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A historical study of Chile's twin experiments with cybernetics and socialism, and what they tell us about the relationship of technology and politics.In Cybernetic Revolutionaries, Eden Medina tells the history of two intersecting utopian visions, one political and one technological. The first was Chile's experiment with peaceful socialist change under Salvador Allende; the second was the simultaneous attempt to build a computer system that would manage Chile's economy. Neither vision was fully realized--Allende's government ended with a violent military coup; the system, known as Project Cybersyn, was never completely implemented--but they hold lessons for today about the relationship between technology and politics.Drawing on extensive archival material and interviews, Medina examines the cybernetic system envisioned by the Chilean government--which was to feature holistic system design, decentralized management, human-computer interaction, a national telex network, near real-time control of the growing industrial sector, and modeling the behavior of dynamic systems. She also describes, and documents with photographs, the network's Star Trek-like operations room, which featured swivel chairs with armrest control panels, a wall of screens displaying data, and flashing red lights to indicate economic emergencies.Studying project Cybersyn today helps us understand not only the technological ambitions of a government in the midst of political change but also the limitations of the Chilean revolution. This history further shows how human attempts to combine the political and the technological with the goal of creating a more just society can open new technological, intellectual, and political possibilities. Technologies, Medina writes, are historical texts; when we read them we are reading history.

The kinds of families we see today are different than they were even a decade ago as paths to parenthood have been rejiggered by technology, activism, and law. Gamson brings us extraordinary family creation tales that illuminate this changing world of contemporary kinship. He tells a variety of unconventional family-creation tales-- adoption and assisted reproduction, gay and straight parents, coupled and single, and multi-parent families-- set against the social, legal, and economic contexts in which they were made

Political instability; civil-military conflict; economic problems. Outlook for the double round of presidential elections scheduled for Jan. and May 1988; external debt; the petroleum industry.

The current continuing outflow of valuable production forces and intellectual resources from Transbaikal has a negative impact on the socio-economic development of this border area. A retrospective analysis of the health care system provided to the Russian population living in remote areas demonstrates that not all formative stages of the health care system in Transbaikal were completed without problems. The Russian Empire implemented a state policy on the demographic and socio-cultural integration of Transbaikal for the purpose of rational economic development, effective consolidation of the territory and provision of border security. The pre-revolutionary government, facing significant financial shortages and an unfavorable socio-economic and political situation from the mid 18th century, carried out continuous work to create the foundations for the Transbaikal public health system. However, social issues were not a priority with regard to all population groups living on the outskirts of the Russian Empire, therefore many projects and decisions were implemented with significant delays or in a reduced format. In addition, it is necessary to take into account an objective point restraining the introduction of the central authorities' solution: a new type of medical care was being promoted, to which the indigenous and newly arrived people of Transbaikal had to grow accustomed. At the same time, by the beginning of the 20th century, the heterogeneous population of Transbaikal, which traditionally used folk methods as well as Tibetan medicine, gradually began to understand the advantages of official medicine and science-based hygiene for improving and preserving human potential, which is the basis of the physical and intellectual development of any nation, and to master their leading principles. From the beginning of November 1920, under the conditions found in the Far Eastern Republic, measures were taken for the first time to organize free and preventive medicine for all population groups on the territory of ...

Frontmatter -- Contents -- Author's Note -- Introduction: From the Other Shore -- PART I: AUTOCRATIC RUSSIA, LETHARGIC RUSSIANS -- 1 An Empire of Climate -- 2 Endurance without Limit -- 3 Studying Our Nearest Oriental Neighbor -- PART II: REVOLUTIONARY RUSSIA, INSTINCTUAL RUSSIANS -- 4 Little above the Brute -- 5 Sheep without a Shepherd -- 6 Feeding the Mute Millions of Muzhiks -- PART III: MODERNIZING RUSSIA, BACKWARD RUSSIANS -- 7 New Society, New Scholars -- 8 The Romance of Economic Development -- 9 Starving Itself Great -- 10 Scratch a Soviet and You'll Find a Russian -- Epilogue: Russian Expertise in an Age of Social Science -- Sources -- Abbreviations -- Notes -- Acknowledgments -- Index

Foreword by Tom Lodge -- Preface -- 1. The African Worker: Class and Community -- 2. Desperately Lean Times: The Socio-economic Background -- 3. Industrial Legislation and Minimum Wages -- 4. Rebuilding the African Unions, 1932-40 -- 5. Organising Domestic Servants -- 6. Vereeniging: 'To Hell with the Pick-up!' -- 7. The Politics of War and the Black Working Class -- 8. Trade Unions in Strnggle -- 9. Organising Under War Conditions -- 10. Rural Protest and Rural Revolt -- 11. Azikwhelwa! - We Shall Not Ride -- 12. Umagebule - The Slicer -- 13. Organising the Migrant Workers -- 14. The 1946 Miners' Strike -- 15. Conclusion.

