Artificial scarcity
We’re often encouraged to make changes in our personal lifestyle on the grounds that this can help change things or at least do something to help us move in the right direction. We should make sure we know, for example, where the food we eat is grown, how ‘sustainable’ its production and distribution methods are, and, if possible, to ‘buy local’. The idea is that our food buying choices will help reduce carbon emissions and contribute to the battle against ecological deterioration and global warming. It is also suggested that more radical lifestyle choices like vegetarianism or veganism can play a part in this by freeing up for direct food production land currently used for crops to feed the vast number of animals raised and slaughtered everywhere in the world.
And it’s true that, if large numbers of people made such choices, it might indeed lead to different methods and types of food production, reduce the mass slaughter of living creatures and also have some impact on climate change. But none of this would make any appreciable difference to the day-to-day problems faced by many millions of people throughout the world. These are such problems as poverty, homelessness or precarious housing, and, above all, the need for the vast majority of us to sell our energies to an employer for a wage or salary day in day out or find ourselves without the means to live decently. The fact is that, whatever the method of production or the goods produced, so long as this happens with a view to the goods being sold on the market and people needing money to buy them, we will still have the system we call capitalism and all the problems and contradictions it throws up.
The main contradiction is that we now have the means to produce enough food and all else to sustain the whole world at a decent level several times over and to do so without polluting the environment or changing the climate, yet under the capitalist system of production for profit this cannot happen. Instead it creates artificial scarcity, causing millions to go hungry and many more to live insecure or highly stressed existences. A new report by Unicef published in June this year (Child Food Poverty: Nutrition Deprivation in Early Childhood) revealed that around 181 million children worldwide under 5 years of age – or 1 in 4 – are experiencing severe child food poverty, making them up to 50 percent more likely to experience wasting, a life-threatening form of malnutrition. To make things worse, capitalism’s methods of production put massive stress on the ecosystem, fast pushing it, according to some, to the brink of collapse.
Time therefore for workers throughout the world to vote collectively to change that system and move to a moneyless, marketless society of free access and voluntary cooperation – which we call socialism. In that society people will put their natural human capacity for cooperation and collaboration to work and use the resources of the earth to secure a decent life for all while maintaining the environment so as to ensure a steady state of ecological balance.
HKM