ABSTRACT
The great transformation, the ecological conversion of industrial societies into a climate compatible, resource-conserving and sustainable world economic order, requires far-reaching and manifold tasks to shape it, which, in their make-up, are neither purely scientific and technological nor purely social or political. The transformation process should lead to just and sustainable governance over the use and management of global, regional and local commons. Marx called the railways the crowning achievement of the industrial economy for their ability to connect a single interacting economy, just as the steamer enabled the multiplication and intensification of the capitalist economy incorporating ever more parts of the globe, providing the basis for a gigantic export boom in which world trade increased by 260 per cent between 1850 and 1870. If Industrial Revolution laid foundations for industrial civilization, then the era of Fordist mass production also brought with it a requirement for mass consumption of the goods being produced in the factories of mid twentieth-century America.
