luc: “Well, you haven’t really contradicted my main point - that if (when?) we get to the point where goods and services can be churned out with (virtually?) no marginal cost, there’s no reason why the government should not take over the means of production and hand stuff out.”
lucwarm, you may be speaking from a pragmatic rather than utopian position: that is, you may be saying that such a technological bonanza would be well-suited to government intervention. So let me say from the start that I’m not weighing in on that debate at this moment.
What I do want to address is that you’ve conceded to aspects of Sam’s position that are antithetical to the underlying spirit, and much of the detail, of Karl Marx’s thought. Maybe that was intentional as there after, after all, different communist viewpoints. But let’s, for the moment focus on Marx.
Marx didn’t see the problem of industrial capitalism as being centered on the scarcity of goods (Sam’s key assumption). As a result, he didn’t see the primary goal of communism as redistribution.
Marx saw the problem of industrial capitalism as being the alienation of labor. He believed (as I said in another recent thread devoted to Marx) that humans are by nature producers and that it is in their very being to want to add the impress of their labor to the world. Labor is made onerous, he believed, because under the capitalist system people are alienated from the product of their labor (through division of labor and through the commodification both of labor, of products, of exchange and therefore of all social relations), and, in addition, they are alienated from the “surplus” of their labor–which becomes the capitalist’s profit. (I took a crack at explaining this in the Marx thread if this seems a little abstract as I’ve just stated it).
None of this had anything to do with scarcity. Indeed, the scarcity model is a conservative myth. It’s useful for conservatives because it allows them to posit a view of human nature in which we are all destined inevitably to compete with one another for scarce resources like many animals do (unless technology frees us from this destiny in the manner posited by lucwarm).
However, there is in actuality no major problem with scarcity on our planet, and certainly no scarcity in ultra-prosperous countries like the United States and Canada. The planet offers us the resources for people not only to survive, but to thrive. What do people need? Food, shelter, comparionship, a decent natural environment and, beyond that, education, leisure and the arts. What do people (at least conventionally in Western societies) desire: happiness, freedom, autonomy, self-development. The resources to provide people with the former already exist. The tricky question in prosperous countries is how to make sure that the fulfillment of needs becomes the fulfillment of desires.
Here’s the rub though: as an economic and cultural system, capitalism doesn’t want people to have their desires fulfilled. Indeed, “scarcity” is and must be the illusion of a capitalist economy, which can’t operate without the desire for more and more consumption.
For an example: think about what happened after 9/11. People became too concerned with issues of mortality and safety to be interested in buying stuff. Did they cease to eat or drive or go to work: to do what’s required for comfortable subsistence? No. They ceased to shop; they ceased, for a short while, to be responsive to advertising; they watched less TV or different kinds of TV.
And then they were exhorted to shop till they dropped in order to be patriots. This is a huge subject one important transition in which was the post-World War II/cold war era when government and other powerful institutions began, in concerted fashion, to exhort Americans to be mega-consumers rather than thrifty savers. In today’s capitalist economy, much more so than in Marx’s time, the system depends upon each and every one of us wanting the latest version of the gizmo/gadget; a closet full of up-to-the-minute clothes to replace the still quite wearable ones we bought six months ago, etc.
Now Sam paints the picture of a poor person as being heaven in comparison to past ages. As a matter of fact, that’s a major distortion (and shows that Sam knows very little about the actual material life of poor people). Most poor people, including the working poor, lack decent healthcare and have very lousy access to education. Although their healthcare and education may indeed be better than those of a medieval serf, and although their working conditions are likely to be much less harsh than that of either a nineteenth-century factory worker (or a third-world factory worker today), these kinds of comparisons are not very meaningful since the goals that matter most to people–happiness, freedom, autonomy, self-development–are developed within a web of social relations.
So, yeah, if books don’t exist then naturally the “rich” head of a feudal clan has even less access to them than an impoverished child in the South Bronx. But–to return to my main point of difference–neither one of these people lacks access to books because of scarcity. One lacks them because civilization hasn’t reached the level of print technology; the other lacks them because he or she is part of a web of social relations that his doomed him or her to grow up without the skills and resources that are needed to seek after happiness, freedom, autonomy and self-development in the early 21st century.
I don’t want to go on forever or to quibble with you, lucwarm. Most nineteenth-century thinkers–including Marx–assumed that self-development was crucial to human nature; that without development people became something less than human. Therefore work of some kind (intellectual, manual, artistic) would be sought out as the fulfillment of one’s nature: each according to his/her ability if were able to work well. Socialism, as Oscar Wilde wrote at the end of the nineteenth century (although he didn’t have Marx especially in mind), would allow people to complete themselves as personalities. Distribution of “stuff” was not really on their minds. They thought much more about what people would be able to do to cultivate their minds, bodies their social relations if they didn’t have to live under grueling conditions of labor.
Now actually mssmith is a better example of what Marx’s thought can add to our understanding of our lives than is that of a hypothetical poor person. Although the poor person is very likely to lack the healthcare and education to seek effectively after happiness, freedom, autonomy and self-development, mssmith does not lack these things.
And yet, ironically, mssmith is (in my limited experience of him) one of the most “alienated” of posters on this board.
ms, before I say another word on this vein, as I am eager not offend you in any way: I don’t know if you read the Karl Marx thread (I’ll post a link if you like). But you were the person I was referring to at the end when I said that there were posters here on the SDMB whose posts suggested that earning $300k/year wasn’t sufficient to allow one to develop one’s full humanity. If you want me to elaborate I will, but I’d like to know first if you’d read that thread.
