As it should and ought to be

Humanity has at last conquered scarcity and achieved abundance. Enough for all is too much for the Capitalists, who find that they cannot distribute plenty - at a profit. Of course they can't. Their remedy, therefore, is to stop the machinery, as they are doing and hereafter to control production to keep it well under human need and so maintain prices and profits. Post-scarcity may seem like something from a work of science fiction. But rapid advances in seldom-reported technologies, coupled with sociological forecasts of our transition towards a new kind of civilization, say otherwise. Take, for example, 3-D printing which may someday inspire the development of a nanotechnology “everything machine,” a perfect panacea to all scarcity and disequilibrium in the world economy. Imagine if people could make anything in the household? What need would there be? Today’s 3-D printers maybe crude compared with what is going to arrive in coming decades. Strides in nanotechnology and biotechnology could potentially move us away from a profit-oriented economy to a post-scarcity situation that fits the description of a socialist mode of production with maximal freedom. Nano and bio machines may someday be household appliances that can literally do anything we want of them, and so our capacity to help ourselves and our fellow man will be so high that “economics” itself will become an outdated word describing a concern of primitives. The idea of post-scarcity might seem fictitious still, but it is every bit as plausible as democratization of information and press power through the Internet would surely have seemed twenty years ago. Technology reports are worth reading in combination with political and social theory, because many developments in science and technology are making a post-scarcity world seem more and more possible every day.

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. If production was directed to meeting human needs, instead of making profit, there would be no scarcity. When one need was filled, we would fill the next; and when all needs were filled, we would have leisure time for other pursuits.

In most nations, the production of wealth has consistently outpaced the growth of the populations that produce that wealth. 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. Workers were promised that the new automated 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.

Most of the world’s starving people live in nations that export food. In India, where more than half the children are malnourished, the government 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 a third of all food produced is discarded. Over the past 30 years, food production has consistently outpaced population growth. 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 over-population and too many people wanting too much. Sadly, many in the environmental movement have largely embraced the myth of over-population and creating a fear of human beings. In t seminal work, the 1962 book, ‘Silent Spring’, Rachel Carson rightly lays the blame of the destruction of the natural world where it deserves - on the “gods of profit and production” and a world “in which the right to make a dollar at any cost is seldom challenged.” The belief that social and environmental problems are caused by too many people persists, not because it is true, but because it serves the ruling class. The unpalatable truth – that capitalism builds wealth for the few by impoverishing the many and destroying their environment – cannot be acknowledged. To do so would be to admit that what is good for the capitalist class is bad for the world. The myth of scarcity is necessary to reconcile the obscenity of growing wealth alongside growing poverty.

According to the World Health Organization, 10 million children died in 2004 from largely preventable causes like malnutrition and infections. At least two million child deaths a year could be prevented by existing vaccines and most of the rest could be prevented by access to clean water, sanitation and other basic necessities. Nearly 1.3 billion people live in absolute poverty, and more than 15 million adults aged 20 to 64 die every year from preventable causes. The pro-capitalist lobby so to continue the rule of the few and the misery of the many is 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 can never accept this account of the matter. If they did, they would have to abandon their system of private ownership and competition for profit. Because they cannot do this, they promote the myth of scarcity instead. The central concept of capitalism is the idea that there isn’t enough to go around. Hence we are confronted with the idea that there isn’t enough food, aren’t enough jobs, isn’t enough housing, or aren’t enough university places because there is a certain fixed amount of all these things. We then compete in the “market” where the victory of one person necessarily comes at the expense of someone else.

Historically, control over land has always been vital to the livelihoods of the world's poorest people. Lack of access to land not only denies people the ability to grow or to gather their own food: it is also excludes them from a source of power. Who controls the land -- and how they do so -- affects how land is used and to whom the benefits for its use accrue.

Highly-concentrated land ownership is now a feature of agriculture in both North and South. In the US, nearly half the country's farmland is held by just 124,000 corporations or individuals -- just four per cent of the total number of farm owners.

 In Guatemala, 65 per cent of the best agricultural land is owned by just two per cent of the population -- a figure that is not atypical for other countries in Central America.

In Brazil, a mere 340 of the largest landowners, many of whom are foreign-owned transnational companies, own more land than all the country's peasants put together. The 18 largest landowners own an area equivalent to that of The Netherlands, Portugal and Switzerland combined.

In the Philippines, five per cent of all families control 80 per cent of the agricultural land, despite seven land reform laws since 1933.

In the Philippines, about 72 per cent of rural households (three-fifths of the Philippine population) are landless or near-landless. Tenant farmers must contend with rents which account for between 25 and 90 per cent of their production costs. Usury at rates of 100 per cent in three months or 50 per cent in one month is common. Half of all those who make a living from agriculture are farm workers, often earning as little as $1 a day.

In Central America as a whole, small and medium-sized farms producing for local consumption and local sale represent about 94 per cent of existing farms but use only 9 per cent of the farmland. Meanwhile, 85 per cent of the best farmland is used to grow crops for export.

