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Question
- Jul 2019
It is often incorrectly claimed that the European Union is responsible for peace in Europe since Victory in Europe day in 1944. That is not possible as the EU has existed only 26 years being created by the Maastricht Treaty, of November 1, 1993.
NATO and not the EU was responsible for the security of NATO states.
Further the history of Europe has been marred by war and genocide, notably in the Third Balkan war of 1991-2001. In addition to that Greece, Spain, and Portugal were dictatorships as late as the 1970s and Yugoslavia was held together by President Tito's regime until his death.
Additionally, the EU's short history is characterised by the unprecedented social, political and economic instability it has overseen and fostered. President Barak Obama warned against policies like austerity but the EU pressed ahead making money for the banks and increasing poverty, unemployement and unrest in Europe.
So what are the true conditions to foster peace and inhibit war?
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Question
- Jan 2019
The concept of Hybrid Warfare and Lawfare is still contested and not consistently defined. Some researchers (e.g. Lawrence Freedman in “The Future of War: A History”) are arguing that the concept is misleading, nothing new and consistent with former Soviet doctrines.
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Question
- Apr 2014
To hear that Riga is a capital of Lithuania was a wrong assumption and very common in the Soviet times. But why now do westerners very often not see or not like to see the strong differences between Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia in culture, architecture, religion, languages, history, etc?
Is it a matter of education or psychological phenomena? Maybe the Baltic states themselves are bad in advertising or simply too small to be noticed?
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Question
- Apr 2021
I am doing research paper Russian geopolitical interest at Northern sea route. .Soviet and Arctic had long history from 1930, exploring naval base by Arctic circle as today research develop nuclear icebreaker development experiment of raw materials, fisheries, oil etc. EurAsia trade with China and other as one of reason Russian economy is rebuilding,, but in long run Russian could benefit from climate change. I want discuss different opinion, fact and point some problem it could face problem with other global players.
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Question
- Jan 2025
There're two outstanding facts in the history of the Russian higher education in the 21st Century: joining the Bologna process in 2003 and an expulsion in 2022. But inspite of geopolitical reasons of both events, no doubt we may observe now a somewhat exhausting the ideological backgrounds for such globalization processes and "democratic prospects" for today's world. Surely, we may attribute this new political agenda to occasionalities, but in fact, one it's necessary to recognize, that the war conflicts in the Post-Soviet space, "US conservative revolution" etc. are parts of a general trend, which is definitely influence higher education at a global scale. Some problems of this transformation have been treated here
Deleted research item The research item mentioned here has been deleted
but it remains more general questions, what values, concepts, strategies and resources will determine the new era in the world-wide higher education in the near 10 - 15 years? …
Question
- Feb 2025
-Call for Papers-
Marxism & Sciences: A Journal of Nature, Culture, Human and Society
Issue 8
Summer 2025
Marxism and Systems Science - The Technosphere: Systems, Things, and Infrastructures From Tektology, Cybernetics and Computational Planning to the Complexity Paradigm and Platform Capitalism
Issue Editors: Sascha Freyberg, Joost Kircz & Örsan Şenalp
Deadline for abstracts: March 1
Deadline for finished articles: June 1
Issue publication: September 2025
Marxist thought and practice have always centrally focused on the analysis of systems, things, and (technological) infrastructures—along with the possibilities inherent in alternative systems organized by collective ownership and state planning. These discussions have gained renewed currency in the digital age. To explore these questions today means to elaborate a Marxist epistemology of systems that goes beyond the old dichotomy of historical vs. structural analysis.
In this special issue, we want to investigate the relation of Marxism and systems science, in history, theory and practice. We construe systems science broadly, with a particular emphasis on those conceptions which developed in the Marxist tradition with a dialectical approach. Additionally, we understand there to be a longstanding relationship between systems theory, political economy, organisation, computational means, theories of economic planning, and global social history, represented by traditions such as Immanuel Wallerstein’s world systems theory.
In recent years, world systems analysis has been recast in light of the debate around the notion of the Anthropocene. Representative is the work of the geologist Jan Zalasiewicz, who has argued we should understand the artefacts of human planetary activity as comprising the Technosphere. As Zalasiewicz writes, “The technosphere encompasses all of the technological objects manufactured by humans, but that is only part of it…. [It] comprises not just our machines, but us humans too, and the professional and social systems by which we interact with technology…. A proto-technosphere of some kind has been present throughout human history, but for much of this time, it took the form of isolated, scattered patches that were of little planetary significance. It has now become a globally interconnected system – a new and important development on our planet.”
