Post-Scarcity?

[Kingbruh]

I've heard many, many times that a Communist Society would be post-scarcity, but how do people expect that to work? In America, there are tons of factories and other workplaces, but it isn't post-scarcity. So how do people expect to achieve post-scarcity?

[ckaihatsu]

When revolutionaries speak of 'post-scarcity' it's meant in the *political* sense of countering capitalism's *artificial* scarcity (where owners have more to gain economically from a restricted supply, rather than from everything being readily available to everyone everywhere).

So politically, just allowing that which is made to actually reach those who need/want it would be 'post-scarcity', since enough *is* produced under capitalism to eradicate conditions of material scarcity.

But outside of the political term there's the *material* meaning of 'scarcity', which is a *blanket* term, and really should be thought-of on a *per-item* basis -- could there be the possibility of *nothing* being scarce whatsoever -- ?

This is where the two meanings often get conflated and revolutionaries can be made to look as over-promising -- no, not *every little thing* is meant to be at everyone's fingertips, 100% of the time, and that's not the point of overthrowing capitalist (exchange-value) relations, either. The point of 'post-scarcity' is the *political* one as described above, to get past the artificial scarcity that capitalism enforces for the sake of subsidizing the world's regime of exchange values (less supply = more demand = higher prices).

On a per-item basis, though, is where the *implementation* of communism would be realized -- which items, exactly, should be made post-scarce / in abundance, and which ones shouldn't -- ? How would that line be drawn? What would be the system for producing 'scarce' items under communism if they weren't 'post-scarcity'?

The quick answer to all of this is that if whatever kind of work was *easy* enough and socially-important-enough, like for that of producing food, perhaps, then a 'gift economy' would probably be sufficient -- all it would take is enough people volunteering their liberated-labor to produce food for everyone, regardless. (In return they would have access to all of society's material production, as would anyone else.)

But if socially necessary work *wasn't* so easy or volunteered-for then the situation would be more complex. I developed a model of circulating 'labor credits' to address this kind of terrain:


labor credits framework for 'communist supply & demand'

http://s6.postimg.org/jjc7b5nch/150221_labor_credits_framework_for_communist_su.jp g (http://postimg.org/image/p7ii21rot/full/)

[Kingbruh]

When revolutionaries speak of 'post-scarcity' it's meant in the *political* sense of countering capitalism's *artificial* scarcity (where owners have more to gain economically from a restricted supply, rather than from everything being readily available to everyone everywhere).

So politically, just allowing that which is made to actually reach those who need/want it would be 'post-scarcity', since enough *is* produced under capitalism to eradicate conditions of material scarcity.


So by artificial scarcity you means stuff like when the government burned tons of crops in order to raise their prices? Stuff like that?

[tuwix]

^^ More or less. There are far more sophisticated forms of that. In electronics and car industry, for example, there is an obvious collusion to not produce an equipment very reliable. The equipment must break down after some time to enforce customers to but a new equipment. It has even its own name: the planned obsolescence. In agriculture, there to many people employed and using obsolete technology due to a fear of unemployment. Governments subside obsolete agriculture to avoid a potential revolution due to unemployment in agriculture. And there are many other ways to create an artificial scarcity.

[Creative Destruction]

So by artificial scarcity you means stuff like when the government burned tons of crops in order to raise their prices? Stuff like that?

Most things you can think of are a result of artificial scarcity. Take housing for example: there are more empty houses in the United States than there are homeless, yet there is talk of housing is scarce enough for there to be a homeless population. This is due to economic factors.

Take the luxury items: Cristal doesn't have to be scarce. There's nothing particularly special between it and other wines, except it is a Veblen good; that is, it's expensive because it's a brand name that evokes bougie privilege. Same thing with diamonds. There is no actual diamond scarcity that would justify the prices for which natural diamonds sell. There's a cartel that controls the supply and controls the prices through that.

Take water: water isn't actually scarce. Most of the earth is covered in the stuff. Drinking water is scarce because of overuse, but also because the technology that we have that could make, for example, ocean water potable (desalinization) is considered cost prohibitive. And it is, under a capitalist system. In a system where profit is no longer a motivation and money is literally no object, it would be relatively easy to engineer desalinization plants, just as if we had coal or gas operated power plants.

Food: food is probably one of the least scarce items you can think of, yet there are millions, if not billions, of people who go hungry. We have the capacity to feed everyone in the world nutritious meals. But there's political hassles around a.) GMOs that would grow in areas where the un-modified plant normally wouldn't and b.) there's the simple question of cost. Food producers produce food for profit. They're not just going to give it away to hungry folks if there wasn't some way they could defray their costs and at least break even. That's why we have situations where grocery stores, if closing down, just let the food rot. Or that we burn crops, in order to protect farmer's incomes.

And on and on.

There are some real scarcity issues that face us, especially in the realm of technology. For example, we're getting close to mining out all of the base elements needed to make computer chips, which is why there's been an emphasis (though not large enough) on recycling what we have now. The way to deal with that is researching how we can create these elements in labs, without having to mine them from the earth. (Like we're now finding out how to make actual meat in labs without having to kill cattle.) Pair that with a more concerted effort to recycle and reuse these elements. Tons of phones and computers are thrown away each day but they often end up in landfills, rather than back in newly produced phones. It's incredible how many issues of scarcity of this kind that we could actually nip in the bud if we weren't so goddamned wasteful and scared of garbage.