On 09/03/11 12:27, Jurriaan Bendien wrote: > I' not being rhetorical, but if you think I am, prove then, that Western > hegemony depended on oil, gas and coal! > > You're the man with the rhetoric, posing the very rhetorical question "What > if the hegemony of the West was not, after all, defined by modern natural > science and technology, enlightenment and individualism but by a one-time > offering of coal, gas and oil?"
No, I posted a quote from and a link to an article which asks that question - as a reponse to the request for comments on the somewhat related article. It is a very interesting article. There are converging narratives suggesting that Western hegemony is bound up with coal, gas and oil. The European economy only became bigger than Asia's around 1800, some say, and is now smaller again, so the Euro-American age seems to coincide with the offering of cheap coal, gas and oil that is now vanishing slowly. I don't need to "prove" it - what does that mean anyway? - it is more than sufficient for me to find resonance with those converging narratives (which you can combine with narratives of a new global elite (The Atlantic/The Economist) to fully see that Western hegemony is over and out - curiously just as control of oil seems to be running out). If you actually read the article questioning hegemony and oil it might also make more sense, perhaps. It seems to me that the amount of "assets capital can mobilise" is proportional to the amount of coal, gas and oil capital can command. As such, that abstract statement - "relative quantity of capital assets it can mobilize" - is to my mind but an obscure way of saying the plain thing that the Finnish philosopher was asking. jmp -- http://commoning.wordpress.com "...I thought we were an autonomous collective..." _______________________________________________ pen-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l