This debate provides an occasion to revisit Marxist resources for understanding human labour in connection with the “scientific-technological revolution” and the “great acceleration” of the twentieth century. We can consider key moments in history, from the famous Bogdanov-Lenin debate to the anti-technocratic work of Evald Ilyenkov, the systems theory of Blauberg, Sadovsky, and Yudin, and cybernetics in the socialist realm.
In the special issue we would like to address the following questions: Is system science more than a theory of an administered world? Does it go beyond an effort to improve the status quo and transform the system altogether? What role does systems theory play in Marxist thought and the history of socialism more generally? What epistemological changes are presented by the development of technologies such as AI? Are current developments reducible to old questions about statistics and data, or do they contain novel dynamics?
Additionally, we might ask: what were the contexts informing the development of Marxist systems theories? Which problems do we encounter today when pursuing these perspectives, and how successful were syntheses of the Marxian critique of political economy and systems thinking? What are its prospects today, and where are revisions needed?
Also, Is it significant that the first two versions of systems science, developed by prominent Marxist theorists Bogdanov and Bukharin, were suppressed by the Soviet regime and only reemerged in the post-war US context?
Given the broad topic, we are looking for contributions from different fields and perspectives, including historical and analytical methods, and systematic and speculative approaches alike. We particularly welcome contributions that give a comprehensive overview of a specific field, case study, or problem.
Possible topics may include:
Revisiting Bogdanov’s work and its reception
Cybernetics in socialist planning in view of computation (e.g. in Chile, DDR, USSR, China, etc.)
Marxist analyses of systems (e.g., trade, money, the internet)
Marxist systems theories (World systems theory, the Regulation School, etc.)
Materialist dialectics and systems theory
Hegel, Marx and Engels as precursors of the systems paradigm
The problem of inherent positivism in techno-futurist ideas
Dialectics of nature and earth-systems science
The Technosphere and the debate about the Capitalocene
Marxist epistemology of systems and infrastructure
Capitalist appropriation of systems sciences (neo-liberalism, neo-institutionalism, Governance theory, Club of Rome, RAND, etc.)
Cybernetics in socialist planning and computation
The rise of complexity science in the neoliberal era (Manhattan Project, Santa Fe Institute, etc.)
Marxist (and post-Marxist) critics of systems sciences and complexity governance
Digital infrastructures and platform capitalism
Proposals
Please send abstracts of your proposal with max. 300 words to marxismandscience@gmail.com
Select Bibliography:
Biggart, J., Dudley, P., & King, F. (Eds.). (1998). Alexander Bogdanov and the origins of systems thinking in Russia. Ashgate.
Blauberg, I. V., Sadovsky, M. V., & Yudin, E. G. (1977). Systems theory: Philosophical and methodological problems. Progress Publishers.
Bogdanov, A.A. Red Star: The First Bolshevik Utopia. (1908). Edited by Loren R. Graham and Richard Stites. Indiana University Press 1984.
Bogdanov, A., and Peter Dudley (1996). Bogdanov’s Tektology. Hull: Centre for Systems Studies; and: Bogdanov, A. (1980) Essays in Tektology, George Gorelik(trs), The systems inquiry series.
Gare, Arran (2000). Aleksandr Bogdanov’s history, sociology and philosophy of science. Stud. Hist. Phil. Sci. 31,2: 231 -248. See also the praise by C. Rovelli (2023). Relational interpretation of quantum mechanics and Alexander Bogdanov’s worldview. Systems Research and Behavioral Science, 40(2), 312–319.
Ilyenkov, E.: Leninism and the Metaphysics of Positivism Online: https://www.marxists.org/archive/ilyenkov/works/positive/positii.htm.
Lenin (1908) Materialism and Empirio-Criticism. Critical Comments on a Reactionary Philosophy. Vol. 14. Collected Works. Progress Publishers, 1968.
