” (Slate)—a powerful argument against the rise of meaningless, unfulfilling jobs…and their consequences. Does your job make a meaningful contribution to the world? In the spring of 2013, David Graeber asked this question in a playful, provocative essay titled “On the Phenomenon of Bullshit Jobs.” It went viral. After one million online views in seventeen different languages, people all over the world are still debating the answer. There are hordes of people—HR consultants, communication coordinators, telemarketing researchers, corporate lawyers—whose jobs are useless, and, tragically, they know it. These people are caught in bullshit jobs. Graeber explores one of society’s most vexing and deeply felt concerns, indicting among other villains a particular strain of finance capitalism that betrays ideals shared by thinkers ranging from Keynes to Lincoln. “Clever and charismatic” (The New Yorker), Bullshit Jobs gives individuals, corporations, and societies permission to undergo a shift in values, placing creative and caring work at the center of our culture. This book is for everyone who wants to turn their vocation back into an avocation and “a thought-provoking examination of our working lives” (Financial Times).
'The best single-volume study of the Enlightenment that we have' Literary Review The Enlightenment is one of the formative periods of Western history, yet more than 300 years after it began, it remains controversial. It is often seen as the fountainhead of modern values such as human rights, religious toleration, freedom of thought, scientific thought as an exemplary form of reasoning, and rationality and evidence-based argument. Others accuse the Enlightenment of putting forward a scientific rationality which ignores the complexity and variety of human beings, propagates shallow atheism, and aims to subjugate nature to so-called technical progress. Answering the question 'what is Enlightenment?' Kant famously urged men and women above all to 'have the courage to use your own understanding'. Robertson shows how the thinkers of the Enlightenment did just that, seeking a rounded understanding of humanity in which reason was balanced with emotion and sensibility. His book goes behind the controversies about the Enlightenment to return to its original texts and to show that above all it sought to increase human happiness in this world by promoting scientific inquiry and reasoned argument. His book overturns many received opinions - for example, that enlightenment necessarily implied hostility to religion (though it did challenge the authority traditionally assumed by the Churches). It is a master-class in 'big picture' history, about one of the foundational epochs of modern times.
A visionary social thinker reveals how the addition of one hundred million Americans by midcentury will transform the way we live, work, and prosper. In stark contrast to the rest of the world's advanced nations, the United States is growing at a record rate, and, according to census projections, will be home to four hundred million Americans by 2050. Drawing on prodigious research, firsthand reportage, and historical analysis, acclaimed forecaster Joel Kotkin reveals how this unprecedented growth will take shape-and why it is the greatest indicator of the nation's long-term economic strength. At a time of great pessimism about America's future, The Next Hundred Million shows why the United States will emerge a stronger and more diverse nation by midcentury.
Iraq in the Twenty-First Century by Tareq Y. Ismael,Jacqueline S. Ismael Pdf
Much has been written about the events surrounding the 2003 Anglo-American invasion of Iraq and its aftermath, especially about the intentions, principles, plans and course of action of US policy, but much less attention has been given to the consequences of US policy on Iraqi political and social development. This book provides an in-depth analysis of the impact of US policy on the social and political development of Iraq in the twenty-first century. It shows how not just the institutions of the state were destroyed in 2003, leaving the way open for sectarianism, but also the country’s cultural integrity, political coherence, and national-oriented economy. It outlines how Iraq has been economically impoverished, assessing the appalling situation which ordinary people, including women and children, have endured, not just as a result of the 2003 war, but also as a consequence of the 1991 war and the sanctions imposed in the following years. The book argues that the social, political, and cultural ruin that accompanied the Iraq war was an absolute catastrophe; that the policies which had such adverse effects were the foreseeable consequences of deliberate policy choices; and that those responsible continue to evade being made accountable.
NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY Bloomberg • Forbes • The Spectator Recipient of Foreign Policy's 2013 Albie Award A powerful portrayal of Jeffrey Sachs's ambitious quest to end global poverty "The poor you will always have with you," to cite the Gospel of Matthew 26:11. Jeffrey Sachs—celebrated economist, special advisor to the Secretary General of the United Nations, and author of the influential bestseller The End of Poverty—disagrees. In his view, poverty is a problem that can be solved. With single-minded determination he has attempted to put into practice his theories about ending extreme poverty, to prove that the world's most destitute people can be lifted onto "the ladder of development." In 2006, Sachs launched the Millennium Villages Project, a daring five-year experiment designed to test his theories in Africa. The first Millennium village was in Sauri, a remote cluster of farming communities in western Kenya. The initial results were encouraging. With his first taste of success, and backed by one hundred twenty million dollars from George Soros and other likeminded donors, Sachs rolled out a dozen model villages in ten sub-Saharan countries. Once his approach was validated it would be scaled up across the entire continent. At least that was the idea. For the past six years, Nina Munk has reported deeply on the Millennium Villages Project, accompanying Sachs on his official trips to Africa and listening in on conversations with heads-of-state, humanitarian organizations, rival economists, and development experts. She has immersed herself in the lives of people in two Millennium villages: Ruhiira, in southwest Uganda, and Dertu, in the arid borderland between Kenya and Somalia. Accepting the hospitality of camel herders and small-hold farmers, and witnessing their struggle to survive, Munk came to understand the real-life issues that challenge Sachs's formula for ending global poverty. THE IDEALIST is the profound and moving story of what happens when the abstract theories of a brilliant, driven man meet the reality of human life.