Post-Scarcity Socialism

As a follow up to an earlier posted article on artificial scarcity 

If the human species is to survive then deep changes are necessary to the way we organise ourselves socially. The most destructive force of capitalism has been artificial scarcity. Capitalism is very inefficient at the just distribution of necessities. Capitalism assumes that people currently holding the most wealth are most deserving of life satisfaction, which is a spurious assumption. The myth of scarcity has one purpose: to justify not sharing the social wealth. There is no evidence that society does not have, and never could have, sufficient resources to meet human needs. On the contrary, the resources spent on war alone could provide everyone in the world with a very good life. The myth of scarcity was invented to justify the growing gap between what is possible – a world of plenty for all – and what exists – fabulous wealth for a few and declining living standards for the rest. The myth of scarcity is necessary to reconcile the obscenity of growing wealth alongside growing poverty. To continue the rule of the few and the misery of the many, to obscure what would otherwise be obvious: that ordinary people create all of society’s wealth and deserve their share of it, the elite who rule society who cannot abandon their system of private ownership and competition for profit promote the myth of scarcity instead. 

In most nations, the production of wealth has consistently outpaced the growth of the populations that produce that wealth. Gross Domestic Product (GDP) measures the annual value of all goods and services produced. Between 1950 and 2000, the population of the United States increased 86 percent, from 151 million to 281 million. Over the same 50 years, US GDP soared 3,239 percent, from $294 billion to $9,817 billion. In other words, the production of wealth grew 38 times faster than the population. Such a massive increase in wealth compared to the size of the population should eliminate poverty and result in a very generous rise in the standard of living, including universal access to medical care.

If the total wealth produced by American workers in 2003 had been shared, every US resident would have received the equivalent of $38,000, and every family of four would have received $152,000 in that year alone. This payment would have been much larger if it included a share of the wealth produced in the past. And much more could be produced if everyone who wanted to work were employed. However, capitalism is not about sharing. Because the means of producing wealth and the wealth produced are both privately owned, only a small elite benefit from rising productivity. The top five percent of individuals in the world receive about one-third of total world income. The top 10 per cent get one-half of world income, and the bottom 10 per cent get only 0.7 per cent of it. Within 48 hours, the richest people acquire more than the poorest people earn in a year.

In the world’s richest nation, an artificial scarcity has been created for American workers whose average real wages are back to what they were in 1958. More families are living paycheck to paycheck and relying on credit cards to purchase food and other essentials. As consumer debt rises, those with money to lend are further enriched at the expense of the impoverished. Back in the 1970s, the mass media promised that the new computer technology would raise productivity so high that people wouldn’t know what to do with all their leisure time. However, like the rise in wealth, the rise in leisure went only to the leisured class. Since the 1970s, the amount of time Americans spend on the job has risen steadily, and leisure time has declined by one-third. Workers have less time to sleep, eat and relate to their children. Overwork exists alongside chronic under-employment. Twenty percent of workers are unable to secure as many hours as they need to make ends meet.

In fact, there are not too many goods being produced, there are too few paying customers. Billions of people desperately need manufactured goods – agricultural machinery, construction equipment and supplies, plumbing, computers, medical supplies and technology, etc. If production was directed to meeting human needs, instead of making profit, there would be no economic crisis. When one need was filled, we would fill the next; and when all needs were filled, we would have leisure time for other pursuits. However, the capitalist system of privately-owned production, backed by the myth of scarcity, stands in the way. Most of the world’s starving people live in nations that export food. In India, where more than half the children are malnourished, the State spends more to stockpile food than it does to feed the hungry. In the world’s richest nation, 40 million Americans have difficulty putting food on the table, while up to 30 percent of all food produced, worth $48.3 billion, is discarded. Over the past 30 years, food production has consistently outpaced population growth. In 2008, record food production was accompanied by widespread food riots. The problem is not too many hungry bellies, but that food is sold for profit, and too many people can’t afford it. The same is true for medical care. There are not more people than can be cared for, but more people than can be cared for profitably. Because these truths cannot be admitted, social problems are blamed on too many people wanting too much.

 Eliminating poverty by ending artificial scarcity is what we mean by socialism. Socialism has emerged from scarcity. “Socialism” here bears no relationship to the “socialist” regimes that collapsed in the Twentieth Century, or supposedly continues in China, Cuba and North Korea, and it is regrettable that an alternative word with less historical baggage is not available. Post-scarcity free access may only seem like something from science fiction but rapid advances in seldom-reported technologies say otherwise. 3-D printing, nanotechnology and biotechnology could potentially provides a post-scarcity situation that fits the description of a socialist mode of production with maximum freedom. If post-scarcity seems unreal it is nevertheless every bit as plausible as democratisation of information through the Internet would surely have seemed twenty years ago. This is an alternate economic system in which all goods and services are available without the use of money, credits, barter or any other system of debt or servitude. All resources become the common heritage of all of the inhabitants, not just a select few, made possible by use of advanced technologies to create an abundance of resources and thereby negate the need for any sort of rationing. It will be a system run by freely associated producers and their communities that excludes commodity exchange and money as primary forms of social reproduction. As a result, “the money-capital” including the payment of wages is eliminated. Even in Marx’s concession to the technology and production of his time and a requirement for what he believed to be some rationing, socialism’s “lower phase”, “the producers may…receive paper vouchers entitling them to withdraw from the social supplies of consumer goods a quantity corresponding to their labour-time” but “these vouchers are not money. They do not circulate.” In other words, “the future distribution of the necessaries of life” cannot be treated “as a kind of more exalted wages.” Within the co-operative society based on common ownership of the means of production, the producers do not exchange their products. The communal character of production would make the product into a communal, general product from the outset, bypassing market exchange and the overcoming of workers’ alienation from production.

The most common objection to socialism is that without money to motivate, there is no reason to go to work, let alone innovate. However, that people will become ever more sedentary if their basic needs are fulfilled is a dogmatic supposition perpetuated by profiteering propaganda. There is no genetic basis that determines the superiority of money – or rather the threat to withhold money – over social incentive. Under capitalism, it is insecurity that motivates people to go to work. The benefits of work itself – social interaction, credit for one’s work output and access to luxuries – provide incentive to go to work. Would most people decide not to go to work and sit idly in front of a television if all their basic needs were provided for? The Socialist Party argues that the human need for creative activity motivates one to contribute to society in one’s best capacity if only one is provided dignity and the means to pursue one’s full potential. The Marxist maxim “from each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs” is not merely an ideal but to be standard.