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.
I’d be willing to bet 3 out of 4 people in this thread couldn’t even define capitalism. I count myself among them.
I think the simplest way to put it is “an economic system where individuals are allowed to have exclusionary ownership of capital”
Technically, Monarchism falls under that definition as well, which is why it gets a bit more complex than that.
I would call monarchism a form of religious capitalism where the ruling class claims divine right as the methods to accumulate capital, rather than using financial means to accumulate capital
Certainly more hierarchical than Socialism, but also more than Capitalism. Fundamentally, the lack of a market for Capital separates Capitalism from Monarchism, the class dynamics of today are different from before. This is helpful to understand IMO when trying to see how to solve it.
Does the exchange of land between kingdoms via wedding dowries/treaties/violence fulfill the definition of a “market for capital”?
Not really. Capitalism allows anyone to buy and sell Capital, whereas these more primitive exchanges aren’t the same. The Bourgeoisie are fundamentally different from the Aristocracy.
That’s pretty fair. It may feel impossible for me today to afford any capital, but if I were somehow able to accumulate enough money I would be legally allowed to own capital. Under monarchy, even if I got that much money, it would be illegal for me to purchase capital as an individual. That’s enough of a distinction to make them different for me, thanks for bringing it up.
Kinda. It’s not a very efficient market, but a market doesn’t have to be efficient to be a market.
I guess technically any system of trade could be thought of as a capital market, as long as capital is for sale.
A monarchy can be capitalist as long as peoples property rights are respected. The moment the monarch decides to lop somebodys head off and take their stuff you’ll be back to the old-school feudalistic “might makes right” societies.
Sort of. Monarchism is more about respecting a family’s right to rule, than a claim on economics, though usually Feudalism goes hand in hand historically. The British parliamentary system with a vestigial Monarchy is an exception, not the rule.
Don’t see the problem in that
The problem comes in what you define as “capital”. Food and housing are the biggest issues for the modern world but there still exists the problem of PEOPLE being considered capital that can be owned by other people.
You should be able to own a house. Everyone should be able to own a house. Food of course needs to be owned to be consumed.
Food isn’t capital. Capital is wealth used to produce other wealth. A house definitely is. Foods just consumable.
Classic “capital” is a hammer owned by a laborer (that situation is one person playing both roles). The classic capitalist separation of layers is a guy who owns a truck full of tools, and he hires other guys to work on things using the tools, but he retains ownership of the tools.
What’s “exclusionary ownership” mean here?
It’s the idea that because you own something, you’re the only one who is allowed to use it, whether you’re actually actively using it right now or not. You can contrast it with usufructuary rights, which are based on the idea that you only have rights to something while you’re actively using it
So that would be like one of those rental scooters, or a set of scuba gear if you lived and worked on a ship? It’s yours while you’re wearing it, or maybe while you have it checked out?
Yep! I wouldn’t say it would be “yours” exactly because you would never have actual ownership of the thing while you’re using it, but it would be your right to use it and profit from it so long as you don’t destroy it. A good example would be the way Native Americans viewed land use, following herds of wild animals wherever they went and moving from depleted areas to more fertile ones. This clashed heavily with European and American colonialists, who enforced their views of exclusionary ownership with barbed wire fences and violence.
Like territory. Your crew sets up camp somewhere, that’s your property until you move. You walk into a bar, you take over a corner. It’s your corner for the night.
Capitalism is a Mode of Production by which the Means of Production are bought, sold, and traded among individuals. This results in Capitalists, ie owners of Capital, and Workers, those who Capitalists employ to create Value using said Means of Production.
And what’s the problem with owning, buying and selling things? We’ve been doing that for millennia. Obviously, unregulated American style capitalism is very broken, but there are better ways to do business. It’s just that those ways are not that appealing to the greedy.
Markets aren’t Capitalism, Capitalism has only been around for a few hundred years.
Capitalism: The best system for harnessing the greed inherent in humans for the benefit of others. Capitalism produces the most wealth, and it’s spread more evenly, than any other system.
