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that “economics” itself will become an outdated word describing a concern of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.
