Some thoughts about Carrying Capacity

[kristopher]

3. You left out the most significant contribution by Harris.

1. INFRASTRUCTURE
A. Mode of Production: the technology and the practices employed for expanding or limiting basic subsistence production, especially the production of food and other forms of energy.

B. Mode of reproduction: the technology and the practices employed for expanding, limiting and maintaining population size.

This makes Harris' analytic strategy worlds apart from what Marx worked with. You also seem to me to be emphasizing the primacy role of infrastructure a bit too much. In application Harris freely employs the idea of feedbacks throughout his analysis. Infrastructure is what it is due to it's limiting nature and shouldn't be used to ignore the potential for other components to be the nexus of change. The very reason the 'mode of reproduction' has such a profound implication to analysis is the way it serves to link our core cultural conditioning to structural change.