RE: [A-List] Sustainable Territories

["Stan Goff" <sherrynstan@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

The following is one of several articles that were put into "The Power
of the Machine."  The link between ecocide and general purpose money is
spelled out here very well.  -SG

<snip>  The debate about whether to define "capitalism" in terms of
merchant or industrial capital can thus only be solved by recognizing
that circulation and production are mutually interdependent. In relying
on fossil fuels and combustion engines, industrialization was certainly
revolutionary, but the growth of a material infrastructure through
unequal exchange was not an innovation of eighteenth century England. In
order to trace such processes further back in history, as would
Wallerstein, Braudel, and Frank, we would need to widen Marx' concept of
"capital" so as to make it more abstract and inclusive, both in its
symbolic and its material aspects. I have elsewhere (Hornborg 1998)
argued that such an extended concept of "capital" could be defined as a
recursive (positive feedback) relationship between some kind of
technological infrastructure and some kind of symbolic capacity to make
claims on other people's resources. Such a general understanding of
capital accumulation would be as applicable to the agricultural terraces
of the Inca emperor in ancient Peru as to the textile factories of
eighteenth century England. What the two examples have in common is the
recursivity between the symbolic and the material. In both cases, the
material infrastructure is used to produce an output that is culturally
transformed (i.e. through the mediation of symbolic constructs) into
more infrastructure. Industrial machinery is only the latest version of
infrastructure, wage labour only the latest version of cultural
persuasion. <snip>

Full at http://jwsr.ucr.edu/archive/vol4/v4n2a5.php.

-----Original Message-----
From: a-list-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
[mailto:a-list-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Bill Totten
Sent: Monday, December 20, 2004 7:19 PM
To: A-List
Subject: [A-List] Sustainable Territories


In February this year, Richard Douthwaite conducted a week-long internet
seminar
on his book The Growth Illusion for over six hundred participants
worldwide.
Here is an edited version of some of his contributions towards the end
of