The Failure Of Modern Civilization And The Struggle For A Deep Alternative

Western civilization is the Utopia of a better and higher life on Earth. The globalization of neo-liberalism proves that this project has failed. The paradigm of «Critical Theory of Patriarchy» explains this failure and discusses alternatives. By confronting the central civilizations in history, the egalitarian, life-oriented matriarchal one, and the hierarchical, nature and life dominating, hostile patriarchal one, we see that 5000 years of patriarchy have «replaced» matriarchies and nature itself by a «progressive» counter-world of «capital». This transformation characterizes «capitalist patriarchy» including «socialism». Its demise is due to the «alchemical» destruction of the world's resources, thought of, theologically legitimized and fetishized as «creation». This violence is not recognized. Elites have, instead, begun with a new «military alchemy», treating the whole Planet as weapon of mass destruction. Hence, the «Planetary Movement for Mother Earth».

World-systems analysis has developed rapidly over the past thirty years. Today's students and junior scholars come to world-systems analysis as a well-established approach spanning all of the social sciences. The best world-systems scholarship, however, is spread across multiple methodologies and more than half a dozen academic disciplines. Aiming to crystallize forty years of progress and lay the groundwork for the continued development of the field, the Handbook of World-Systems Analysis is a comprehensive review of the state of the field of world-systems analysis since its origins almost forty years ago. The Handbook includes contributions from a global, interdisciplinary group of more than eighty world-systems scholars. The authors include founders of the field, mid-career scholars, and newly emerging voices. Each one presents a snapshot of an area of world-systems analysis as it exists today and presents a vision for the future. The clear style and broad scope of the Handbook will make it essential reading for students and scholars of anthropology, archaeology, geography, political science, history, sociology, and development economics.

In Designs for the Pluriverse Arturo Escobar presents a new vision of design theory and practice aimed at channeling design's world-making capacity toward ways of being and doing that are deeply attuned to justice and the Earth. Noting that most design—from consumer goods and digital technologies to built environments—currently serves capitalist ends, Escobar argues for the development of an “autonomous design” that eschews commercial and modernizing aims in favor of more collaborative and placed-based approaches. Such design attends to questions of environment, experience, and politics while focusing on the production of human experience based on the radical interdependence of all beings. Mapping autonomous design’s principles to the history of decolonial efforts of indigenous and Afro-descended people in Latin America, Escobar shows how refiguring current design practices could lead to the creation of more just and sustainable social orders.

Stories of the primordial woman who married a bear, appear in matriarchal traditions across the global North from Indigenous North America and Scandinavia to Russia and Korea. In The Woman Who Married the Bear, authors Barbara Alice Mann, a scholar of Indigenous American culture, and Kaarina Kailo, who specializes in the cultures of Northern Europe, join forces to examine these Woman-Bear stories, their common elements, and their meanings in the context of matriarchal culture. The authors reach back 35,000 years to tease out different threads of Indigenous Woman-Bear traditions, using the lens of bear spirituality to uncover the ancient matriarchies found in rock art, caves, ceremonies, rituals, and traditions. Across cultures, in the earliest known traditions, women and bears are shown to collaborate through star configurations and winter cave-dwelling, symbolized by the spring awakening from hibernation followed by the birth of "cubs." By the Bronze Age, however, the story of the Woman-Bear marriage had changed: it had become a hunting tale, refocused on the male hunter. Throughout the book, Mann and Kailo offer interpretations of this earliest known Bear religion in both its original and its later forms. Together, they uncover the maternal cultural symbolism behind the bear marriage and the Original Instructions given by Bear to Woman on sustainable ecology and lifeways free of patriarchy and social stratification.

'It is my thesis that this general production of life, or subsistence production - mainly performed through the non-wage labour of women and other non-wage labourers as slaves, contract workers and peasants in the colonies - constitutes the perennial basis upon which "capitalist productive labour" can be built up and exploited.' First published in 1986, Maria Mies's progressive book was hailed as a major paradigm shift for feminist theory, and it remains a major contribution to development theory and practice today. Tracing the social origins of the sexual division of labour, it offers a history of the related processes of colonization and 'housewifization' and extends this analysis to the contemporary new international division of labour. Mies's theory of capitalist patriarchy has become even more relevant today. This new edition includes a substantial new introduction in which she both applies her theory to the new globalized world and answers her critics.

This book critically examines how mathematical modelling shapes and limits a scientific approach to the natural world and affects how society views nature. It questions concepts such as determinism, reversibility, equilibrium, and the isolated system, and challenges the view of physical reality as passive and inert. Dan Bruiger argues that if nature is real, it must transcend human representations. In particular, it can be expected to self-organize in ways that elude a mechanist treatment.This interdisciplinary study addresses several key areas: the "crisis" in modern physics and cosmology; the limits and historical, psychological, and religious roots of mechanistic thought; and the mutual effects of the scientific worldview upon society's relationship to nature. Bruiger demonstrates that there is still little place outside biology for systems that actively self-organize or self-define. Instead of appealing to "multiverses" to resolve the mysteries of fine-tuning, he suggests that cosmologists look toward self-organizing processes. He also states that physics is hampered by its external focus and should become more self-reflective. If scientific understanding can go beyond a stance of prediction and control, it could lead to a relationship with nature more amenable to survival.The Found and the Made fills a void between popular science writing and philosophy. It will appeal to naturalists, environmentalists, science buffs, professionals, and students of cultural history, evolutionary psychology, gender studies, and philosophy of mind.

This groundbreaking work remains as relevant today as when it was when first published. Two of Zed's best-known authors argue that ecological destruction and industrial catastrophes constitute a direct threat to everyday life, the maintenance of which has been made the particular responsibility of women. In both industrialized societies and the developing countries, the new wars the world is experiencing, violent ethnic chauvinisms and the malfunctioning of the economy also pose urgent questions for ecofeminists. Is there a relationship between patriarchal oppression and the destruction of nature in the name of profit and progress? How can women counter the violence inherent in these processes? Should they look to a link between the women's movement and other social movements? Maria Mies and Vandana Shiva offer a thought-provoking analysis of these and many other issues from a unique North-South perspective. They critique prevailing economic theories, conventional concepts of women's emancipation, the myth of 'catching up' development, the philosophical foundations of modern science and technology, and the omission of ethics when discussing so many questions, including advances in reproductive technology and biotechnology. In constructing their own ecofeminist epistemology and methodology, these two internationally respected feminist environmental activists look to the potential of movements advocating consumer liberation and subsistence production, sustainability and regeneration, and they argue for an acceptance of limits and reciprocity and a rejection of exploitation, the endless commoditization of needs, and violence.

This important new book argues that at the root of the contemporary crisis of climate, energy, food, inequality, and meaning is a certain core presupposition that structures the ways in which we live, think, act and design: the assumption of dualism, or the fundamental separateness of things. The authors contend that the key to constructing livable worlds lies in the cultivation of ways of knowing and acting based on a profound awareness of the fundamental interdependence of everything that exists – what they refer to as relationality. This shift in paradigm is necessary for healing our bodies, ecosystems, cities, and the planet at large. The book follows two interwoven threads of argumentation: on the one hand, it explains and exemplifies the modes of operation and the dire consequences of non-relational living; on the other, it elucidates the nature of relationality and explores how it is embodied in transformative practices in multiple spheres of life. The authors provide an instructive account of the philosophical, scientific, social, and political sources of relational theory and action, with the aim of illuminating the transition from living within seemingly ineluctable 'toxic loops' of unrelational living (based on ontological dualism), to living within 'relational weaves' which we might co-create with multiple human and nonhuman others.