Edit: Changed title to be more accurate.
Also here is the summary from Wikipedia on what Post-scarcity means:
Post-scarcity is a theoretical economic situation in which most goods can be produced in great abundance with minimal human labor needed, so that they become available to all very cheaply or even freely. Post-scarcity does not mean that scarcity has been eliminated for all goods and services but that all people can easily have their basic survival needs met along with some significant proportion of their desires for goods and services. Writers on the topic often emphasize that some commodities will remain scarce in a post-scarcity society.
Your premise is wrong in like… A bunch of ways. We sure as shit do not live in a post-scarcity society lol
I specifically said we are in a post-scarcity information society. I didn’t say everything is post-scarcity.
@[email protected]
So a post-information-scarcity society. It means something else with different word-order.
Yeah my mistake. I’m gonna fix the title.
So you’re saying that everyone has sufficient and easy access to information? How does that relate to capitalism?
Some people say that if we lived in a post-scarcity society we would move on from capitalism. I am pointing that out as not true since there is an aspect of our lives that is already post-scarcity yet we still use the same capitalist system to distribute that information.
Also post-scarcity doesn’t mean everyone has sufficient and easy access it means that everything can be produced in great abundance.
Edit: would to wouldn’t; Most to Some
Edit 2: Rephrased some words so that my meaning comes across better.
Because you can’t eat ideas.
We can have all the free information in the world, the people who control the bare necessities still control the bare necessities and they can use that to keep people down and divided.
Exactly. Information is a luxury - you could go your entire life without learning even a shred of information, but you’d still need to eat.
We don’t just use capitalism to distribute information. There are free libraries all over the U.S. It’s possible to learn most of what knowledge-workers need to know for free. Then you can seek employment for using what you know and not your physical labor.
But also, economists consider humans to have infinite wants. Certainly society as a whole has infinite wants. So no matter what resources we extract from the environment, society always wants more, which creates scarcity, which creates markets, which, in a free society, creates capitalism.
Markets and currency have existed for thousands of years. Capitalism has existed for barely more than 200 years. Markets don’t create capitalism. However capitalism destroys markets.
Unregulated agriculture also destroys land. Just because something has negative effects over long-term unregulated use doesn’t mean it should be abolished despite the positive effects. Just because a system is older than another doesn’t mean it’s superior. Or do you yearn for serfdom?
What positive effects has it had?
The only reason I pointed out the age is that markets and currency often are, and were being confused/conflated with capitalism.
I actually advocate for a system 100 years newer than capitalism. And even then I push for a version of it that has been modernized to fit current realities.
Well, the device you are reading this on is a product of capitalism. Whether it’s a phone or a computer, it has hundreds of chips made at hundreds of factories in at least half a dozen countries, all the parts had to be brought to a place and assembled, then brought to another place and sold to you. And you likely didn’t even have to pay for it in advance before it was assembled and ready for you to use!
Did you eat food today that wasn’t grown near where you live? “That’s just trade” you might say, but it took a significant investment of capital to set up the system of trade that got it to you, at the very least the ship or the train it was transported on, if not the equipment used to grow and harvest it. If you ate a banana or chocolate and you don’t live in the tropics then you only ate those things thanks to capitalism.
Are you wearing shoes? Are they completely hand-made by an artisan, did you commission them to be made and come back in a year to pick them up, or did someone invest in capital so you could buy them in a store?
Did you go to college? Did you pay to have the school built and the teachers hired to teach you, or did someone raise and donate a bunch of capital to create it? Did it own a farm you had to work to pay for its operation, or does it have an endowment it can invest as capital to raise money to pay for some of your education? Just because it’s (hopefully) a non-profit institution doesn’t mean it would exist without capitalism.
Just look at the improvements in the living conditions of a huge portion of the planet over the last 200 years when we had capitalism, then look at the improvements for the 200 years before that. Haven’t there been more improvements in more people’s lives since capitalism than before it?