Susiluoto, I. (1982). The origins and development of system thinking in the Soviet Union. Political and philosophical controversies from Bogdanov and Bukharin to present-day re-evaluations, Phd thesis, Helsinki: Annales Academiae Scientiarum Fennicae Dissrtationes Humanurum Litterarum 30, Suomalainen Tiedeakatemia
Wallerstein, I. (1974-1989) The Modern World-System, 3 vols; and idem. (2004) World Systems Analysis: An Introduction. Online: https://archive.org/details/worldsystemsanal0000wall
Zalasiewicz, Jan. “The Unbearable Burden of the Technosphere.” The Unesco Courier. March 27, 2018. Online: https://courier.unesco.org/en/articles/unbearable-burden-technosphere
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Question
- Apr 2013
Here's my list of twenty. I need five more.
Bennett, E.W. (1964) The marine fauna of New Zealand: Crustacea Brachyura. New Zealand Department of Scientific and Industrial Research Bulletin, 153 [= New Zealand Oceanographic Institute Memoir, 22], 1–120. [pp. 17, 32–35]
Coelho, P.A. (1999) Revisão dos gêneros Eurypodius Guérin, 1825, Anomalothir Miers, 1879 e Eucinetops Stimpson, 1860, nas costas Caribe e Atlântica da América do Sul (Crustacea, Decapoda, Majidae). Trabalhos Oceanográficos da Universidade Federal de Pernambuco, Recife, 27(1), 149–168. [p. 149]
Dell, R.K. (1968a) Composition and distribution of the New Zealand brachyuran fauna. Transactions of the Royal Society of New Zealand, Zoology, 10(25), 225–240. [pp. 231, 233, 237]
Dell, R.K. (1968b) Notes on NZ crabs. Records of the Dominion Museum, 6(3), 13–28. [p. 23]
Denny, C.M. & Schiel, D.R. (2001) Feeding ecology of the banded wrasse Notolabrus fucicola (Labridae) in southern New Zealand: prey items, seasonal differences, and ontogenetic variation. New Zealand Journal of Marine and Freshwater Research, 35(5), 925–933. [p. 927]
Fenwick, G.D. (1978) Decapoda of the Snares Islands, New Zealand. New Zealand Journal of Marine and Freshwater Research, 12(2), 205–209. [p. 208]
Fürböck, S. & Patzner, R.A. (2005) Decoration preferences of Maja crispata Risso 1827 (Brachyura, Majidae). Natura Croatica, 14(3), 175–184. [p. 182]
Griffin, D.J.G. (1966) The marine fauna of New Zealand: spider crabs, family Majidae (Crustacea, Brachyura). New Zealand Department of Scientific and Industrial Research Bulletin [= New Zealand Oceanographic Institute Memoir, 35], 172, 1–111. [pp. 11, 24, 27, 30, 31, 33, 34, 90, 92]
Griffin, D.J.G. & Tranter, H.A. (1986) The Decapoda Brachyura of the Siboga Expedition. Part VIII: Majidae. Siboga Expeditie Monografie, 39, i–vii, 1–335. [pp. 3, 61, 219]
McLay, C.L. (1988) Brachyura and crab-like Anomura of New Zealand. Leigh Laboratory Bulletin, University of Auckland, 22, i–v, 1–463. [pp. 6, 12, 130–132,
McLay, C.L., Feldmann, R.M. & MacKinnon, D.I. (1995) New species of Miocene spider crabs from New Zealand, and a partial cladistic analysis of the genus Leptomithrax Miers, 1876 (Brachyura: Majidae). New Zealand Journal of Geology and Geophysics, 38(3), 299–313. [p. 304]
Ng, P.K.L., Guinot, D. & Davie, P.J.F. (2008) Systema brachyurorum: Part I. An annotated checklist of extant brachyuran crabs of the world. Raffles Bulletin of Zoology, supp. 17, 1–286. [p. 113]
Szebeni, T. & Hartnoll, R.G. (2005) Structure and distribution of carapace setae in British spider crabs. Journal of Natural History, 39(44), 3795–3809. [p. 3795]
Wear, R.G. & Fielder, D.R. (1985) The marine fauna of New Zealand: larvae of the Brachyura (Crustacea: Decapoda). New Zealand Oceanographic Institute Memoir 92: 1–90. [p. 6]
Webber, W.R., Fenwick, G.D., Bradford-Grieve, J.M., Eagar, S.H., Buckeridge, J.S., Poore, G.C.B., Dawson, E.W., Watling, L., Jones, J.B., Wells, J.B.J., Bruce, N.L., Ahyong, S.T., Larsen, K., Chapman, M.A., Olesen, J., Ho, J.-S., Green, J.D., Shiel, R.J., Rocha, C.E.F., Lörz, A.-N., Bird, G.J. & Charleston, W.A. (2010). Phylum Arthropoda – subphylum Crustacea – shrimps, crabs, lobsters, barnacles, slaters, and kin. In: Gordon, D.P. (ed), New Zealand Inventory of Biodiversity. Volume Two. Kingdom Animalia. Chaetozoa, Ecdysozoa, Ichnofossils. Canterbury University Press, Christchurch, pp. 98–232. [p. 227]