Not sure how anyone can sanely argue that Capitalist wealth is spread more evenly than any other system when disparity is rising everywhere it’s practiced, even if at slower rates in Social Democracies.
Not to disagree, but what examples are there of a different system being practiced which have a more even distribution of wealth?
Numerous different systems. If you want to look at modern, developed economies, Worker Co-operatives are smaller, Socialist entities that have far more equitable distribution, happier workers, and more stability. If you want a more Libertarian approach, EZLN doesn’t seem to have very high disparity, a bulk of the wealth is owned by the Workers, though they reject terms like Socialism. At the risk of being called a tankie (I’m not, I am incredibly critical of more centralized Socialist projects), even the USSR had far lower disparity during it’s time than Tsarist Russia or the current Capitalist Russian Federation.
The answer is for Workers to share the Means of Production in a democratic fashion, as opposed to having petite dictators focused on accumulating Capital.
Because the comparison is between systems. In other systems some people often end up with nothing, as in not even enough food to survive. That happens less under capitalism, hence there’s a more even distribution of resources.
Kinda like two pieces of paper are both thin, but one of those pieces can be thicker than the other one, despite still being considered thin.
People end up with nothing under Capitalism as well, and there is less disparity in some non-Capitalist systems.
In response to the food crisis, communities rallied together, giving rise to social movements and calls for change, as a sense of solidarity developed among the people. These interconnected issues eroded public trust in the government’s ability to fulfill the basic needs of its citizens. It, in turn, fueled public dissatisfaction and ultimately led to widespread calls for political and economic reforms. The downfall of communism in Eastern Europe was, therefore, not solely a consequence of political factors but also deeply rooted in the economic challenges and fundamental survival concerns faced by the population.
https://calxylian.com/food-scarcity-and-the-fall-of-communism-in-eastern-europe/
Nobody brought up the USSR, and your linked comment has several issues, even as someone who is a critic of the USSR and does not wish to rebuild the USSR:
- None of that fundamentally addresses the fact that Russia had higher rates of disparity both under the Tsarist Regime and under the Russian Federation than under the USSR: https://cepr.org/voxeu/columns/soviets-oligarchs-inequality-and-property-russia-1905-2016
- The article you linked goes largely without citations, and both articles cited at the bottom of the article state that the USSR improved food production from an initial state of instability through investment in industrialization: “The paper summarises the East European experience with socialist agriculture and notes that while production often failed to meet plan targets (thereby giving the impression of a sector in crisis), there was steady growth based on substantial investments in buildings, machinery, fertilisers and irrigation systems which provided food for the population at affordable prices.”
- The Marxist-Leninist USSR is absolutely NOT the only form of non-Capitalist economy. Market Socialism, Anarchism, Syndicalism, Democratic Socialism, and more all exist and can similarly solve the issues of inequality.
What is the point of your comment?
third person checking in here
The rubes need something to collect so they can lord over you. They don’t want an intelligent society. They want something they can game to get big numbers.
In 1980, ‘middle class’ was still defined as one job paying for a family of four. In those days $1 million was still considered a vast fortune. By the time Bush Sr. left office ‘middle class’ was two salaries to support a family and $1 million was what a rich guy paid for a party.
To be fair, “middle class” isn’t a real class, the closest is petite bourgeoisie. What’s thought of as the middle class doesn’t necessarily have the same class interests, as they vary in social relation to the Means of Production.
Probably just autocorrect but it’s “Petty Bourgeoisie”, referring to those who own a shop or restaurant or something, often joining in the running of it. We call them small business owners in the US.
Not a typo, but we are functionally talking about the same thing: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Petite_bourgeoisie
When you’re discussing politics you have two choices. You can avoid highly specific terms and focus on real world problems, or you can parse out the meaning of every single word and win a meaningless argument.
99% of the people in America know exactly what I mean when I say ‘middle class.’ Maybe 5% know what ‘petite bourgeoisie’ means. Probably less. You don’t win elections by arguing the difference between the Social Democrats and the socialists, you win them by talkign to people about how much a gallon of gas costs.
