humanaesfera - Against the metaphysics of scarcity, for the practical copiousness.pdf

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This article was originally written as a response to "libertarians" who see scarcity
as a natural, objective and eternal consecration of private property and the market.
It also describes a perspective concerning the limitations of democracy in relation
to the transformation of the material conditions of existence.
"No one votes; neither the majority nor the minority ever makes the law. If a proposition
can gather enough workers to put it into operation, whether they be in the majority or the
minority, it is carried out, so long as it accords with the will of those who adhere to it."
Description of a free association within communism by Joseph Déjacque (Le
Humanisphère,
1857).
Only one condition underlies the demand for democracy (including direct democracy):
scarcity. The claim for democracy only makes sense on the very ground on which private
property flourishes - inaccessibility, deprivation, tyranny. The vote and profit are two poles
of the same deprivation of access for people to their conditions of existence. Both poles
presuppose the state - that is, violence. At one pole; policing in order to ensure by force the
monopolisation which establishes scarcity (private property, prices, the free market, the
"invisible hand"). At the other pole; policing in order to compensate for monopolisation
(equitable distribution, voting, boring assemblies and meetings, distribution of rations and
handouts of "social welfare"). Theses are the two poles of legitimisation of the same status
quo.
What underpins the two poles is the private mode of production, capitalism. Only that
which can be monopolised has a price: scarcity is the very condition of existence of the
market, the very definition of
private
property. The value of goods is proportional to the
difficulty ("work") of access to its production. Thus, its mode of producing is mere labour,
an activity devoid of any intrinsic value and only of worth for something else (reward,
retribution, merit, salary, money, profit) - therefore an activity which is always abstract and
servile. The machines replace the work, but in the private mode of production its function is
solely to punish the workers with unemployment so they "offer" to work even more for
even less. To overcome the material basis of all this, we need to tear away this
straightjacket, private property, and to free global productive forces to make them freely
accessible practical conditions for anyone who wants to satisfy his inclinations, needs,
desires and develop his faculties, abilities and passions - as activities worthy in themselves.
From this perspective, even the most radical democratic claim for self-management
("factory to the workers!", "land to the peasants!") is inherently confined within private
property and therefore the state (i.e. its violence), even confined within nationalist
mythology ("the nation to nationals"). Self-management of enterprises are today clearly
untenable, because if there are enterprises (whether self-managed or not), then the
conditions of existence of the population remain private for them; that is, the workers are
still coerced into selling themselves in the labour market in return for survival (wages). It is
only possible for this deprivation (private property) to be abolished by abolishing the
enterprise (whether individual, co-operative or state ...), as well as by abolishing the
national borders, liberating the productive forces worldwide in order to interconnect them to
a network of immanent flows which surpasses the exchange for equivalents (by ending the
reduction of production to an external law; for example, market, profit or hierarchy).
Thereafter, the means of production can no longer belong to anybody because it will have
become, in itself, the actual worldwide material community of individuals in free
association.
Once the enterprise is abolished, it will no longer make sense to talk about employees or
unemployed*, but only about individuals who associate freely through their many passions,
needs, projects, desires, inclinations ... whose free expression will be itself production,
activity (but no longer subject to any equivalent, as it has dismantled the basis of
domination which is the system of rewards and punishments). This will mean that, with
nothing to force anybody to sell themselves in the labour market to survive, no one will be
forced to buy - which makes the market completely obsolete. (Probably as a free hobby the
market will still exist - but never as a mandatory social link). The material basis for the
flourishing of free individuality is communism, because it is the overcoming of the terrain
of the universal equivalent that is the coercion called competition (market, nations,
hierarchy...).
It is true that, either for natural reasons or due to technical insufficiency, some (or probably
much) production will inevitably continue of items rare, scarce and not easily accessible;
and will therefore still be subject either to democracy (voting to decide a criteria: raffle,
equal distribution, distribution according to specific "work" done, or for those people in
most urgent need...) or to direct private appropriation. But the capacity to overcome
capitalism by communism will be the greater the more its material basis, which is free
production, prevails over democratic production; that is, the more that wealth is enjoyed as
free creativity in the global human community. In contrast, if the democratic aspect
predominates, it means the ground upon which capital and state (whether as democracy or
dictatorship) spring from was unsurpassed and that they will probably return in one way or
another (starting with the "black market" and the survival of the state and the mythology of
nation), as the most appropriate social form ("legitimate", they’ll say) for scarcity, for
monopoly, for private property, for tyranny.
A final clarification: all ideas presented here boil down to classic positions of the proletariat
held since at least the eighteenth century (see bibliography below). And since none of these
minimum needs has yet been met - and have instead been repressed almost to the point of
becoming unconscious - and as the extent and intensity of proletarianisation today is the
greatest in history, communism remains more urgent than ever.
- Humanaesfera, July 2014
( Translated to English by humanaesfera, with revision by Red Marriott. The original article
in Portuguese: “Propriedade privada, escassez e democracia”)

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