Woods, C.M.C. (1995) Masking in the spider crab Trichoplatus huttoni (Brachyura: Majidae). New Zealand Natural Sciences, 22, 75–80. [pp. 75–79]
Yaldwyn, J.C. & Dawson, E.W. (1976) First records of the crab genera Homola, Randallia, and Rochinia from New Zealand (Crustacea: Decapoda: Brachyura). National Museum of New Zealand Records, 1(6), 91–103. [p. 95]
Yaldwyn, J.C. & Webber, W.R. (2011) Annotated checklist of New Zealand Decapoda (Anthropoda: Crustacea). Tuhinga, 22, 171–272. [p. 236]
Zarenkov, N.A. (1968) [Crustacea Decapoda collected in the Antarctic and Antiboreal regions by the Soviet Antarctic Expedition]. [Investigations of USSR Seas], 6(11), 153–199. [In Russian] [p. 193, 194]
Zarenkov, N.A. (1970) Crustacean Decapoda collected by the Soviet Antarctic expeditions in the Antarctic and Subantarctic regions. Andriyashev, A.P. & Ushakov, P.V. (Eds), Studies of Marine Fauna, Biological Reports of the Soviet Antarctic Expedition (1955–1958). Israel Programme for Scientific Translations, 4, 153–201. [p. 194]
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Question
- Jan 2010
PAUL ERDOS ( 1 9 1 3- 1 996) , born in Budapest, Hungary, was the son of two high school mathematics teachers.
He was a child prodigy: at age 3 he could multiply three-digit numbers in his head, and at 4 he discovered negative numbers on his own.
he was mostly home-schooled. At 1 7 Erdos entered Eotvos University, graduating four years later with a Ph.D. in mathematics. After graduating he spent four years at Manchester, England, on a
postdoctoral fellowship.
Erdos made many significant contributions to combinatorics, graph theory and number theory.
In 1 938 he went to the United States because of the difficult political situation in Hungary, especially for Jews. He also spent considerable time in Israel.
Erdos traveled extensively throughout the world to work with other mathematicians, visiting conferences, universities, and
research laboratories. He had no permanent home.
Erdos published more papers than any other mathematician in history. He was the author or coauthor of more than 1500 papers and had morethan 500 coauthors.
Copies of his articles are kept by Ron Graham, a famous discrete mathematician with whom he collaborated extensively and who took care of many of his worldly needs.
Erdos offered rewards, ranging from $ 1 0 to $ 1 0,000, for the solution of problems that he found particularly interesting, with the
size ofthe reward depending on the difficulty ofthe problem. He paid out close to $4000.
Erdos had his own special language, using such terms as
"epsilon" ----------> (child),
"boss"----------> (woman),
"slave" ----------> (man),
"captured" ----------> (married),
"liberated"----------> (divorced),
"Supreme Fascist" ----------> (God),
"died" ----------> (stopped doing mathematics),
"Sam" ---------->(United States),
"Joe"----------> (Soviet Union)
He devoted himself almost entirely to mathematics. He had no hobbies and no full-time job. He never married and apparently remained celibate.
Erdos was extremely generous, donating much of the money he collected from prizes, awards, and stipends for scholarships and to
worthwhile causes. He traveled extremely lightly and did not like having many material possessions.
Resource: "Discrete Mathematics and Its Applications" by Rosen (Sixth Edition) plus some modifications!
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Question
- Nov 2013
First, in order to avoid speculations, I should note that I am happily married and a father of two very smart schoolgirls. I am teaching mathematics at two faculties of Brno University of Technology, Faculty of Electrical Engineering and Communication and at Faculty of Information Technologies.
