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Our lives are driven by fear. Fear leads us to political apathy
regarding our power. Exploitative capitalism leave us feeling hopeless. Our nature
is presented in dualities. Are we competitive
or cooperative? Generous or greedy? Violent or peaceful? A common theme among
religion has been that human beings are “born into sin” and heavily influenced
by “evil forces” to do harmful things. Human beings are not capable of
co-existing in harmony without the threat of a supreme being bringing down
divine retribution.
Are we really drawn toward conflict? Must we compete with
one another to survive? Peter Kropotkin in his classic Mutual Aid observed “Mutual
Aid and Mutual Support carried on to an extent which made me suspect in it a
feature of the greatest importance for the maintenance of life, the
preservation of each species, and its further evolution?”
There is ample evidence that we are drawn to cooperation.
“Caring about others is part of our mammalian heritage, and
humans take this ability to a high level,” explains neuroscientist Sandra
Aamodt. “Helping other people seems to be our default approach, in the sense
that we’re more likely to do it when we don’t have time to think a situation
through before acting. After a conflict, we and other primates-including our
famously aggressive relatives, the chimpanzees-have many ways to reconcile and
repair relationships.”
So, if we are truly inclined to cooperate with one another,
why is there so much division and turmoil in the world? The answer is to be
found in the mechanisms of capitalism, its creation of artificial scarcity as a
means to maintain hierarchies. It is no secret that capitalism thrives off
exploitation. It needs a large majority of people to be completely reliant on
their labor power. It needs private property to be accessible to only a few, so
that they may utilize it as a social relationship where the rented majority can
labor and create value. It needs capital to be accessible to only a few, so
that they may regenerate and reinvest said capital in a perpetual manner. And
it needs a considerable population of the impoverished and unemployed – “a
reserve army of labor,” as Marx put it – in order to create a “demand” for
labor and thus make such exploitative positions “competitive” to those who need
to partake in them to merely survive. It needs these things in order to stay
intact – something that is desirable to the 85 richest people in the world who
own more than half of the world’s entire population (3.6 billion people)
But wealth accumulation through alienation and exploitation
is not enough in itself. The system also needs to create scarcity where it does
not already exist. Even Marx admitted that capitalism has given us the
productive capacity to provide all that is needed for the global population. In
other words, capitalism has proven that scarcity does not exist. And, over the
years, technology has confirmed this. But, in order for capitalism to survive,
scarcity must exist, even if through artificial means. Maintaining scarcity is necessary
for wealth enhancement. It is not enough that accumulation flows to a very
small section of the population, but more so that a considerable portion of the
population is faced with the inherent struggles related to inaccessibility. For
example, if millions of people are unable to access basic needs such as food,
clothing, shelter, and healthcare, the commodification of those needs becomes
all the more effective. On the flip side, the mere presence of accessibility –
or wealth – which is enjoyed by the elite becomes all the more valuable because
it is highly sought after. In this sense, it is not the accumulation of
personal wealth that creates advantageous positions on the socioeconomic
ladder; it’s the impoverishment of the majority. Allowing human beings access
to basic necessities would essentially destroy the allure (and thus, power) of
wealth and the coercive nature of forced participation. This effect is
maintained through artificial scarcity – the coordinated withholding of basic
needs from the majority.
A crucial part of this process is commodification – the
“transformation of goods and services, as well as ideas or other entities that
normally may not be considered goods, into commodities” that can be bought,
sold, used and discarded. The most important transformation is that of the
working-class majority who, without the means to sustain on their own, are left
with a choice between (1) laboring to create wealth for a small minority and
accepting whatever “wages” are provided, or (2) starving. When society
commodifies the bare necessities of life, they are commodifying human beings,
whose labor can be bought and sold. Underneath the pseudo-philosophical
rationalizations for capitalism is a defense of wage slavery. For, if your
labor is for sale, then you are for sale.
We are for sale, and we sell ourselves everyday – in the
hopes of acquiring a wage that allows us to eat, sleep, and feed our families.
In the United States, the 46 million people living in poverty haven’t been so
lucky. The 2.5 million who have defaulted on their student loans have been
discarded. The 49 million who suffer from food insecurity have lost hope. The
3.5 million homeless are mocked by 18.6 million vacant homes. And the 22
million who are unemployed or underemployed have been deemed “unfit
commodities” and relegated to the reserve army of labor.
In Post-Scarcity Anarchism, Murray Bookchin offers a glimpse
into this world not constructed on labor, profit, and artificial scarcity:
“It is easy to foresee a time, by no means remote, when a
rationally organized economy could ‘automatically manufacture small ‘packaged’
factories without human labor; parts could be produced with so little effort
that most maintenance tasks would be reduced to the simple act of removing a
defective unit from a machine and replacing it by another-a job no more
difficult than pulling out and putting in a tray. Machines would make and
repair most of the machines required to maintain such a highly industrialized
economy. Such a technology, oriented entirely toward human needs and freed from
all consideration of profit and loss, would eliminate the pain of want and
toil-the penalty, inflicted in the form of denial, suffering and inhumanity,
exacted by a society based on scarcity and labor.”
We could say in response get a decent taste in music :-p
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