We already live in a “post-scarcity” world… there is absolutely nothing humans could need that we couldn’t grow or produce. All the scarcity you see around you is artificially created and maintained - and that means socialism is far, far from obsolete.
there is absolutely nothing humans could need that we couldn’t grow or produce.
Yes, but much of it is made using human labor. Labor is what’s scarce in real life and not scarce in Star Trek, and a technological Holy Grail is required to bridge that gap.
So no, present-day scarcity is not artificial. Not entirely artificial, at least.
Labor is what’s scarce in real life
No, it isn’t. We have more labor on this planet that we would know what to do with if we stopped repressing it in order to keep a small group of billionaire parasites in the money.
and a technological Holy Grail is required to bridge that gap.
Absolutely not… there is nothing humans would need that we couldn’t produce in spades using already existing methods. The heinous abuse and mismanagement of human resources in our current mode of production does not require techno-fetishizing non-solutions - it requires a social solution. Hence, socialism.
It’s like with famines: globally we produce more than enough food to feed everyone, we just choose not to.
Our problem isn’t the production of goods, but the allocation.
We have more labor on this planet that we would know what to do with if we stopped repressing it in order to keep a small group of billionaire parasites in the money.
We would run out of it very quickly if there wasn’t anything compelling laborers to perform labor. Nobody’s going to grow crops for you out of the goodness of their hearts. That’s hard, miserable, thankless, dangerous work. That’s why capitalism exists in the first place.
The heinous abuse and mismanagement of human resources in our current mode of production does not require techno-fetishizing non-solutions - it requires a social solution. Hence, socialism.
That has already been attempted several times, each attempt ended in catastrophic failure, and that failure itself involved heinous abuse and mismanagement of human resources.
Machines may yet solve this problem for us, but humans definitely won’t, and we’ve got the history to prove it.
