Peer2Politics

East and West Germany reunified 25 years ago today. But for most workers, the hopes of that day were dashed.

It is written somewhere that history may inform our current endeavors. History has indeed dictated that the lessons of The unMonastery be collected in a singular fashion. Although earliest known sources have the title as The Book of Greater and Lesser Omissions this is not the language of the street. The more punchy title Il Libro degli Errori stuck.

In November 1933, less than a year after Hitler assumed power in Berlin, a 47-year-old socialist writer on Vienna’s leading economics weekly was advised by his publisher that it was too risky to keep him on the staff. It would be best both for the Österreichische Volkswirt and his own safety if Karl Polanyi left the magazine. Thus began a circuitous odyssey via London, Oxford, and Bennington, Vermont, that led to the publication in 1944 of what many consider the 20th century’s most prophetic work of political economy, The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of Our Time.

Three lessons in sense making

An inside look at the devastating impact of the Greek financial crisis on ordinary citizens.

"This book analyses water issues in ancient Roman World (cultural and social norms as well as legal provisions) and links the roman imagery about water to the current debate about the commons.

Stafford Beer explains to a group of students his relationship with Cybernetics, the Science of Control and Communications in the animal and the machine.

The basic premise of Kathleen E. Kennedy’s intriguing volume Medieval Hackers is that modern computer hackers are essentially the inheritors of the medieval copyist and translators who sought to freely disseminate information from original sources through their “derivative texts,” which often also abridged, expanded, or altered information in their exemplars. More specifically, hackers can be identified with those late medieval transmitters of information who came into conflict with authorities when, starting especially in the mid-sixteenth-century, efforts were increasingly made to control, limit, or prohibit the free diffusion and distribution of certain text types, despite the fact that such unfettered free license had hitherto had been an accepted and integral part of European intellectual culture. While Kennedy begins by acknowledging in the very first sentence that “hackers are the last thing most people would associate with the Middle Ages” (1), she nonetheless manages to make a compelling argument for this bold parallel, developing the image of the “medieval hacker,” which she herself acknowledges as an “anachronistic title.” (4) The analogy ultimately succeeds, however, mostly thanks to her well-considered assessment backed up by convincing comparisons and persuasive references that demonstrate serious reflection and thorough academic rigorousness. She furthermore demonstrates expertise in the culture of both medieval textual transmission and modern information technology, as well as a host of other academic domains on which she relies to form and support her hypotheses.

The left “needs to abandon its mythology of the ‘liberation of the productive forces’”, Ned argues. “Instead of that narrative of progress, we need to realise that industrialism is a 200-year-old bubble that is beginning to burst.”

By Evaggelos Vallianatos Morton Biskind, a physician from Westport, Connecticut, was a courageous man. At the peak of the cold war, in 1953, he complained of

Nick Dearden: Sixty years ago, half of German war debts were cancelled to build its economy. Yet today, debt is destroying those creditors