First published in 1985, this is a book written at the height of the Soviet war in Afghanistan in the 1980s. Based on five clandestine trips into Afghanistan with the resistance, the book examines why the Soviets invaded in 1979 and what they were seeking to defend. The author analyses their deliberate policy of migratory genocide through a combination of aerial bombardments, political repression and economic blockades. The book is written by the journalist Ed Girardet, one of the world's leading authorities on the conflict, whose particular strength is his dispassionate reporting style and his.

The volume approaches Cuba as a nation that hosts a convergence of extraordinary global developments and, in turn, projects itself onto the world's major cultural, political and economic processes. From different perspectives, ranging from architecture and music to politics and economics, the twenty-one essays presented here embrace the multifaceted interactions between Cuba and foreign imperial strategies during the 19th century, the troublesome formation of national political cultures in the first half of the 20th century, and the multiple global aspects of some of Cuba's choices from the Cold War to the first decade of the present century

In the Cold War era that dominated the second half of the 20th century, nobody envisaged that the collapse of the Soviet Union would come from within, still less that it would happen meekly, without global conflagration. In this compact book, Stephen Kotkin shows that the Soviet collapse resulted not from military competition but, ironically, from the dynamism of Communist ideology, the long-held dream for ""socialism with a human face"". The neo-liberal reforms in post-Soviet Russia never took place, nor could they have, given the Soviet-era inheritance in the social, political and economic l

Introduction -- I. The need for power versus environmental concerns. Growth of the power industry ; Siting controversies ; Regulated electric power -- II. The local contest. The lake ; The reactor ; The New York State Electric and Gas Corporation -- III. The actors and the action. Plans of the NYSE&G ; Scientific activity ; Citizen activity and NYSE&G response ; Public hearings and political activity -- IV. Salient issues. Economic options of an expanding utility ; Unresolved technical questions ; The behavior of the scientific community in a public controversy ; Policy implications -- Conclusion -- A note on the program on science, technology, and society -- Definitions

"In this paper I will try to outline the emergence of the idea of Atlantic Community (from now on AC) during and in the aftermath of World War II and the peculiar, controversial place of Italy in the AC framework. Both among American policymakers and in public discourse, especially in the press, AC came to define a transatlantic space including basically North American and Western European countries, which supposedly shared political and economic principles and institutions (liberal democracy, individual rights and the rule of law, free market and free trade), cultural traditions (Christianity and, more generally, "Western civilization") and, consequently, national interests."

Ulrich Herbert's monography "Geschichte Deutschlands im 20. Jahrhundert" (German History in the 20th Century) is a major coup in the literature on German history. This is particularly striking as it has become almost impossible to keep track of the literature published on this topic. Further, the multi-faceted and contradictory character of German history itself makes such a general work undoubtedly ambitious in itself. Each review essay in this article concentrates on different eras of German 20th-century history. They contain some points of criticism while still marking Herbert's book as a great work, in general. Amongst the reasons for this are that his methods are state-of-the-art and because he continually discusses the overall European context.

