The Spectre of Scarcity

By Kyle Joseph

If you start reading almost any economics textbook, you’ll be greeted by one of capitalist ideology’s favorite words: scarcity. In the bourgeois worldview, economics can be reduced to questions of resource scarcity, which explains every problem faced by the market. After establishing this principle, most textbooks will spend the rest of their time on graphs of vague, hypothetical scenarios. Missing from this set-up, of course, would be history, or a specific overview of economic phenomena in the real world. Scarcity is posed only as an abstraction, and data from actual events plays no role in the analysis. Mention this to a bourgeois economist, and you’ll be told to study anthropology instead.

Why do capitalists love framing economics through ahistorical abstractions, and why does this approach fall short?

For one, if capitalists avoid talking about the actual development of their system, they can naturalize it, and portray it as merely a response to humanity’s eternal struggle for resources. Placing capitalism in an historical context would demonstrate its artifice, and expose how recently it emerged on the stage, along with the bloody steps it took to do so. Further, when capitalists place economics and history into separate, metaphysical boxes, they can fill reams of paper with models and charts, while ignoring whether their theories actually reflect planet earth. In fact, one of the most popular schools of contemporary thought, the Austrian school, explicitly places its theses outside the realm of empirical verification. They’re simply true, regardless of whether anything real conforms to them. How convenient!

Also, returning to scarcity for a moment, let’s ponder why this framework fails to fully describe economic behaviors. To do so, I’ll quote the high school economic textbook I just pulled off the shelf. “Why does it cost money to produce and consume the goods society wants?” it asks. “The answer is scarcity.” As an example of a non-scarce resource, it lists air, and asserts that this resource will never be commodified. One the one hand, scarcity does play a major role in human civilization, and society would look very different if our species began with superabundance. But this approach glosses over a central aspect of economic development: systems of property ownership, labor, and production.

For instance, how does the “abstract scarcity” model account for world food production being sufficient to provide every person with 2800 calories per day, while thousands starve every few hours? How does it account for crises of overproduction, in which myriad commodities flood the market, but no one has the purchasing power to access them? How does it account for some of the “poorest” countries being the richest in natural resources? How does it explain peopleless homes outnumbering homeless people? How does “scarcity” explain manors with more wealth than anyone could dispense with, next to serfs living an existence nobody can imagine? Did slaves collapse hungry in the fields because there wasn’t enough food to go around?

When bourgeois economists insist we divide history and economics, perhaps they want to silence these questions before anyone even ponders them.

By beginning an economic analysis with an abstraction such as “the distribution of scarce resources,” we take a one-sided, non-dialectical approach to an endlessly complex human phenomenon. We separate production and circulation, which leads to erroneous notions such as the lack of sufficient distribution equaling a lack of sufficient supply.

We ignore the role played by social class, by the antagonism between those who own production and those who work it, by the surplus produced by the latter and consumed by the former. Contrary to the “abstract scarcity” model, Marxism focuses on the role played by all mechanisms in the capitalist machine, and recognizes that a greater amount of goods does not always equal a rise in living standards. In fact, one of the curious laws of capitalist development involves the increase in commodities alongside the increase of poverty. The capitalist world produces far more than it did 30 years ago, yet people live so much worse. How does scarcity explain this? It doesn’t, and the powers that be are well aware.

And make no mistake: as soon as they can commodify air, they’ll jump right on it.