Desire & Scarcity (was Re: Desire under the Elms)

Charles Brown CharlesB at CNCL.ci.detroit.mi.us
Sat Jan 29 12:15:09 PST 2000



>>> Doug Henwood <dhenwood at panix.com> 01/29/00 02:12PM >>>
Max Sawicky wrote:


>Or put it this way. The socialization of the means of
>production/elimination of classes seems to connote an
>absence of scarcity that does not obtain in *any* real
>economy, where rationing of one sort or another is
>inescapable. Nice to imagine but hard to believe.

Bingo. Which is why I think it's important to talk about the need/desire continuum. Our hardline Utopians seem to think that the abolition of capitalism, by means unspecified, and its replacement with an institutionally unspecified planning regime, will solve the scarcity problem, since people will have what they need. I don't think that's possible, nor do I think it's particularly desirable.

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CB: The word "desirable" here creates a kind of complicated paradoxical loop :>).Why would it be undesirable for everybody to have what they need ? Why would it be undesirable to abolish capitalism ? I desire the abolition of the artificial scarcity of capitalism.

But on the main point, Max's statement above is not true, is it ? There is no objective scarcity with respect to a very full basket of use-values for basic needs for all and a pretty big basket of use-values for wants for all beyond that. There is objective capacity to meet the whole need end of the need/desire continuum and a big chunk of the desire end of the continuum. What is lacking is the ideology in those who control the forces of production to exercise that objective capacity.

In other words, it is not a Utopian goal or impossible from the standpoint of the objective capacity of today's productive forces. The main barrier to doing it is the difficulty in forcing those who control the forces of production to do it. And I'm with you in that it is hard to imagine those in control of the forces of production changing soon. They tend to commit mass murder as an ultimate defense of their keeping control of the forces of production, not to mention all those Gramscian cultural foxholes and trenches before you get to the violent defense at the fort itself.

CB

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Leave that to the neoprimitivist deep ecologists. But Carrol tells us we don't need to have a theory of psychology; blame it all on neurotransmitters, or don't blame it on anything at all. The revolution will resolve the Neurotransmitter Problem.

Doug



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