Aunque diferentes disciplinas del área social, entre ellas la historia económica, han investigado de alguna forma el devenir histórico de una sociedad, muy pocas lo han abordado desde el tratamiento de la tasa de ganancia como mecanismo para interpretar la forma como han intervenido los diferentes agentes políticos, económicos y sociales en su determinación y su efecto en la distribución del ingreso. Igualmente, la historia económica ha encontrado en la corriente heterodoxa, especialmente en la escuela francesa de la regulación, un amplio bagaje para la interpretación histórica de diferentes hechos mediante una visión más integral de los mismos. Esta escuela en su andamiaje conceptual y metodológico acoge diferentes propuestas como, las de Annales, marxistas, inclusive economistas e historiadores de la escuela británica, kaleckianos, poskeynesianos, al igual que, valiosos aportes de la sociología y la ciencia política en el análisis de los fenómenos auscultados. Con estos elementos conceptuales y metodológicos abordamos la evolución de la tasa de ganancia en Colombia, haciendo un paralelo general con lo sucedido en Estados Unidos y Latinoamérica, en la segunda mitad del siglo XX, y más concretamente en el periodo 1970-2000 dado que recoge importantes acontecimientos políticos, económicos y sociales que influyeron con bastante fuerza en el transcurrir nacional. La década de los setenta marcaría el giro hacia el monetarismo y la economía de mercado, situación con lo que se echaba por tierra el pacto capital - trabajo propio del fordismo, el cual había logrado armonizar las relaciones salariales que garantizaban tanto la rentabilidad del capital como mejores condiciones sociales de la población. Quizás una muestra de dicha ruptura fue el más exitoso paro cívico nacional organizado por los trabajadores colombianos. La década de los ochenta, muestra con más fuerza la irrupción neoliberal concordante con el advenimiento de gobiernos conservadores en las principales economías capitalistas, que habían utilizado a América Latina como el laboratorio de dichas propuestas. Este afán de maximizar la ganancia y su tasa, se reflejó en el país a través de diferentes prácticas ilegales, que dio como resultado la crisis del sistema financiero y la aparición de capitales ligados al narcotráfico. La población tuvo que padecer tanto la violencia acosada por los diferentes grupos armados, como los bajos estándares de vida y el peso de la década perdida, que sin embargo no fue tan profunda como la de los países vecinos. En los noventa las reformas ortodoxas se institucionalizaron y la concentración del ingreso retoma su profundización con fuerza. La violencia se enseñorea aún más y el país vive una de las peores historias de masacres y genocidios que se recuerde en la actualidad. La mayor recesión del país en el siglo XX, convivió con la crisis política de las élites que se dividieron en dos bandos bien definidos por el control del poder, esto llevo a que el país fuera uno de los cuales inicio y terminó ese siglo en medio de la violencia y crisis económica, social y política ; Abstract : Although different subjects in the social area, including economic history, have investigated in some way the historical development of a society, very few have approached it from the treatment of the profit rate as a mechanism to interpret how the different political, economic and social agents have intervened in its determination and its effect on income distribution. Similarly, economic history has found in heterodox economics, especially in the French regulation school, an extensive knowledge for the historical interpretation of different events through a more comprehensive view. This school, in its conceptual and methodological scaffolding, welcomes various proposals such as Annales, Marxist, British Marxist historians, Kaleckian, post-Keynesians and the valuable contributions of sociology and political science in the analysis of auscultation phenomena. With these conceptual and methodological elements, we address the evolution of the rate of profit in Colombia, making a general comparison of the occurrences in the United States and Latin America during the second half of the twentieth century, specifically in the period 1970- 2000, due to the important political, economic and social events that influenced quite strongly during this time. The seventies marked the shift towards monetarism and a market economy, which put off the work-capital pact indicative of Fordism that had managed to harmonize wage relations that guaranteed both the return on capital and better social conditions for the population. As a sample of this shift, the most successful national strike organized by Colombian workers, is considered. The eighties show strongly the neoliberal invasion consistent with the advent of conservative governments in the major capitalist economies that had used Latin America as the laboratory for these proposals. The rush to maximize profit and its rate was reflected throughout the country in various illegal practices that resulted in the crisis of the financial system and the development of capital linked to drug trafficking. The population had to suffer violence as well as low life standards due to being harassed by armed groups and the weight of the lost decade, which is noted as less profound as that of neighboring countries. In the nineties, orthodox reforms were institutionalized and income concentration deepened at full force. Violence gains further dominion and the country lives one of the worst massacre and genocide stories remembered in recent times. The worst recession the nation has seen in the twentieth century lived side by side with the political confrontation of the elite that were divided into two sides defined by their control of power which was the main reason the country started and ended the century in the midst of violence as well as an economic, social and political crisis ; Doctorado

"This book is about southern Africa's long walk to freedom, about the overturning of colonial rule in the northern territories and the dissolution of backs-to-the-wall white settler suzerainty first in what became Zimbabwe and then in South Africa. Chapters on the individual countries detail the stages along their sometimes complicated and tortuous struggle to attain the political New Zion. We learn how and why the Federation of Rhodesia and Nyasaland failed, how and why apartheid eventually collapsed, and exactly how the various components of this heavily white conquered and later white oppressed domain transitioned via diverse fits and starts into today's assemblage of proud, politically-charged, and still mostly fragmented nation-states. But what did the new republics make of their hard won freedoms? That is the subject of more than half of this book. Having liberated themselves successfully, several soon dismantled democratic safeguards, established effective single-party states, closed their economies, deprived citizens of human rights and civil liberties, and exchanged economic progress for varieties of central planning experiments and stunted forms of protected economic endeavors. Only Botswana, of the new entities, embraced full democracy and good governance. The others, even South Africa, at first tightly regimented their economies and attempted severely to limit the degrees of economic freedom and social progress that citizens could enjoy. Corruption prevailed everywhere except Botswana. Today, as the chapters on contemporary southern Africa reveal, most of the southern half of the African continent is returning, if sometimes struggling, to return to the patterns probity and good governance that many countries abandoned in the decades after independence. Now there is a resurgence of high performance, which this book celebrates"--