In Costa Rica, 55 per cent of all rural households are landless or near landless, whereas the cattle owned by 2,000 politically-powerful ranching families occupy more than half of the nation's arable, most fertile land. As in other countries throughout the region, smallholders have been pushed from their land into areas where soils are poor and prone to erosion.

In Guatemala, huge swathes of land owned by the biggest landlords -- an estimated 1.2 million hectares -- lie idle, either because the price of export crops is too low to justify planting or because the land is being held simply for speculation. Meanwhile, some 310,000 landless labourers over 20-years of age are without permanent employment.  A complicating factor is that ownership or continued access to land is not secure for many people. Some 22 per cent of farms in the country are held by squatters with limited rights.

Landlessness and poverty go hand-in-hand.

 Eight out of ten farmers in the Central America do not own enough land to sustain their families, forcing them to look for seasonal jobs.

 In Guatemala, government figures from the mid-1980s estimated that 86 per cent of families were living below the official poverty line, with 55 per cent classified as "extremely poor". Rates of malnutrition reflect these figures: a national survey in 1980 found that only 27 per cent of all children between six months and five years showed normal physical development, with 45 per cent showing moderate to severe retardation in their growth.

Land concentration in the Third World is not accidental . It has always been fiercely resisted, not least by popular movements demanding land redistribution. Imbalances of power, however, have enabled landowners to ensure that, by and large, land reform programmes have either been put on hold, subverted or short-lived. In other instances, they have been framed, not as a means of addressing insecurity of tenure, but as a means of replacing peasant systems of farming with industrialized agriculture. Some governments, in alliance with richer farmers and international development agencies, used "land reform" to appropriate land for the Green Revolution instead of freeing it up for peasant agriculture. The ultimate aim of such "reforms" was to transform Third World farming into "a dynamic productive sector" by extending export crop production and by drawing peasants still further into the cash economy where they were at a disadvantage.

The promotion of off-farm inputs -- chemical fertilizers, pesticides and improved seeds -- has forced farmers to buy what was previously free, in addition to locking them into a cycle of diminishing returns on fertilizers and increasing pesticide use. As a result, thousands of small farmers -- including those who had gained land under previous land reform programmes -- have fallen into debt and their land holdings bought up by richer neighbours. In South Korea, where the army was mobilized to rip up traditional varieties of rice and to compel farmers to plant Green Revolution varieties, the number of rural households in debt rose "from 76 per cent in 1971 to 90 per cent in 1983 and to an astounding 98 per cent in 1985." As a result, farmers have left the land in droves: 34,000 migrated to the cities in 1986, 41,000 in 1987 and 50,000 in 1988. Many of the farmers who remain have now abandoned the new varieties and are returning to planting traditional seeds.

Thus, for marginal groups of people, the promotion of Green Revolution technologies -- the hallmark of "efficient" farming -- has generated yet more scarcity of land and of food as the land becomes further concentrated in fewer and fewer hands. Widespread ecological degradation has also followed the systematic undermining of ecologically-sound systems of agriculture and the adoption of Green Revolution techniques. Such degradation is now in itself a major cause of socially-generated scarcity. In the Sudan, for example, the combination of mechanized farming, monoculture growing and the search for quick profits has caused an estimated 17 million hectares of rain-fed arable land -- almost half the country's potential arable land -- to lose its topsoil. In central India, for example, the preferential diversion of limited groundwater supplies to richer farmers growing sugar cane and grapes has created severe water scarcity for poorer sections of the community. In many states, the mining of groundwater for commercial agriculture has led to ground-waters declining by 5-10 metres, generating a scarcity of water for subsistence farmers and villagers whose water demands (unlike those of large industrialized farms) are minimal. In the state of Maharastra, some 23,000 villages are now without water, while in Gujarat the figure is 64,500 villages. In such areas, access to water is increasingly restricted to those who can afford to deepen their wells regularly.

As land and water become increasingly degraded, and control over such resources increasingly concentrated, so the livelihoods of peasant farmers, the landless and the near-landless become increasingly precarious. No longer able to rely on growing their food, the vast majority have to buy their food. How much and what they get to eat depends on their ability to earn money or on the state's willingness to support them.

Discussions of population and food supply which leave out power relations will always mask the true nature of food scarcity -- who gets to eat and who doesn't -- and lead to "solutions" that are simplistic, technocratic, frequently oppressive and gender-blind -- all of which, ultimately, reinforce the very structures that create ecological damage and hunger. To reiterate: so long as one person has the power to deny food to another, even two people may be judged "too many".

Those committed to fighting for a better world should focus on the real cause of mass starvation and ecological crises: the capitalist system itself. If we got rid of the warped priorities of capitalist accumulation with all its gargantuan waste of resources, the environmental “footprint” of humanity, even with ten billion of us, would be far less than it currently is with seven. For a socialist society to succeed, abundance, rather than scarcity, must be the norm. The immense technological advances in production over the last couple centuries have made such a world feasible--a world based on Karl Marx's famous principle of "from each according to his ability, to each according to his need."

Socialism is based on the idea that we should use the vast resources of society to meet people’s needs. It seems so obvious--if people are hungry, they should be fed; if people are homeless, we should build homes for them; if people are sick, the best medical care should be available to them.

Adapted from here