Is Post Scarcity possible?
Photo by jpellgen
Lately I have been reading more Kropotkin and Bookchin. Both of them have elements of post-scarcity found in their visions for anarchism. I have always perceived this as a utopian ideal that I liked. Post-Scarcity: is a hypothetical form of economy or society in which goods, services and information are free, or practically free. This would require an abundance of fundamental resources (matter, energy and intelligence) – Wikipedia. In looking at the concept I have been trying to understand it on a level I find real and practical. I have been trying to see how this non-market system would work, how it is implemented in a real world situation. I am, not rejecting it, I am not claiming it is possible, I am simply trying to gain an understanding of it and see how it might be possible.
Saturday was hot. I don’t have central air and it has been getting into the hundreds around here. My spouse and I decided to get out of the ghetto and go somewhere there is air conditioning so we drove out of the city to the exurbs to walk around the mall. I have not been to a mall in years. As we walked around this vast structure of non-essential commerce we grew jaded. Store after store of the same crap. I could not believe how much stuff there was. There was stuff made for the sole purpose of selling stuff. Most of it served to fill no real need whatsoever. This massive monstrosity of mindless shopping and endless commerce just got under my skin. Nobody actually needs a misogynist t-shirt that says ‘I have the dick so I make the rules’. Everything being bought and sold was surplus. It was all non-essential goods being marketed to create a need within the mind of the consumer. As much as I love books and I love to read I walked in to the book store and saw the very same thing. It was discouraging.
As I looked around I began to see something I have not seen before. I began to see potential in all of this. Lots of mass manufactured crap made in China and sweat shops by slave labor I saw as potential. It began to become painfully obvious to me that this much surplus production has potential to lead to a society of post-scarcity. The problem I started to see is a problem of property and ownership. It became more clear than ever just how capitalism as the ownership of the means of production was blocking access go goods while claiming the wealth and paying workers nothing to perpetuate this mindless consumption. Holy shit. I saw the potential of post-scarcity in the suburbs.
I saw that supply and demand was not actually working. It doesn’t work in the ghetto and it is obvious. Take housing. There is supply and demand but the supply is not getting to the demand. If it were there would not be people sleeping on streets while so many houses and buildings sat unoccupied. Go to this middle class neighborhood and the real illusion is present. Everything is okay, buy this popular item. Capitalism has become the opiate of the masses. Endless bikini women, rock stars and cell phones serve to distract as we piss away the product of our labor so that the capitalist can buy a second home in the Hamptons. The private security worked with the police to keep out the desperate and to keep the peaceful illusion that everything is fine so that you could go about your way consuming and throwing wealth to the capitalist.
The production that occurs is surplus. The labor is non-essential except for the fact that those who do labor do so out of desperation so that they can attempt to meet basic needs because the product of labor is owned by another. I began to see quickly that this amount of surplus production could easily be redirected if it were no longer hindered by the rule of the capitalist. I began to see exactly where we could begin to build a society of post-scarcity.
11:12 am
Production of excess bugs me a little bit … especially in the case of goods that are perishable in the short-term … and even in the mid-term to some degree, but for slightly different reasons. It bugs me because it represents an inefficiency in the system and, as such, a waste of resources that reduce the use of those resources for other things (although most of these resources tend to be ones that can be “reclaimed” but are are renewable/recyclable over different time frames).
For example, I tend to wonder what percent of the meat at most grocery stores expires before it can be sold. If it’s some small percentage (say less than 1-2%), then I guess it’s not so bad, but if it’s anything over 10%, that seems to be a *huge* waste to me. It’s the same thing with mid-term goods like OTC medicines, I don’t catch colds often, and when I do they’re short-lived. However, when I do get them thay can be a quite problematic as far as my sinuses go so I’d prefer to take something to relieve the symptoms and help get over it quicker. However, it seems like such a waste to buy a package of 24-one dose capsules, when 6 would do for my purposes. I’d rather be using maybe 4 pills over the course of the illness and have 2 pills possibly go to waste at some later point than to potentially have 20 pills go to waste! Even if I wind up needing more, than 6 pills, I can go get more and I would be going to see a doctor well before I ended up using 24-pills over the course of one cold.
They say excess supply is supposed to bring down prices and make goods more affordable, so I can see why manufacturers would want to produce in surplus to open up the market from as many consumers as possible. Contrary to that, I always took that as *potential* supply (i.e. how many of these things *could* we make in a given period given the resources and labor available after factoring in other various trade-offs) as opposed to *realized* supply (how many of these things have actually been produced and are out in the market) being the driving factore behind the supply and demand curve. I guess since since potential supply is hard to measure, economists would rather tend to fall back on something that is actually measurable and quantifiable using the number of goods available as a measure of supply and the number of goods sold as a measure of demand.
11:44 am
Between grocery stores and waste in the home and in food preparation businesses (packaged food, restaurants, etc) the number is closer to 30% loss. But it is a little more complicated than simply saying “stop wasting it all! Or stop producing excess!” A lot of the wastage stems from deep structural issues that are invulnerable to the screaming of those in the know. You can’t have factory farms and industrialized agriculture and supermarkets and not have massive, unbelievable amounts of waste. There are alternatives if you want to minimize waste and maximize energy:output ratios, but they are fundamentally not implementable in a central power system.
Biointensive agriculture is incredibly efficient, but it requires intelligence and constant intervention. For what you spend on food in a year and about 2 hours a day 3 days a week you can feed yourself out of a suburban backyard using these techniques. With a few acres and ten years you can feed dozens with a permaculture food forest that is completely self maintaining and wastes *nothing* because everything unused goes back into the biological feedback loop instead of a garbage dump. But you can’t automate this. You can’t harvest and distribute it one a one worker: 100 customers scale of industrial ag. You can’t profit from picking it and packaging it and selling it in supermarkets. It has no economy of scale, in other words.
The central power thing is one of the reasons I find post scarcity movements absurd. The vast majority imagine this centrally managed and controlled system that somehow achieves optimal production and eliminates waste. That is impossible. Waste and central management go hand in hand. Centralization and industrialization is the *source* of waste. And I don’t mean technological approaches to production when I say industrialization by the way; I mean the notion of central production, the assembly line, wage labor, etc.
Here is the reality: we are already technologically and intellectually capable of post scarcity. But few want to put forth the effort or live the lifestyle that is required for it to work. It requires thinking and doing for yourself. It requires learning a *lot* of things about a *lot* of different subjects. You have to start one spring by ripping up your backyard and installing $500 worth of hardware and plants that won’t pay for themselves for two or three years and will probably fail miserably for a lot longer than that if you lack the skills. Or you have to muster the courage to quit your job and start working for yourself, and worse yet develop the skills to work in a market where that’s possible if you don’t already have them. Only by creating your own capital do you free yourself from dependence on the capital of others.
I’ve been at this for half a decade now and I’d say conservatively I’m less than 10% of the way toward complete liberation. The interference of the state doesn’t help, of course. But the task of learning everything from computer programming to agriculture to carpentry when the first 20 years of my life were wasted in (failed) obedience and complacency training is a mountain that looks unclimbable from the bottom and grows more discouraging for most of the climb.