>In fact the above dream, got me to suspecting that there might have
>always been enough basics to go around.
No, if that was so then the class system wouldn't have occurred to anyone.
> And worse. That much of the
>technological progress we celebrate in the west has been essentially
>motivated to prevent this distribution largess in new and different
>ways,
Certainly. It is crucial to avoid a situation where everyone's needs are adequately satisfied, that would lead to economic crisis. Capitalism is an economic system designed to manage scarcity and in fact can only operate in an environment of scarcity. For it to work at all, if scarcity does not occur naturally, then it must be artificially created.
Obviously it takes a certain capacity to think outside the box to realise that the solution to this is to change the economic system to one that is designed to cope with abundance, socialism, rather than artificially create scarcity to keep the capitalist system running smoothly.
But it doesn't follow that this was always the case. At the time the class system was devised and as it was refined, it was presumably the most efficient way to cope with natural scarcity. People simply aren't that stupid that they would have tolerated the invention of a new system which replaced abundance with scarcity. But like the frog slowly boiled in water, we are stupid enough not to have noticed that the material conditions which necessitated class division and ultimately the capitalist system have radically changed.
Bill Bartlett Bracknell Tas