Yes, but at the same time, this is just an argument for using terms incorrectly and perpetuating bourgeois terminology. The idea of a “Middle Class” was invented in order to give the Proletariat a realistic goal (in their eyes) to work towards, in order to divide the Proletariat against itself.
If more people understand class dynamics, they will also understand more about their surroundings, and will also be able to better think for themselves, instead of you trying to do all of the thinking for them.
Education is important.
Education is important, but not all knowledge is equally important.
I liken it to a carpenter who uses Imperial units instead of metric. You can argue that metric is more exact, but if the carpenter can do the work why ‘correct’ them?
It’s not the job of the people to be better educated, it’s the job of the leaders to find a way to speak to them that they understand.
I disagree. It is the job of leaders to push for education, so that the people can be trusted to make correct decisions on their own. We currently have an issue with rising fascism at the hands of an under-educated working class, which is resulting in a violent backlash against academia and science, because education is being strategically cut by fascists.
“Tax the rich.” Anyone can understand that.
I think the argument is that creating these definitions ruins class solidarity. You are working class if you have to go to work every day to live period.
Well, there’s the concept of group consciousness, and that definitely depends on a good working set of definitions.
Or you can present people with actual plans written in terms they understand and are comfortable with.
I used to work in public health. One of the first things I learned is that a patient needs to be approached on their own level. Some people can handle exact medical terms, and others blank out when they hear terms they don’t understand.
If you have someone’s ear for five minutes, are you going to waste three of them trying to bring them up to your level, or do you change your terms to fit their point of view?
Depends on how much distortion is required to get the concept to their level. If the concept doesn’t map to there, then giving them the impression that they understand is misleading them.
In those case middle class is just fine for petty bourgeoisie. But there’s always a distortion in swapping out terms for similar terms, and that needs to be paid attention to and recognized as a potential source of misunderstanding and trouble.
Read ‘The Autobiography of Malcolm X.’ Malcolm came from the streets and had been in prison. He could break down complex idea into terms the people could understand. Don’t assume that because someone lacks your vocabulary they are ignorant. Like I siad, it’s on the leader to reach out.
Your premise is wrong in like… A bunch of ways. We sure as shit do not live in a post-scarcity society lol
Yeah I was confused by this. The world is pretty far off post-scarcity! Might need more context here
I specifically said we are in a post-scarcity information society. I didn’t say everything is post-scarcity.
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 wouldn’t have a need for capitalism anymore. I am pointing that out as wrong in the sense that 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
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.
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.
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 have 3kg of cheese in the fridge but no bread.
go conquer some.
Some people
Who?
if we lived in a post-scarcity society we wouldn’t have a need for capitalism anymore
yet we still use the same capitalist system to distribute that information
Do we? I mean, some information, maybe. But all information? As a concept?
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.
yet we still use the same capitalist system to distribute that information.
…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…
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.
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.
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.
We’re in a post information scarcity society and there are still people out there who think the Earth is flat.
What’s that alternative then?
The reason you are post scarcity is because other people around the world are not. This imbalance in wealth is because of capitalism
You fail to understand in your eagerness to jump on a soapbox.
The numbers simply do not lie:
There is not one reason for anyone, anywhere, to go without food, water, or shelter. That some regions lack the production is irrelevant, others over produce and still refuse to meet the needs of their own, much less others.
It’s because we’re bad at distributing resources equally. Don’t really care if you don’t like the fact I used the word capitalism.
The question is; is it capitalism that causes our inability to properly allocate resources or is it just the fact that humans are bad at allocating resources? What economic system would incentivise the equal distribution of said resources?
ITT : People who want to argue about dictionary definitions and ignore the topic of the post.
Well I think it’s normal since the common meaning of the central word is misrepresented. Post-scarcity means there is no scarcity, which is not the situation right now. Also the title says “post information scarcity” which i didn’t now was a thing and that we still don’t have. Factually correct information is not very easy to come by nowadays, and not easy to verify. And if we talk about scarcity of goods and services we certainly have a shitload of factories but some key jobs are not automated yet and in case nobody noticed we have some serious problems with natural resources.
