Schumacher's 'Small is Beautiful' is indeed an excellent text, and anyone who hasn't got a copy on the shelf should consider investing in one. (or maybe share one with a friend) I hope you have read it Grok.

Encouraging small scale economics is about giving control to people and communities. It is also about intensive resource management in a scarce world. We can still engage in specialized professions and have the odd pencil factory set up.

Grok, Yabby. A discussion of socio-economics will certainly not be complete without consideration of human nature.

IMO there is such a thing as human nature. It swings between the physical and the energetic on one spectrum and the desire to control and the desire to commune with our surrounds on the other spectrum. (These come from my idea that I mentioned earlier of two categories of dialectical tensions: being/non-being and separateness/connectedness) This gives us what I call the four primary emotions: Toward sensual beauty, toward empathetic connection, toward being in control of our circumstances and toward justice.

Within ourselves we need to balance these sometimes contradictory tendencies. With balance, all is positive. Too much of one or the other however will result in either the loss of the self or the loss of community.

Ideally our society will be structured to facilitate the complexities of our being. Not assume or expect us to be one way or another at the expense of the other aspects of our being, as capitalism and communism have tended to do from opposite ends of the spectrum.

I'm interested in the effects that large scale industry for profit has on indigenous populations....they are the ones who end up in the cities with no means of support.
Part of my argument here concerns the uprooting of such people, and their relocation away from their traditional food sources.
A good example is the damming of the Mekong River for a hydro-electric operation. The locals have been relocated, given compensation ($5,000) and now have electricity and T.V...which on the surface seems an advancement, yet they now cannot access their farms or the river because they are too far away. They are having to come to terms with having to "buy" food. The Mekong is an abundant provider of sustenance and now they cannot partake of it.
The same thing has happened in India where in the last fifty years there have been thirty three hundred big dams built - 40 percent of the world's big dams have been constructed in India, and even if your village managed to escape being flooded, the further downstream you are, the worse off you find yourself...sugar factories and golf course promoters are more likely to be beneficiaries than ordinary people.

*I'm interested in the effects that large scale industry for profit has on indigenous populations....*

Poirot, I'm interested why you seemingly always want to blame
everything on large scale industry for profit. Most of these
decisions are made by politicians and bureaucrats. They make
the rules, the rest of us have to abide by them.

The Communist Chinese Govt is well known for not giving a hoot
about the rights of individuals. So why your focus on just
for profit industry?

Gilbert, indeed there is a thing called human nature. I'm
fascinated by fields such as neuroscience and evolutionary
psychology. But feel free to invent your own wheel, if you wish.

Dear Yabby,

Are you suggesting that Chinese large-scale industry does not turn a profit?

http://www.businessweek.com/news/2010-09-27/chinese-industrial-company-profits-rise-55-on-year.html

Dear Poirot,

No, for I know that some Chinese companies are not state owned and
do make a profit.

What I am curious about is why you want to blame political decisions,
made by Govts, on companies.

The Chinese for instance, have a long history of taking whatever
land they need, without much concern about the people. Especially
for building dams.

So from my perspective, you are biased.

Since we are straying far afield from hegelian vs. marxist dialectics, let me introduce one basic example (which could be of either one), from the standpoint of political-economy: since the Rightwingers here (and these reactionary days, even most liberals are de facto Rightwingers) absolutely insist on making everything about this 'dialog' _political_ in terms they can understand and expect and demand. So while political developments, per se, are in fact a higher, more complex and concrete order of dialectical relations than, say, the more abstract and Ideal "Being" and "Nothingness", we can still point to basic dialectical relations at this level; such as how bourgeois "Democracy", while continuing (just barely today) to give us their much-vaunted and proclaimed *forms* of democracy (if that), in fact entirely betray that promise (and have from the beginning, actually) by almost completely emptying that form of any real, meaningful, truly democratic *content*...

And of course, the VERY first thing the Reichwingers here will want to talk about then would be the not-very-democratic praxis of the "people's democratic republican" democracies. As if their constant attempts here at typical misdirection are fooling anybody.