debates - abundance and scarcity

  1. robbo203
    robbo203
    Discuss:

    We must learn here from the limits of Marxism, a project which understandably in a period of material scarcity. anchored the social dialectic and the contradictions of capitalism in the economic realm. Marx, it has been emphasized , examined the preconditions for liberation, not the conditions of liberation. The Marxian critique is rooted in the past, in the era of material want and relatively limited technological development...
    A century ago, scarcity had to be endured; today it has to be enforced - hence the importance of the state in the present era. It is not that capitalism has resolved its contradictions and annulled the social dislectic, but rather that the social dialectic and the contradictions of capitalism have expanded fromn the economic to the hierarchical realms of society, from the abstract "historic" domain to the concrete minutiae of everyday experience, from the arena of survial to the arena of life
    (Murray Bookchin, Post-Scarcity Anarchism, Wildwood House, London , 1974, p.37-8)
  2. grok
    grok
    Marxism has yet to be transcended as the horizon beyond which no other system of thought or praxis can penetrate. While there exists potential abundance in many areas where it did not exist, previous to advanced capitalism, there still remain very real limits to objective social development at the moment, whatever the political system -- "Peak Oil" being just one major example. So AFAIC in a very real sense: the "conditions of liberation" are not conditions even we in the 21st Century are going to be able to fully comprehend. It indeed remains for our communist descendants to truly deal systematically with whatever Objective Reality they exist as a part of.

    And for the record: it should come as no surprise that I am no big fan of the originator of 'Dialectical-Naturalism', Mr. Murray Bookchin.
  3. Grenzer
    Grenzer
    Bookchin? Interesting.. from my understanding he became a primivist.