Lol
Capitalism will collapse eventually, whether planned or not. The best we can do is build up parallel structures that can weather that collapse, like complex networks of Mutual Aid, strong Unions, FOSS software, and more.
Yeah I totally agree. I’m trying my best to integrate these things into my life today.
I like this view of parallel structures
Best we can do is fascism and climate apocalypse.
Fascism is similarly unsustainable, if we fail and can’t achieve Socialism from Capitalism then fascism will take its place, and will also collapse. Same with climate, if we fail to properly handle it we will almost certainly go extinct, but the door remains open for life in millenia.
Everything is unsustainable. So far, nothing has been observed to last forever.
Fascism tends to collapse a lot faster than capitalism though, because of its inherent drive to rework the world into something new. Fascism cannot abide non-fascism existing, and contains the implicit imperative to invade and impose fascism.
Just want to add this is not unique to fascism. It is an emergent property of all systems that seek to reshape the world.
Hopefully earth finds harmony after humans.
Harmony with what?
Harmony without 150 species being driven to extinction every day by one organisms population.
Okay that’s “without”. In harmony, with what?
Are you stupid? Without humans destroying the environment.
Even Socialism seems transitory to me. Much better than Capitalism, but once labor can be more broadly automated, we need to think of something other than money quickly.
Communism is just that, same with Anarchism (though Anarcho-Communism skips Socialism). You’re correct, but that is for after Socialism.
Shhhhh, im trying to lead then to that conclusion without the big scary C word.
Haha, I gotchu.
As capitalism itself has demonstrated, people and money can operate just fine when others are doing the work.
Yes, we do live in a post-scarcity information society. Unfortunately, we will not for much longer. The time to make the most of it has already come and passed. We chose capitalism over sustainability when it mattered most (before many of us here were even born).
Firstly, capitalism isn’t going to just “poof” away just because there are more resources available. The rich will just hold them back to create artificial scarcity - like is done with diamonds.
Secondly, even discounting that, there are plenty of resources that are genuinely scarce no matter how much money you have to throw at the problem.
But if you’re referring to just the scarcity of information - then you’re still not quite right as not all that information out there is good information - a lot of it is misinformation (i.e. propaganda, etc.)…
And even that discounts the fact that for many people, they don’t have the tools/capability to access the information, or simply can’t access the information full stop (I.e. due to censorship, etc.).
Capitalism incentivizes production so well that the mere charity of individuals provides more for free than all the redistribution the government can manage under a controlled economy.
Capitalism’s primary activity is commerce, with a tiny sliver of charity on the side. That tiny sliver of charity is the biggest pool of resources made available for free under any system.
In what unicorn world are you living in? There are so many subsidies for so many sectors that it isn’t even funny. Capitalism is parasitic at its core and the only reason there is charity from the rich is for the good publicity.
The society is already wealthy, but all the wealth is drained in the hands of a few.
Unfortunately for the post scarcity information society, the capitalists are in fact moving on — to fascism.
Fascism is the violent reaction to the fall of Capitalism, just as fascism is on the rise, so is Socialism. The fight against fascism is critical, as that which replaces Capitalism will be either Socialism or fascism.
Can we stop posting about communism every single day?
Yeah, probably when the system changes.
Go live in china bro. Noone stopping you…
China is yet another capitalist cryptofascist country
How about no? We already tried Communism and many people died and it fell apart.
We didn’t try shit but bowing to a succession of neoliberals.
Part of the reason Capitalism sort if worked in the 60’s was because it had to globally compete with communism. We seem to forget how hard the red scare had to be pushed to silence the growing American Communist constituency.
Wages were high for low education workers because they had to be to stave off the communist political movement.
The second the Soviets collapsed, capitalism started its more evident decline. Capitalism only works with competition, even from a meta perspective.
I, and I alone live in a post-info-scarcity world. Everyone else is just dojng the best they can.
dojng
Oh great wise one of infinite information, what does this new word mean?
