Date: Fri, 06 Aug 1999 11:57:46 -0700
From: "J. Foster" <borealis-AT-mail.wellsgray.net>
Subject: DMP


Leah:
>> nature isn't trying to maintain itself, to 
>> preserve itself, hell nature isn't "trying" to "do" anything - nature grows 
>> and grows until it destroys itself, over-abundance, so much life that life 
>> dies, bataille's exuberance, no darwinian cause'n'effect, no greater 
>> ecosystem, no larger picture, only too much life spilling over its 
>> boundaries, consuming itself in reckless reckless senseless growth.
>> you want to be hard? put away these easy explanations.
>> masculine-versus-feminine will alway make sense no matter how the terms 
>> are defined. a truer danger lies beyond making sense.
>> 
Ariosto:
> It's  an "explanation" because  it  tells  a  story  governed  by  a 
>cause (different  from  the  notion of  origin) and  an  end. Bataille
>would call this  a project, maybe even providence.

Feminine versus masculine certainly makes sense if we were talking about a
general economy. The domestic mode of production with the family at the
center is well dispersed at the planetary level. Certainly one explanation
is that within each DMP, each instance, there are gender specific roles. In
Africa it has been shown that women in Tanzania were the ones to develop
market gardens for the specific purpose of obtaining additional income to
augment the income that men had to obtain by leaving the home and working in
distant mines, etc. 

Originally the people herded cattle on a semi-nomadic basis, but this was
prevented in large part due to English colonizers taking the land and making
the land, the best land into private farms. The result was the displacement
of millions of people onto steep hillsides and marginal farmlands for
sustainence. When the 'restrictive economy' of the British colonizers came
to an end the remaining private farms were no longer sufficient - due to
erosion and increased population - to supply incomes to farm labourers, and
the country. So some of the land was returned to the indigenous people, and
used to obtain sustenance, however. The outcome was not entirely successful
immediately since the land was subject to over exploitation. The land also
eroded horrendously, and this caused siltation of the watercourses, disease,
and food shortages.

The solution to the general economies problems did occur though in the last
twenty years due to a shift to more or less to the DMP or domestic mode of
production which essentially is families with self-sufficient means of
production of food, shelter and clothing. The develop and research into
permanent terraces to halt accelerating soil erosion, and the establishment
of market gardens by women while the men were often away working in
industrial mining and farming facilities, and the use of organic and
indigenous methods of farming provided a means to achieve the
self-sufficiency of the these peoples and at the same time protect
environmental resources, biodiversity. 

John