What do you think of Marshall Sahlins' argument?
***** The Original Affluent Society
Marshall Sahlins
Hunter-gatherers consume less energy per capita per year than any other group of human beings. Yet when you come to examine it the original affluent society was none other than the hunter's -- in which all the people's material wants were easily satisfied. To accept that hunters are affluent is therefore to recognise that the present human condition of man slaving to bridge the gap between his unlimited wants and his insufficient means is a tragedy of modern times.
There are two possible courses to affluence. Wants may be "easily satisfied" either by producing much or desiring little. The familiar conception, the Galbraithean way -- based on the concept of market economies -- states that man's wants are great, not to say infinite, whereas his means are limited, although they can be improved. Thus, the gap between means and ends can be narrowed by industrial productivity, at least to the point that "urgent goods" become plentiful. But there is also a Zen road to affluence, which states that human material wants are finite and few, and technical means unchanging but on the whole adequate. Adopting the Zen strategy, a people can enjoy an unparalleled material plenty -- with a low standard of living. That, I think, describes the hunters. And it helps explain some of their more curious economic behaviour: their "prodigality" for example -- the inclination to consume at once all stocks on hand, as if they had it made. Free from market obsessions of scarcity, hunters' economic propensities may be more consistently predicated on abundance than our own.
Destutt de Tracy, "fish-blooded bourgeois doctrinaire" though he might have been, at least forced Marx to agree that "in poor nations the people are comfortable", whereas in rich nations, "they are generally poor"....
[The full article is at <http://www.primitivism.com/original-affluent.htm>.] *****
Scarcity, after all, is a relative concept: goods are scarce relative to unlimited wants. It is clear that pre-capitalist peoples -- especially those who lived in "primitive communist" societies -- never experienced unlimited wants. They knew the meaning of the word "enough." To remember it is not necessarily to glorify & romanticize the world before capitalism (much less to recommend Zen); it's to historicize capitalism while historicizing wants, as Marx does. You can still make an argument, though, that once created by capitalism, unlimited wants & therefore scarcity are here to stay, though I'd disagree with you.
At 11:35 AM -0400 4/8/01, Chris Kromm wrote:
>In my previous post, meant to say Marx saw nature as "realm of necessity"
>that could only be transformed to "realm of freedom" under *capitalism* --
>not socialism. Oops!
The main point of Marx, I think, is to take note of capitalism's contradiction: contradiction between socialized production and private appropriation of surplus value. As Marx put it, "The means, the unconditional development of the productive forces of society, enter continually into conflict with the limited end, the self-expansion of the existing capital" (_Capital_ III). Only under capitalism, therefore, you have hunger, poverty, etc. due to an over-production (as opposed to an under-production): "In these crises a great part not only of the existing products, but also of the previously created productive forces, are periodically destroyed. In these crises there breaks out an epidemic that, in all earlier epochs, would have seemed an absurdity -- the epidemic of over-production" (Marx, _The Communist Manifesto_). A crisis of over-production under capitalism stands in stark contrast to the Malthusian cycles of famines & plagues following over-population that characterized many class societies before capitalism. (On this point, see _The Brenner Debate_, eds. T. H. Aston & C. H. E. Philpin, Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1987.) Hungry peoples are unfree, to say the least.
Yoshie