Post-Scarcity

Introduction
Further Statements on “Society”
Post-Scarcity Anarchism
Is Post-Scarcity Technically Feasible?
Is Post-Scarcity Socially Possible?
Current Production Techniques/Consumption Habits are Killing the Planet and We Need To Do Things Better
Further Reading
Footnotes

Introduction

C: Good Sexitidi everyone, and welcome to part five (5) of Goth Angel Sinners, a podcast for jocks and goths about glocks and moths. I’m Chloe…
U: …and I’m Una…
C: Our small, British son will not be joining us today because he’s too limey
Some axioms for our discussion here:
- All people deserve to survive.
- Society exists for the mutual benefit of its members.
- We live in a society.
- Socially usable resources are the product of human action, though resources by themselves exist in nature.

Further Statements on “Society”

Society (which we live in) should ensure that all people can survive.
Humans, as members of society, can contribute the resources that they produce, allowing “society” the usage of them as a means to achieve the previous point. This is called the “commons,” the collective resources of society.
The exact form of “society”’s will in this case would have to be enacted in some form: government, market, free distribution.¹
The former two possibilities while not necessarily inefficient are open to a significant amount of errors in their efficient operation: underestimate of need, overestimate of production, deliberate corruption, etc.²

Post-Scarcity Anarchism

Assuming that “what can go wrong will go wrong,” i.e. the existence of a potential fault will at some point become an actual fault, then such a system will inevitably be riddled with inefficiencies and corruption.
- The former feeding into the latter as the impossibility of a purely efficient system will be used as an excuse to further the systemic enforcement of inefficiencies (such as the alteration of the metric of efficiency to begin with as seen with measures such as GDP and “poverty” which gerrymander the population to cover up various problems that would elsewhere be more negatively perceived).
As such we can explore the third means: free distribution, that is the open availability of all resources to be called upon by the consumers without any bar to entry.
- The negative consequences of which being the overconsumption of resources, essentially the overestimation of available resources without the action of a central authority but still the collective action of multiple consumers.
- Chuds believe that this is inevitable and screech “the tragedy of the commons” every time this is proposed, however this is wrong and common pool resources can frequently result in a “comedy of the commons” and there’s also the fact that people can in fact talk to each other and figure out how to do things.
A post-scarcity society and anarchism necessitate each other because state systems are built around restriction and exclusion of access to necessary resources (water, food, land, shelter, etc. etc. etc.).
- One cannot have a general post-scarcity while a state exists because states require the exclusion of the majority of people from some necessity, and one cannot have a state while general post-scarcity exists due to the lack of exclusion/restriction, by definition.

Is Post-Scarcity Technically Feasible?

First, a clarification: abundance vs. post-scarcity.
- Having a bunch of shit doesn’t necessarily mean having post-scarcity and having post-scarcity doesn’t necessarily having unlimited everything.
- Post-scarcity is less about “having lots of stuff” and more about a social state of having access to all the resources necessary for the fulfillment of life.
- If post-scarcity were dependent on abundance, then it would imply that post-scarcity and therefore anarchism could only occur at a certain level of production, however since people have volition and could in fact decide to stop doing hierarchy and do anarchy instead, this is clearly wrong (i.e. we could have done anarchism at any point in history, we aren’t dependent on certain material conditions; fuck you, Marxists).
If, however, production is at or beyond the estimates of the consumers, which given modern production modes is a fair assumption, then this problem can be viewed as trivial.
- Food Production
  - Somewhere between ⅓ and ½ of food produced globally is lost or wasted.
    - This is entirely the fault of statism you cannot change my mind.
  - See Goth Angel Sinners Pt. I for our opinion on our current method of getting products to consumers and how efficient it is.
  - Cars are bad. Food production is useless without access and a car based infrastructure increases the bar for said access to those with access to the economic means by which to use the infrastructure.
  - Much of³ cereal production is used for biofuels, which assume the usage of personal transport (i.e. cars) which rely on such fuels. Removing this sector of the production would decrease the necessary yield giving more room for seeking ecological means of production.
- Housing⁴
Thus, we return to the issue of distribution, free distribution as opposed to our contemporary manner which restricts access thru economic and geographic barriers.
- Economics is meant as a field to manage the distribution of resources under the assumption that resources are either more scarce or precisely as scarce as demand; as this is based on prediction and estimate leaning towards underestimation, scarcity is “enforced” thru the deliberate lack of distribution to specific communities either due to their not meeting the expected conditions (production of wealth) or thru deliberate [sanctioning?], i.e. racism (see: food deserts).