Look I know it’s not a perfect system, it needs regulation, and it’s not the right tool for every situation but generally it blows mercantilism and feudalism out of the water, and it’s done better than every planned economy so far.
Markets aren’t Capitalism. You can have non-Capitalist markets, such as ones made up of Worker Co-ops.
You can have a market-based economy without exploitation a la Capitalism.
Fine. Factories are capital. If you want manufactured goods and the freedom to get a job you want more than you want to work in a factory then you want capitalism.
Capitalism keeps people from the jobs they want. Literally. If the job you want can’t meet your basic needs. Capitalism falsely posits that it’s because the job has no value. Rather than the value of it not being generally understood or valued by others.
Capitalism is still good at making menial valueless work to under pay you for however.
I’m not saying it gets you the job you want, I’m saying no one can make you do a job you don’t want to do. People can incentivize you, with money. And I think collective organizing and bargaining is important to make things fair. I hear German firms have a union representative on the board, that seems pretty smart.
And it needs to be regulated. The government needs to force firms to pay to mitigate harmful externalities as well as incentivize positive externalities. And there should be social programs to take some of the edge off market fluctuations, like free or cheap training, help finding employment, cushioning some of the effects of market fluctuations for the average person.
I’m struggling to see what alternative you are envisioning here, but maybe I’m misunderstanding you. People and companies pay for the work they need done. When not enough people do that work, the salaries paid for it will increase. When there’s a large pool of people willing to do a job but not enough people and companies who need that job done, the salaries drop. The capitalist job market, from a theoretical perspective, seems to regulate the job market such that people choose jobs that are desired by society.
Now there’s obviously some downsides to this, because the gap between income levels is way too large in my opinion. Regulation is required so the CEO’s don’t earn like 200 times as much as the cleaning people. But in the end any system that exists needs to make sure that people do work that benefits society. And certain jobs are just more desired by society than others. Not everyone who likes drawing can become an artist, because in the end society just doesn’t need many artists. So any system should penalize people who try to do a job that society simply doesn’t need at that moment and incentivize jobs that have shortages.
No.
All tools are Capital. If Workers collectively share ownership of industry, there is a free flow of labor to where you wish to apply it. Are you under the mistaken impression that Socialism is when someone picks where you can work? You sure you aren’t talking about Capitalism?
I’m quite sure we’ve outlawed the direct ownership of people so, yeah, in capitalism no one tells you where to work, they pay you to work. There is a job market. In planned economies, someone tells you where to work. Planned economies are an expression of socialism. On the scale of individual firms, capitalism doesn’t require them to be organized in any particular way. If you want to run a business as a cooperative, where the workers own the company, you can certainly do that in the United States if you want. But if a collective tells you where to work, then someone is still telling you where to work. Please explain how you’d do socialism without anyone telling anyone else where to work.
…they posted, on the fediverse… 🙄
Either way, your framing of the existence of media and information exchange free from capitalism, as something that would somehow invalidate or contradict the existence of capitalism, oozes yet you participate in society vibes…
Who?
Do we? I mean, some information, maybe. But all information? As a concept?
I have 3kg of cheese in the fridge but no bread.
go conquer some.
Here’s the summary for the wikipedia article you mentioned in your comment:
Post-scarcity is a theoretical economic situation in which most goods can be produced in great abundance with minimal human labor needed, so that they become available to all very cheaply or even freely. Post-scarcity does not mean that scarcity has been eliminated for all goods and services but that all people can easily have their basic survival needs met along with some significant proportion of their desires for goods and services. Writers on the topic often emphasize that some commodities will remain scarce in a post-scarcity society.
article | about
lol. Tell that to the scientific papers you have to pay for otherwise they’ll run out and the researchers won’t be able to research.
A post-scarcity society doesn’t mean a post-resource society. We have enough resources to make sure everybody has what they need. None of it is scarce in the slightest. We just need to distribute it equally.
Or sufficiently equally to eliminate scarcity.
Yeah I was confused by this. The world is pretty far off post-scarcity! Might need more context here