In both faculties, but especially in the computer science oriented one, I am observing a new trend of several last years. There is a lot of girls among my students, and most of them are really very smart. They usually reach excellent results at exams. This trend goes just to the opposite to another trend -- a slow, but continuously decreasing the overall level of students in universities, which is observed and complained by many my colleagues.
In addition to this, we have several Ph.D. students at our Department of Mathematics, but again -- with one exception, they all are girls. Some of them are domestic, some are from the countries of the former USSR - Russia, Ukraine and Belarus. All these young ladies are excellent mathematicians. Is it only a coincidence or a confirmation of the new trend? And where are the smart boys, where they were lost in this modern, rapidly changing society?
Do you also observe this phenomenon worldwide, or is it only a matter of the former block of eastern soviet satellites? What are the sociological consequences of this new trend (under the assumption that it really exists)?
For an illustration when I started study physics at another university in my city, over the years, almost all my classmates were boys and the few girls quickly fell away. Our professor on Mechanics and Molecular Physics had a young, beautiful and very intelligent female assistant and most of us were astonished how it is possible that she is so good at mathematics and physics (and being a beautiful woman at the same time). It had one indisputable advantage -- most of us had a strong motivation to show her that we were also not empty-headed.
I do not doubt that women have been throughout the history of mankind as smart as men, but society did not allow them to study. Many women, including my wife, have complained that society is unfair to women. Could the 'advent of smart girls' witness that this old, unfair social paradigm is definitively over?
And could there arise a new danger for us, men? Should we be afraid of these smart girls?
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Question
- Jun 2020
On White Supremacy:
The obsession as to whether human-kind is fundamentally bad or good has preoccupied scholars for millennia. This can be traced back to the Catholic theologian, Augustine (354-430), who believed that men and women are basically bad, all born into original sin, and therefore require close supervision by which to cleanse their souls. In the enlightened age, intellectuals such as Rousseau (1712-1778) came up with the counter argument defending the premise that human-kind is basically good, an ethos that has been adopted by many liberal societies of today even if only by lip-service. We know that if one wants an economy that is maximally uncreative and unproductive, totalitarianism (left or right driven) is the best political system by which to achieve this. Here a minority of the population under its leadership employs all the state’s resources to control the majority under the assumption that the majority has ‘bad habits’ that must be altered and if not possible contained using police-state tactics. Such a society is unsustainable, as we witnessed with the disintegration of the Soviet Union in December 1991.
So, what about White Supremacy. This viewpoint has a long history in the United State going back to the age of slavery [1620 to 1865] when Black people (including their children) were sold and killed like cattle. At its zenith in 1860, some 13% of the US population, 4 million people of a population of 31 million, were enslaved. Shortly after the passage of the 13th Amendment (which was meant to end slavery in 1865) segments of the White population resisted this policy by forming the Ku Klux Klan who adopted an Augustine-viewpoint that led to the mass lynching of mainly Black males that continued well into the mid-20th Century. According to the Equal Justice Initiative (2017), 4084 African-Americans were lynched between 1877 and 1950, mainly in the Southern United States. In the 1960’s three acts were passed by Congress to remedy this bad history: the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Voting Rights Act of 1965, and the Civil Rights Act of 1968.
Now let us fast forward to age of Trump (2016-2020). Donald Trump, an Independent, became a Republican so that he could win the presidential election in November 2016. His madness, which includes racism, bigotry, and contempt for women, is expressed regularly via Twitter and Fox News. This madness has now been amplified by the recent killing of an African American man, George Floyd, who was caught on camera being suffocated by a Minneapolis police officer. With Christian Bible in hand and in front of St. Johns church in Washington DC, Trump declared (much like Hitler did during his rallies in the 30 and 40’s) that he would impose law and order on the masses who are protesting the killing of George Floyd. So far, 10,000 protesters have been arrested by police (Aljazeera, June 4, 2020). The ~ 25,000 White supremacist of America are standing by to see whether Trump can create an opportunity for them to return America to its roots: by having a large segment of the population (mainly immigrant and non-White) be put under the control of a White minority to satisfy (unbeknown to them) the dictates of the Catholic theologian, Augustine (354-430). If you believe in humanity and its sustainability, you can never allow this to happen since this is a recipe to continuous warfare, much like what goes on in the Middle East today.
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