Is Post-Scarcity Socially Possible?

Uh… remember that like 195,000 years where we didn’t have states and people had free access to resources and somehow managed to survive? Yeah, let’s do that again but this time with trains.
Modern “Society”
- Free sharing of culture benefits creators and consumers, the only people who lose out are middlemen who otherwise contribute nothing except maintaining scarcity.⁵
- A combination of government regulation and subsidies creates large unnecessary overhead costs, centralizing control of resources and increasing costs to consumers, further restricting access to them.⁶
- State subsidies to things like large agribusiness promote centralization of control in the food system, towards things like monoculture, excessive use of pesticides, topsoil depletion, and resulting in food lacking in nutrition.⁷
- Smaller farms would be more ecological, more productive, healthier, and be more inclined towards equitable distribution, but uh the state and capitalism exist instead.
- Patent system causes medical R&D to focus in simply tweaking old drugs just enough to be considered “new” so a new patent can be gotten for them.⁶
  - Haha, take that, people who believe capitalism creates “innovation” or whatever.
- “It’s an overall process in which the state socializes operating costs and subsidizes inputs to make capital artificially profitable, and disaster capitalists seize on the resulting fiscal disaster to loot taxpayer-funded assets and subsequently gouge the public.” —Kevin Carson.⁸
- What if we just stopped spending resources on things that keep people from accessing resources?
  - Abolish donuts
- As has been repeatedly emphasized, capitalism relies on restriction of access, this is most obviously done through the price system, but other forms of sabotage exist as well to restrict the flow of resources that ranges from planned obsolescence to the outright destruction of resources and infrastructure through war.

Current Production Techniques/Consumption Habits are Killing the Planet and We Need To Do Things Better

Restoration Agriculture/Permaculture.
Green Energy:
- We can and should use things like wind, water, heat, and gravity directly as energy when possible; natural forces generally have less waste heat. Require less infrastructure, and outside of what little infrastructure may be necessary usually require next to no external resources that would be used to justify extractivist practices.
- Nuclear energy, see Neighbor Science 417.⁹
- ~~Geothermal energy~~
- ~~Wind energy~~
- Socially, decentralized energy production would be best practice as it would not leave power (necessary for life in many areas and to quality of life in most) as a hierarchical resource that can be used for social stratification.
  - Furthermore, demand estimates can be tailored to individual need, tho small regional (i.e. neighborhood) distribution networks can be utilized to ensure any excess produced is not lost unnecessarily.
  - Centralized power stations may possibly still be used depending on the social landscape, especially when the management requires specialist handling (see nuclear) or the source of the power is a singular or remote geographic location (see geothermal or wind). In this case decentralized power production can be used to add redundancy to help avoid brownouts or rolling blackouts in areas where demand may peak (such as cities with intense heat waves).
Decentralization and Centralization
- Bookchin was wrong sprawl is bad.
Transit (Death to Cars)
- Trains, bruh.

Footnotes

“Government” and “market” aren’t necessarily different forms of distribution; markets don’t have a tendency to form within societies absent the state, however trade between people as groups does. ↩︎
This is guaranteed to happen because of bureaucracy (see: Scott, Seeing Like A State). ↩︎
We had trouble tracking down exact numbers and sources on this claim, but are nonetheless confident in this statement. ↩︎
This sections was never written. Fuck you. ↩︎
Kevin Carson, “Free Culture Benefits Everyone But the Middleman,” Center for a Stateless Society, Aug. 18, 2016. ↩︎
Kevin Carson, “Open-Source Healthcare,” Center for a Stateless Society, Jan. 24, 2013. ↩︎ ↩︎²
Kevin Carson, “Capitalism’s Running Out Of Water — And Everything Else,” Center for a Stateless Society, Mar. 4, 2014. ↩︎
Kevin Carson, “Defending the Commons from both Corporation and State,” Center for a Stateless Society, Feb. 12, 2015. ↩︎
“Hypothetical carbon sucking machine gosplan w/yungneocon,” Neighbor Science 4, 17 (Jun. 15, 2019). ↩︎