Scarcity (was Re: Doug's points)

[Yoshie Furuhashi]

>>Could you tell us why you think scarcity is inescapable?
>>
>>Yoshie
>
>We will never live on the Great Rock Candy Mountain, where roast 
>chickens grow on trees and fish jump into our frying pans. In the 
>background there are two great facts: one is the absolute material 
>limit on certain resources--oil, coal, gas, fresh water, arable 
>land. There is just so much of that that exists or could exist.
>
>The other limit is time. Human effort is itself scarce in the sense 
>that each of us can only put out so much of it in our limited lives, 
>so that if we use it inefficiently, wasting it, it is just lost, and 
>much of it--that involved in merely necessary production, the stuff 
>we wouldn't do if we didn't have to--criminally so; it's stealing 
>people's lives to waste their efforts. That is one of Marx's deepest 
>insights, and one of his great objections to capitalism.
>
>Against this background, we have to make choices about how to use 
>our material and human resources so as not to waste them. If we 
>waste the material ones, eventually we will run out of some of the 
>most important ones. If we waste the human ones, we will continue to 
>wreck our lives. This just another way of saying the scaricity is 
>inescapable.
>
>It's so obvious that this is true that it is really perverse to deny 
>it; I think it is a sort of ideologically induced insanity, and one 
>that brings the left into discredit when leftists do so. It's a sort 
>of flat-earthism. --jks

However, Marx was not such a simpleton as to think that there is no 
material limit to natural resources & that we may get to live 
practically forever (as Condorcet apparently did).  His belief that 
we may overcome scarcity was thus rooted in neither of the above. 
What then made Marx think that we can?

Yoshie