Technological despotism - Ian Tillium
An attempt to analyse technological innovations from a working class perspective in the early 1990s.
Noam Chomsky: reading guide
Noam Chomsky is such a prolific writer that it is hard to know where to start when reading his writings. What’s more, useful criticisms of these writings can be difficult to find among all the largely useless right-wing comments on the internet. So here is a list of Chomsky’s major - largely political - writings followed by a list of the more useful critiques of his thought. Please suggest any others that we've missed.
Goldsmith, Marie: her life and thought
Contemporary agriculture: climate, capital, and cyborg ecology
Elisée Reclus and the city without limits – José Ardillo
A 2014 critical review of two essays on Elisée Reclus published in 2013, focusing on his somewhat ambivalent views on the city (e.g., he thought that the vast stockyards and slaughterhouse complexes of the Chicago meat industry of 1900 comprised a “model for the mechanization of meat production that should be extended to other cities and countries”), the problematic of how these views fit into his overall theoretical perspective (he was a world-famous libertarian geographer), and the extent to which they are still relevant for our time.
Unconscious objectivity - aspects of a critique of the mathematical natural sciences (excerpts) - Claus Peter Ortlieb
A mathematician takes a sceptical look at the mathematical basis of modern natural science both from an immanent perspective—with regard to its epistemological contradictions (e.g., the divergence of the experimental method from the requirements of a strict empiricism)—as well as from a historical perspective that situates its rise and development in the context of the emergence of capitalist society in Western Europe, and proposes that it, too, like Ptolemaic astronomy, is a transient phenomenon that might be succeeded by another “Copernican revolution in thought”, one in accordance with a different kind of socio-economic system.