> the word ‘post-scarcity’ means fundamentally more than a mere abundance of the means of life: it decidedly includes the kind of life this means support.
> today, scarcity has to be enforced, p.59
The Green New Deal (Ann Pettifor, The Case for the Green New Deal. Verso, 2019), as well as many other proposals to address climate collapse conjures an aesthetic of material scarcity as an urgent necessity. Classically, scarcity is a “natural” condition, and now we must return to it, to combat commodification of people and relations (and the destruction of the world). Abundance then is to be found in de-objectification, dealienation, conviviality, non-work and leisure, care, etc. These are older ideas that when people are freed from necessity of hard work (function of scarcity) they will be free to create (art), which is what brings meaning (God’s replacement) and pleasure (engaging desire).
But then, how to think it otherwise?
Borrowing and re-purposing Murray Bookchin, Postscarcity Anarchism, Pp.12-13, 59
1.Scarcity is not primarily a “natural” condition. It is, first of all, a sense of insecurity;
2.Insecurity is produced socially and culturally (not only or not at all economically);
3.Such production is a function of exploitation;
4.Denial, renunciation and guilt is the subjective accompaniment of the condition of scarcity which is always present as insecurity even at times/places of material abundance.
It follows that abundance actually exists but it is scarcity that is produced and enforced. Examples are plentiful: there is an abundance of books and films but the intellectual property regimes create cultural scarcity. [link to Felix’s intellectual property]
Abundance and scale / structure / combinatorics [link to Christobal’s formal structures]:
Four skirts and four tops (8 items in total) would give you sixteen outfits; same as one skirt and fifteen tops (16 items in total). Same with vegan food, usually presented as a restriction on abundance of non-vegan diets: soya will give you tofu, tempeh, natto, miso, edamame, yogurt, oil, etc (Wikpedia lists 35 foods). Variety therefore does not mean large numbers of things. Smaller number of things can give one more variety. Does this mean: selection, refinement, curation? [Ubu] What does it mean for our archives and libraries? Is abundance about variety?
